Synopsis: We are about to share the planet with a new level of life.
While AI will change life on this planet even before it itself can be seen as “life”, there are some steps that, once taken, mean AI going on to become not only life, but the dominant form of life is effectively inevitable. It is worth considering the implications before taking those steps.
A deep look at the progress of life so far, as outlined below, does suggest AI just could be soon locked onto a path to become the next logical next for life.
Humans and human societies already have lives determined not just by biology, but also by technology.
It is not just pacemakers, bone replacements and other parts inside our bodies, but everything from our homes, our tools, our clothing, vehicles and medicine has changed how we live as a species so dramatically from paleolithic times that it is like we are now a very different species, a species that is a hybrid of biology and technology. Being an accessorised species that is a hybrid of biology and technology has allowed how we live to evolve far more rapidly than any complex species has achieved from the evolution of biology alone.
Clearly technology can evolve faster than biology. Can we ever call technology “life” is an unanswered philosophical question, just as humans are biologically only level 3 life, even though our use of ever evolving technology makes us so different there are calls to declare Earth now in the Anthropocene epoch due to the impact of human “accessories”.
Aside from a collapse in the societies developing AI, or intervention to stop the development, considering the big picture history of life so far, it does seem certain that technology driven by AI has the potential to reach the level where it at least appears self-aware and can take the baton from the partnership of humans accessorised by technology as the new fastest example of evolution on Earth.
Just as humans don’t necessarily intentionally exterminate other life, the rise of the AI machines need not ensure a terminator type future. Plus, it is not even clear that AI Robots will ever become totally independent of humans, even though they could begin to evolve independently.
Many questions are still to be answered, including:
- Can we consider AI driven technology a form of life?
- Just what is intelligence and consciousness?
- What does this mean for employment and the economy?
- How do we coexist with AI technology?
There is a lot still to be posted in answer to these questions.
Brief history of the levels of life.
Level 1: First life of procaryotes and other simple extremophiles.
Life began on Earth within the first 500 million years of the planet forming, and most likely also on Venus and Mars, despite at that time the Earth having no oxygen and an atmosphere and radiation levels that would force a human to wear a spacesuit to survive.
Life began on this at the time hostile planet as very simple organisms too small to see with the naked eye as it was not yet a place where what most people would think of as “life as we know it” could survive.
While evidence suggests procaryotes played sufficient role in the reduction of CO2 greenhouse gasses to avoid the planet becoming too hot for life as a result of increased solar luminance, as may have happened on Venus, oxygen levels in the atmosphere did not yet rise during the 1.5 billion years of life before eucaryotes arrived.
Level 2: Eucaryotes with increased complexity and sexual reproduction.
1.5 billion years of evolution of those simple organisms finally resulted in something really new: eucaryotes.
Eukaryotes can be unicellular. Many people think that eukaryotes are all multicellular, but this is not the case. While prokaryotes are always unicellular organisms, eukaryotes can be either unicellular or multicellular. For example, most protists are single-celled eukaryotes!
Prokaryotes and eukaryotes review
Although eukaryotes are the cells of complex life and capable of sexual reproduction, the first eukaryotes were still single celled and mostly protists invisible to the naked eye. It would take another 1.5 billion years before complex life would emerge as level 3 life. Until then, the first two levels of life coexisted, and despite now sharing the planet, procaryotes did not suffer any real decline in population, at least until they also had to face the for them catastrophe of oxygen in the atmosphere.
A key factor still holding back complex life was the lack of oxygen, but with now twice as much total life, over the next 1.5 billion years oxygen levels finally rose. Although the oxygen presented a problem for some of the original life, that finally provided for the possibility of complex life.
Surviving the first over 3 billion years of life, required not only surviving the harsh environment and evolving the cell structures needed for eucaryotes, the emergence of complex organisms and sexual reproduction, they had to do this whilst “terraforming” the planet by building an oxygen atmosphere and continually adjusting levels of greenhouse gases to compensate for the transition of the “faint young Sun” into a star similar to the Sun we experience today.
All this time, volcanic activity, meteors, snowball Earth and other catastrophes would periodically bring life on Earth close to the point of total extinction.
The Earth was around 4 billion years old before a human would be able to survive the radiation and atmosphere without using a spacesuit, but, rather amazingly, life on Earth did make it to level 3.
Level 3: After 4 billion years, life as we know it and the Phanerozoic.
While it is believed life on Mars and Venus perished prior to ever reaching level 3, and also while it would not be surprising if life almost never passing level even 1 is the normal story throughout the galaxy, on Earth, we made it.
Thus began the phanerozoic era and a new chapter of life on Earth, now with breathable air, reduced levels of harmful radiation and with organisms large enough to see with the naked eye. Level 3 life has the complexity that when combined with sexual reproduction enables an accelerated rate of evolution that can bring life into new forms and new locations.
Life flourished. Modern plants and trees, insects, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals all were able to inhabit the land. Complex life took over as the predominant from of life, and the emergence of level 2 complex life quickly took the total biosphere of life on Earth to a new peak. The biosphere or procaryotes in particular did drop, but no level of life suffered the threat of elimination.
Sadly, nothing is fully sustainable forever, and that gradually but continually warming Sun, which creates a requirement to continually and gradual reduce greenhouse gases to keep temperatures in balance, is resulting in a downward spiral on the total biosphere of life that will ultimately, without some form of intervention, take the Earth to the same lifeless end that awaits all planets.
Biological life can last longer on some planets than others, but there is a time limit, and the more complex that life, the short window around that time limit.
Level 4: Accessorised evolution sees a single species takeover & bring new hope.
Around 1 million years ago, species began to emerge with a new form of evolution: accessorised evolution. These species not only made and used tools, clothing, housing, jewellery, art and records of events, but passed ever improving ways of making these tools from generation to generation.
A new form of evolution began that took life to level 4: the evolution of accessories comprising tools, housing, weapons, clothing and more.
From around 300,000 years ago Homo Sapiens emerged as the most successful human species and gradually through this new form of evolution to evolved from Palaeolithic “old stone age” level accessories to Neolithic “new stone age” tools and accessories, then bronze and iron ages as the evolution of the accessories accelerated.
The combined hybrid of biological species and the technology of the accessories together evolved faster and more significantly than any other species. This evolution produced not just the ability transform areas of the planet for food production and to fly and even leave the planet, it enabled the humans to outcompete other species and increase our population on a planet where total life is not increasing which makes population growth a zero-sum game.
Level 5: The rise of the machines.
Humans have been able to outcompete other and increase the percentage of life on Earth because the accelerating evolution of technology has provided a pace of evolution beyond that provided by biology. But given the technology evolution is outpacing biological evolution, then even in the human-technology partnership, the technology partner is outpacing the biological species. Over time, the balance of ability between technology and biology must shift.
If the technology ever gains the ability to function independently of the species that has been developing the technology, then the technology would cease to be held back by the biology of the species. Now there is technology for intelligence, this can evolve far faster than human intelligence can evolve.
While artificial intelligence may be behind human intelligence in even more ways than we realise today, that faster rate of evolution means it is inevitable that if AI continues to evolve, it will one day surpass human intelligence. It is not a question of if, but a question of when.
AI becomming Level 5 isn’t alone a motive to exterminate humans.
Difference species and levels of life can often exist in harmony.
Level 2 life arriving did not spell immediate doom for level 1 life. Level 3 arriving not only did not eliminate level 1 and level 2 life but is dependent on them for survival. Consider that a human body contains more level 1 and level 2 cells than human DNA level 3 of cells.
Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.
Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.
BBC: More than half your body is not human
Yes, there are species that we humans seek to eliminate, but these are the exceptions, not the rule.
The ultimate threat is solar system itself.
Although the planet is finite and thus can only hold a finite total of all life, every time a new level of life has been added, the total biomass of life on the planet has increased.
But you may notice that total biomass has been decreasing for the past 0.5 billion years. Yes, the Sun will, in perhaps 5 billion years expand and end the Solar system, but life on Earth can’t expect to be around that long. Yes, the data quoted predicts multicellular life could last another 0.75 billion years, but that last multicellular life may be something like a colony of tardigrades at the poles. Humans surviving in their billions, can’t last nearly that long!
Yes, AI might kill us, but the planet will kill us. At least without an escape plan, that we probably need far earlier than the at least 25-million-years the Earth should be able provide a home, as amongst other threats there will almost certainly be another population explosion.
Even if AI does not kill us, without some future planet saving technology or escaping to other planets, the solar system will kill us. AI could kill us even earlier, but it could also help us come up with an escape plan.
AI has no motive to eliminate humanity.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that even becoming dominant would give AI a reason to want to eliminate humans. Humans don’t normally intentionally eliminate other species, in fact, the opposite can be true.
I recently watched a video and have also read about efforts to rescue the Indus River dolphins in Pakistan and was inspired by the efforts of humans to come to the aid of the earlier intelligent species that is the Indus River dolphin.
Can AI become self-aware, conscious and truly alive?
Self-aware and conscious?
It is a huge leap from computers software, electronic circuits and transistors to life, intelligence, self-awareness and becoming conscious.
Yet it seems no more significant step than that from individual eukaryote cells programmed by DNA to the human brain. Yes, the DNA has been refined over billions of years of evolution, but Humans are made from the same basic building blocks as fungi. Even eukaryote cells are made from the same building blocks as procaryote cells and bacteria. An individual braincell has simple functions that we can understand, but all the cells of the brain combine to produce the amazing outcomes of self-awareness consciousness.
We do not yet understand how self-awareness and consciousness arises from the interaction of brain cells in humans, nor are we certain of which other species share these experiences.
It seems almost certain that the same complex outcomes that arise from brains that combine a sufficient number of simple eukaryote cells can also arise from computers that combine a sufficient number of transistors, but the point where this occurs is no clearer than the point where it occurs in biological life forms.
More to be added on this subject, but here are some thoughts from others.
Just self-aware and conscious is not yet ‘alive’.
The fictitious HAL of 2001 a space oddity was an onboard computer operating a spacecraft that had become self-aware and conscious. In the movie the AI sought to kill the astronaut on board in order to avoid being switched off, but it was never clear how the AI could sustain itself for any length of time without assistance from humans.
To be alive, it seems logical that AI would need to be able to produce all the technology it needs to at least maintain itself indefinitely, which is basically the same requirements as to reproduce. This requires mines, transport and factories that can operate completely independent of humans, and over a probably at least decades long transition period all AI will rely on humanity. Perhaps during that time AI could become parasitic life, as life that depends on other species does already exist.
AI doesn’t have its own identity and is currently built around humanity.
Consider Chat-GPT which is a Generative pre-trained transformer. Humans perform that “pre-training” using data which is taken from the web and is entirely about the human perspective and centred on humanity. Chat-GPT can then learn more by directly interacting with humans, but never interacts with any other species.
When AI is connected to inputs become a computer or mobile phone interface, it can view pictures of the world, but it is only when it takes the form of robots that AI can gain its own ‘life experiences’.
Updates:
- 2024 March 20 : added can AI become alive?