Are we the aliens?
There’s a Neil deGrasse Tyson concept that goes like this:
Of the billions of species that have evolved and thrived on the Earth for half a billion years, why did higher intelligence only evolve once? The corollary being, intelligence like ours must not be a prerequisite for a successful species.
Hmm, I thought, a contextually external analysis of historic and current life on earth would look at humanity as an aberration. Millions of species evolved and survived for tens of millions of years with effective but primitive brain capacity and then along comes this new creature with mental abilities that vastly exceed the minimum required of any species thus far.
Our overly large brains are an evolutionary oddity. An expensive and energy wasteful appendage.
Maybe humanity’s boosted intellectual power is the result of alien manipulation. Aliens exist – and we are they.
(I don’t believe such nonsense, but the theory would make an interesting short story.
AI Evolution
In opposition of the above but in conjunction with the concept that evolution requires hundreds of millions of years to finally produce a being capable of recognizing itself as the, up to now, superior species, is the thought that AI will need to endure a similar, lengthy evolutionary progression.
If what we’re experiencing today, the GPT chatbots, Level5 driving agents, Go players and image generators are the equivalent eucaryotes of the age—the primitive creatures that stewed and brewed and developed into more and more complex organisms resulting in us—what are we in for with regards to the mutated AI species that will quickly follow?
If ChatGPT is a trilobite, what will be the corresponding Tyrannosaurus Rex? The Bengal tiger? The mountain gorilla? The Us?
Yes, we are at the “knee” of AI’s exponential growth curve, the rapidly bending slope that eventually shoots straight past the Moon, out to the core of the galaxy. Exciting times, for sure.
Sam Altman has a revealing talk recorded a few months ago. It’s worth watching. Note the part where he mentions asking AI about AI, using AI to solve its own alignment problem. Uh, that works until it doesn’t, right?
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Jordan Peterson remarking on AI & ChatGPT:
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Good point! Sometimes I imagine all those Earth-like planets we’ve discovered hoping we won’t develop faster-than-light space travel any time soon.
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This might sound shallow, but it’s quite deep if you think about it – I cannot help but think that Sam Altman is an AI himself.
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If only dolphins had developed thumbs…
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Sure, dolphins. But what about cats? Do we want to live in a world like that?
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Catnip is their kryptonite. And balls of yarn.
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I don’t know. I once had a cat that frequently focused her powerful, cat-like intellect on the odd hair-tie that had fallen to the floor.
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I’d bet on raccoons or squirrels. Although, primates and their opposable thumbs, binocular vision and nascent ability to walk upright do give them an advantage.
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So, the dolphins said, you know what? This is nuts up here. Let’s just go back into the ocean. NOW who’s smarter??
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You would probably enjoy the Asimov short story, “The Last Question.” If you haven’t already run across it, a fun read. No spoilers.
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“…but the theory would make an interesting short story.”
I read one back in the 70s where two anthropologists are on a trek through the Amazon (not the newer one) for reasons I’ve forgotten and in the deepest darkest jungle they find a damaged, for lack of a better description space craft, and somehow come to the same “we are them” conclusion. Sci-fi has never held my attention but I do recall the ending. And unless there’s a way to fast forward Darwinism I’m inclined to believe it.
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Just curious. Why do you say “fast forward Darwinism?” Mammals have been around for many millions of years. (65M) The last 300,000 years were needed to fine-tune the intelligence of modern humans, maybe, but possibly the bulk of our intellectual horsepower was already there.
That said, whenever Anonymole invents a time machine, I’m going to ask it to take me back 300,000 years and see just how clever those monkeys were.
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Screw the monkeys, that’s a farce. If it were not, there would be no monkeys. We’re an extraterrestrial experiment. Probably right in the middle of the successfully adapted species intelligence wise. Consider we’re the only ones who must manufacture our environment to survive.
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OK. 🙂
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We’re an aberration all right. Too smart for this planet, so therefore a kind of pathology. As for AI, it still needs us to power the devices it runs on, right? If it’s going to evolve to the point where it’s smarter than us, it will have to ensure a power supply.
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And one, unlike our devices’ wall warts, that isn’t so marginal as to be useless under stress.
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Our massive, multi-purpose CPU does allow us unsurpassed adaptability. Some of us may indeed need such stresses to induce our creative juices to flow. Some freak out during calamity. I find myself with unusual clarity of thought during such times. This may be why I yearn for such shocks to society. Until then I appear to just tool along, detached and disinterested.
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That’s almost some sick shit. Wishing for calamity to others to stimulate yourself. You ARE detached and disinterested. Many of us are. Lighting a Roman Candle in the asses of the socially opiated isn’t a solution, it just agitates them and they become more of a nuisance. The way out is letting yourself go and forage for the emotional feedback via imagination. It’s not external. I make noise and find characters I can hang with when the outlook for true interactive depth is bleak, at best. Which is sick too, but beats wishing disruption on others. Because nobody has it as good as it looks from the outside. Fame and fortune, good looks, talent, bringing joy to millions is all external to a depressive, insecure alcoholic doper. I prefer my small world in an unused corner of my over large unused mind.
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Elon will figure it out!
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Maybe he’ll turn Mars into a human-proof planet!
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That’s an interesting idea. If we can’t manage to fly to Mars, then it is, actually, human-proof.
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Given the Universe’s penchant for creating environments hostile to life, like space, and every planet we’ve ever detected aside from this one, I’d say Mars is pretty safe from human infection.
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Good point! Sometimes I imagine all those Earth-like planets we’ve discovered hoping we won’t develop faster-than-light space travel any time soon.
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“but the theory would make an interesting short story.”
Or a long movie: 2001 A Space Odyssey. Although I’m sure some pre-WWII pulp writer did it first. It’s very hard to come up with ideas they didn’t cover.
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Really? The aliens responsible for the monoliths altered man? Makes sense now that you say it. But I never made the connection. Was it stated overtly in the movie?
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It was all pretty implicit in the movie, probably requiring too much piecing together for most of the audience. The novel was much more clear on what was happening. A difference in story philosophy between Stanly Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. (The movie script initially was more like the book, but Kubrick reportedly stripped out most of the dialog during production.)
At the beginning of the movie, the monolith alters early humans (the ape-men), increasing their intelligence and setting them on a path that will result in us. At the end of the movie, the monolith alters Dave Bowman, the astronaut, making him into the next stage of evolution. The implication is that in between it guided our evolution.
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Well, damn. Thanks for that. I’ll give up now thinking I can create new, anything under the sun.
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Still worth exploring I’d say. It’s all in the execution, and there’s always room for fresh takes.
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