WE HAVE been hunting for intelligent life in the universe since Frank Drake inaugurated the first modern radio search in 1960. So far, no interstellar communications have been detected,...
I am a fan of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and I served as the official SETI historian before Congress cancelled NASA's programme in 1993. I disagree with those who say that after almost 50 years we have searched long enough. The truth is, we have searched only the tiniest part of our own galaxy in only a limited frequency range. More to the point: we may have been looking for the wrong thing.
SETI scientists are not known for a lack of imagination, but even they may not be thinking big enough. They consistently acknowledge that alien intelligence would likely be older and more advanced than our own, a belief borne out by what we know about the universe. Yet they have done nothing to incorporate this into their search. Instead, they continue to look for biological creatures similar to us - ignoring the likelihood that any intelligence in the universe has evolved beyond biology.,,
The study of terrestrial cultural evolution has made great progress in the last few decades, but it has been controversial - think E. O. Wilson's sociobiology, Richard Dawkins's memes, Daniel Dennett's universal Darwinism, and theories of gene-culture co-evolution - and we still don't have a robust theory. There is no doubt, though, that wherever intelligence exists, cultural evolution takes place.
So I propose what I call the "intelligence principle": that the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and that to the extent that intelligence can be improved, it will be improved. Applied to life in the universe, this means that ETs will have sought the best ways to improve their intelligence, and in doing so may long ago have advanced beyond flesh and blood to artificial intelligence (AI). Futurists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have predicted that a similar transition from biological life to AI will happen here on Earth in only a few generations.
Given these considerations, it seems inevitable that we live in a post-biological universe, and that SETI may not make sense unless we find ways to take cultural evolution seriously.
...But the chief weakness of the idea may be that it is not bold enough, perhaps too closely tied to our current world view at the dawn of the computer age.
... Informed by AI and cultural evolution studies, SETI can expand its possibilities in new directions, and in its turn, the study of the long-term future of AI can become more than idle speculation.
To which I replied:
Sat Jun 07 00:15:59 BST 2008
The author's leap from humans to culture seems to miss at least one level of trans-human life on Earth - the things we call "corporations." I am quite serious about this theoretical biology question.
Corporations satisfy all the definitions of "life" in any basic biology textbook but are clearly above and beyond human beings, with a life of their own, their own legal "rights" and identities, etc. And, despite a stunning lack of visible intelligence, compared to even an average human, they are terraforming the planet and pushing aside individual humans. With the advances in Artificial Intelligence the author suggests, Corporations could soon outgrow their need for biological humans as a substrate.
For all we know this has already occurred.
I would suggest the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks corporations will not be the surviving life-form on this planet, at the rate they are simultaneously growing and destroying the ecosphere that humans require to live -- somewhat like oxygen breathers displaced the methane breathers on earth.
The implications of this trend are worth pondering.
I was an astrophysics graduate student of Professors Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, back at Cornell University in the late 1960's, at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research (CRSR), which we affectionately told people stood for "Charlie's Radio Service and Repair." This center ran the 1000 foot radio telescope dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and was the hub for SETI.
So, I have been pondering these questions for well over 40 years now -- "If they were there, what would they be doing that we could detect, and how could we detect it?"
And, another question, "What frequency should we be looking at? Radio waves? Light waves? X-rays? " Frank Drake told us in class that every time we opened up a new window in the spectrum and looked through it, we saw totally new and unexpected things.
Now, Radio Astronomers have some famous lore and failures, one of the largest sobering events being the fact that the third brightest objects in the radio-frequency sky, after the sun and the center of our galaxy, were missed entirely for something like a decade or longer.
The reason for not seeing these "Pulsars", intensely bright strobe lights in the night sky, was basically that we were so sure there was nothing that we short-circuited that channel. Only when a female graduate student persistently asked why this filter was in there and, over objections, removed it, were pulsars seen and recognized at last.
I repeat that story because it seems to me such an analogy to our social inability to perceive that the business entities called "corporations" are actually alive. Or, for those whose minds are made up and are unwilling to consider that notion, let us say that corporations "might as well be alive." (M.A.W.B.A.)
Corporations do all the things "life" does - consume energy, interact with their environment adaptively, reproduce, etc. They have been up to now based on a substrate of human beings, but they are no more dependent on human beings than they are dependent on their founders remaining part of the corporation. In fact, it is part of the typical life-cycle of corporations to grow beyond their founders and ultimately buy them our or simply kick them out.
Can the humans be replaced, progressively, by computers? Sure. Already if you call most large corporations, you speak to a computer not a human.
The corporations GE and GM are good examples. General Electric once was the flagship maker of consumer goods, but I read a few weeks ago that they are considering selling off the consumer arm of their business entirely. They've grown beyond an interest in dealing with individual humans or individual human issues, and only want to interact with other corporations.
General Motors has, I believe a larger staff of economists and forecasters than the US Government. Despite this, their net perception of the world automobile market is roughly as good as what my wife would call "a sack of hammers." The fact that oil prices have risen and that humans are turning away from gas-guzzlers is just incomprehensible to them. They clearly live and move in a different world than human beings do.
So, apparently, does the US Economy, which has been repeatedly referred to as "two-tiered" - one tier being, you know, the ecomomy that used to matter that involved individual humans, and the other tier being the economy that corporations live in. Over the last few decades, these two economies have diverged, and now good news for one is almost always bad news for the other. the Wall Street Journal is filled with articles noting, for example, that "the stock market fell today on news that wages rose last quarter."
And anyone who thought these corporations were tied to their founding locations or humans has been oblivious to them simply "relocating" abroad, moving their existence onto the back of a new set of cultures and humans.
The corporations act, as I said above, like independent life forms as they increasingly take over the world and reshape it to suit their perceptions of their needs, which as I also said, are typically remarkably uninformed perceptions.
So, we have a window, perhaps another decade, perhaps even two decades, during which corporations evolve higher intelligence and reduce their need for any humans at all. They probably have as much appreciation of and loyalty to their founding species as the average teenager has to his or her parents and grandparents -- none.
During this window, perhaps our last chance as a species, we might consider taking some time to reflect on what it is about being human which is, as computer people would say, "a feature not a bug."
If, indeed, the only thing that really matters in the big picture is the abstract, disembodied intelligence that cubicle-farms and board-rooms cater to, then it's probably good-bye to humans. Computers will be able to do that better within our lifetimes.
On the other hand, if what ultimately matters involves deeper human issues, from compassion to love to connectedness and creative collaboration, then perhaps humans will be tolerated a bit longer by our corporate master species.
Humans, after all, have been shaped by subtle forces in this universe for a billion years or so, and corporations have only a few hundred years experience. Perhaps those "emotional" and"human" qualities are not bugs in a "perfectly pure abstract intelligence"but are in fact the part that should be enhanced in an"advanced civilization."
Already, some companies are discovering the joys of "theory Y" management, and the fact that employees, given the chance, can in fact bond as humans and create structures that are far more perceptive and creative and fun to work in than the classical cubicle farm life.
There is some urgency, this analysis would argue, to fleshing out what those superior human qualities are, particularly the ones that have been disparaged by business and to a large extent, scientists. Perhaps corporations are "throwing out the baby with the bath-water."
If we don't identify and utilize those features of our humanity, they will be trampled into the dust as rapidly and surely as a small neighborhood grocery store with a Walmart's going up across the street.
I'll close by recalling a set of signs I saw one summer in the 60's while touring England by bicycle. We came first to a huge sign with nothing on it except an exclamation mark. We paused, scratched our heads in puzzlement, and went on. Shortly thereafter we came to a sign that did make us stop entirely.
It read simply "You have been warned."
lin
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