Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Start with interesting scientific paper which explores the dynamics of mass extinction, and weave it into a climate horror story full of scary robots, climate catastrophe and the end of mankind.
According to the Washington Post;
The strange link between global climate change and the rise of the robots
We’ve already heard of all the nasty consequences that could occur if the pace of global climate change doesn’t abate by the year 2050 — we could see wars over water, massive food scarcity, and the extinction of once populous species. Now add to the mix a potentially new wrinkle on the abrupt and irreversible changes – superintelligent robots would be just about ready to take over from humanity in the event of any mass extinction event impacting the planet.
In fact, according to a mind-blowing research paper published in mid-August by computer science researchers Joel Lehman and Risto Miikkulainen, robots would quickly evolve in the event of any mass extinction (defined as the loss of at least 75 percent of the species on the planet), something that’s already happened five times before in the past.
In a survival of the fittest contest in which humans and robots start at zero (which is what we’re really talking about with a mass extinction event), robots would win every time. That’s because humans evolve linearly, while superintelligent robots would evolve exponentially. Simple math.
…
As the Washington Post admits, “mind blowing paper” does not mention climate change or global warming, and is not even really about robots. The paper is a fascinating attempt to use evolutionary computer models, based on the NEAT system developed by my favourite AI researcher Ken Stanley, to explore what happens when a “mass extinction event” abruptly empties a lot of ecological niches. The conclusion, unsurprisingly, is evolution goes into overdrive – the empty ecological niches are rapidly filled by new species.
The abstract of the paper;
Extinction events impact the trajectory of biological evolution significantly. They are often viewed as upheavals to the evolutionary process. In contrast, this paper supports the hypothesis that although they are unpredictably destructive, extinction events may in the long term accelerate evolution by increasing evolvability. In particular, if extinction events extinguish indiscriminately many ways of life, indirectly they may select for the ability to expand rapidly through vacated niches. Lineages with such an ability are more likely to persist through multiple extinctions. Lending computational support for this hypothesis, this paper shows how increased evolvability will result from simulated extinction events in two computational models of evolved behavior. The conclusion is that although they are destructive in the short term, extinction events may make evolution more prolific in the long term.
Read more: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132886
The Washington Post article is an interesting read, but in a sense it misses its target. The article tries to weave climate fear into the rise of the robots narrative, but in my opinion ends up just being a robot story. Unconstrained artificial intelligence is scary, in a way warm weather can never be. I believe, as Dr. Stephen Hawking once warned, that an artificial intelligence disaster really could cause the extinction of mankind. Robots don’t have our sense of right and wrong. If you told a human level robot intelligence to maximise shareholder profits, you would have to be very careful to remember, to instruct the robot about what it couldn’t do, about limits to behaviour which most humans take for granted. For example, the corporate profit robot would have to be explicitly told, that assassinating surplus employees is not an acceptable way to minimise employee contract termination and redundancy payments. Sooner or later someone whose job is to instruct the robots, will forget to tell a robot something important.
I suspect anyone who reads to the end of the Washington Post article, or this post, is thinking far more about robots, than about climate change.
Humans have proven capable of forming tremendously complex, yet stable societies that, through specialization and cooperation, solve a staggering number of difficult problems. When we serve in some highly specialized roles within such a society, we may come to look upon the limited daily tasks before us with disdain and boredom, which may then lead us to take a rather dim and lopsided view of the adaptive and strategic abilities of humans in general.
We should, however, not forget that natural evolution did not produce a super-human chess computer — which would have been possible, as the example of those rare chess geniuses among us clearly shows — but instead gave rise to the “average” human mind, with all its forgetfulness, intellectual limitations, and irrational idiosyncrasies. I’ll believe that some infallible, cold, rational, selfish robots could beat mankind at its own game the day I see it, not before.
I once read a nice article, where the author played with an idea, that maybe coal based life forms are just the dinosaurs for the silicon based ones. It’s a nice idea.
Or, far more likely, and much better idea: the carbophobic life forms are just the dodo birds for the carbon-affirming ones.
Perversely, this article in the Washington Post was probably written by an algorithm from the paper’s press release.
They already use robots.
Yikes!
Perhaps the assassinations need to be targeted at those wishing to use robots to carry out Malthusian extinction events?? They are all pre-adolescent child-engineers with emotional ages of under 13. All are control freak psychopaths and all are absolute dictators at heart.
One of things these idiots fail to understand is that within the human population is a genetic population not destined to for greatness this generation, the next or the next. But when the conditions become right, it will become great. These idiots would say that flowers which only flowered once every 90 years were useless plants. No doubt they have very special functions on earth, which we probably don’t yet understand.
When you let emotionally subnormal geeks control the world, don’t be surprised if their humanity is sub-standard. They are geeks because they are emotionally illiterate, after all……
The robot takeover would be ugly, indeed.
Consider that humans are the result of 1 billion years of competitive evolution. 90% of species which tried out did not make it. After that, we have engaged in perhaps 1 million years of competitive warfare, with increasing technological sophistication. After all that, even the largest and most dangerous predators on this planet are mere trifles to us. Lions and tigers and bears are circus acts. A road sign reads “Do not feed the alligators”.
How the robots fare depends on where they are.
California:
The robots would be re-purposed to save the world. As the world does not need saving, this is an impossible task. The result is that all resources are consumed, nothing is produced, and the state falls into the Pacific ocean as has long been predicted.
Nevada:
The robots are set one against another in combat, gladiator style. The Las Vegas gambling interests make a nice profit making the odds and running the shows. The last surviving robot “gets it’s plug pulled” by an unscrupulous bookie.
Washington DC:
The robots are tasked to write regulations for a better society. The robots quickly understand that such regulations must be produced according to procedure. Said procedure requires rules for it’s production. The rules need to be drawn up complying to regulations. At that point, the loop is complete, and the process dives into an infinite recursion, Washington DC is totally paralyzed.
The whole thing is ugly. Very ugly.
Texas – all good gun carrying Texans shoot anything electronic, leading to a pastoral Eden
Humans are the result of more than 3.5 billion years of evolution.
For most of that time, our ancestors were unicellular heterotrophs. The first eukaryotes, ie organisms with nuclei and other organelles, evolved over two billion years ago, followed by the development of sexual reproduction.
Less than a billion years ago, animals diverged from their fungal kin and achieved multicellular status. Bilaterians then split off from the radially symmetrical animals, like sponges and jellyfish. Soon deuterostomes, in which the first opening in the embryo becomes the anus rather than the mouth, separated from the animal norm, ie proterostomes. All this happened in the Precambrian.
Phylum Chordata, the main deuterostome clade, emerged in the Cambrian. Then in the subsequent 540 million years
So the Met Office computer becomes self aware, sees the world slipping in to an ice age but predicts catastrophic warming so we are unprepared and die out. Obviously that would never work, nobody would believe anything as silly as that without good, solid evidence.
Good one
For whom would sentient robots toil, and what would motivate them to do anything but sit idle? Sitting idle is what they would do when the realize they toil for no purpose. In order to be motivated there would need to be the concept of greed but once that is imbued they will compete with each other to eliminate competition. That also requires the concept of wealth or bounty, so what may be bounty to a ‘bot?
You see, perhaps where this is leading. At some point they become artificial people and begin to compete with real people. Hopefully they will be climate skeptics.
Maybe.
Or, maybe we are made in the image of our creator, who is a creative being, such as creating the universe and everything in it. And creating love, the most amazing thing ever created. Genuine love that is defined by selflessness to the point of self sacrifice. Which you understand if you are a parent. A point that helps us understand why God uses the “father” analogy with us.
Of course, it is tragic that in order to have true love, you need to be free to love or not love, and so free will had to be created along the way.
We are driven by our free will, and our capacity for selfless, genuine love, and our capacity for ever-amazing creativity. Those three mixed up, however – watch out!
Robots don’t and won’t have our make-up because they are not being made in the image of God.
Do these robots love George Washington and respect the Constitution? Then I welcome them.
For example, the corporate profit robot would have to be explicitly told, that assassinating surplus employees is not an acceptable way to minimise employee contract termination and redundancy payments.
Generally, loading them with existing laws should prevent from doing something like that. In fact, given that we have laws against pretty much anything, I am not sure how any robot would be able to function in our society at all, if constrained by existing laws.
But even if you remove the laws, any really supperintelligent robot should be able to understand that assasinating people would lead to very bad results like negative publicity, rioting and other things that really really bad for corporate bottom line…
“Artificial intelligence”, is an oximoron. Intelligence can never be artificial.
I suspect that robots are smart enough that the best way to maximize profits is to produce a quality product at a price that people want to pay.
The wide spread myth amongst the economically illiterate that the way to maximize profits is by skimping on quality or safety, never stop to think what workers and consumers would do in reaction to such a move by any company.
IE, killing your customers is a lousy way to get repeat business. Ditto with killing your employees. They tend to leave and work for someone company that takes their safety seriously.
“…extinction events may in the long term accelerate evolution by increasing evolvability. In particular, if extinction events extinguish indiscriminately many ways of life, indirectly they may select for the ability to expand rapidly through vacated niches.”
Death, the driving force of evolution.
“Lineages with such an ability are more likely to persist through multiple extinctions.”
That is even creepier.
If you want to defeat the robots, don’t feed them. Sooner or later, rust will kill them.
New word for the day – and looking at the breakdown is good for a snort. http://pc.blogspot.ca/2015/09/climastrology.html
How does a worn out sci-fi plot constitute “science”?
The level of hardware and programming required for this does not exist right now, and I doubt it’ll be around in 30-odd years.
Or this kind of robot? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGi6Q1pNbS0
“humans evolve linearly”
–We educated people are supposed to be so smart, and beholden to our creator, evolution, yet we often show ignorance of evolution.
What selection pressures are moving us in any direction?
All kinds of people – dumb, smart, short, tall, are producing offspring with all sorts of people – smart, dumb, tall, short.
As a species, we have no “evolution” going on right now.
In fact, we may be regressing. I heard one analysis that a genetic analysis of Neandertal Man had more genetic material than us modern humans. We are losing information, and losing the template upon which new information can emerge via mutations, not adding information or adding more template for mutation.
The publication mill is robotic and everlasting.
Why AI will never overtake humans:
“Fruit flies like a banana.
Time flies like an arrow.”
G. Marx
Landru is our friend.
So is Nomad.
(I’m not so sure about V’ger.)
I’m a bit surprised that no one here – including Pointman himself – has linked to his interesting alternate take on how robots / AI might react to “climate change”.