The place of humans post-singularity.
If AI considers ecology of the planet, how many humans will they recommend?
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Debate Stats
Total Comments: (13)
Date Started: February 15, 2012 - 8:25 am
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Comments
It\’s useful to think through this question by asking what is \”the place of single-cell organisms post multicellularity.\”
Some chose totally merge completely with the \’machine\’, like the enslaved, specialized cells that make up your body.
Others live in or on multicellular creatures, scavenging, hitchhiking or being parasitical.
Others have nothing to do with the multicellularity or its entities and remain rugged, individualistic, adaptable creaures. Untold trillions of single celled organisms go their entire existence without coming into contact with a multicellular organism. Many of which form loose associations or cooperate with eachother in some fashion to survive.
I think the singularity and the multicellularity have an incredible amount in common. You have to really compare a microbes intelligence to your own to get the true scope of the difference between you and the intelligences that will emerge. Think about your power compared to theirs, their capability of understanding you, how they can still affect you or live off of you or be completely separate from what you are doing. AND how much time you bother thinking about them at all.
Post Singularity analogies:
Humans = Bacteria
Nations = Bacteria Colonies
Cyborgs = Eukaryotes
AGI = Multicellular life of increasing degrees of capability and complexity
Our Galaxy = The World
Then you have to decide if you want to merge with them or not and to what degree. Some of it will be our choice, some of it will simply be swept into against our will or even without our knowledge that anything has happened.
Anybody that thinks that we dont have an over population problem or that we need to control it, is plain ignorant of the obvious, and devoid of common sense. A prime example of unhealthy obsession with “sanctity of life”. Surviving is by any means. I would kill every single person on this planet to survive if I had to, anybody that wouldn’t go as far is someone that has lost the very thing that created higher life-forms, and shouldn’t be allowed to pass that inadequacy on….
I disagree. There is a proven benefit in most cases to promoting the survival of the tribe over the self (assuming you have some common genes with the tribe). Obviously parents in many species are willing to sacrifice themselves for their offspring. Once you have children, your way of thinking changes.
I’m guessing you’re a very materialistic single person.
That said, yes, we do have a current overpopulation problem, and the Catholic church needs to change its policy and apologize for practices that keep their members poor and impoverished.
There’s lots of creatures capable of killing for survival without compunction. All those creatures are considered less highly evolved than us. My cat would do as you describe if need be. Does that make him superior than me because I’d rather die myself than “kill every single person on this planet to survive”.
It’s called empathy and it is a wonderful thing and a great species survival trait.
And once again. I don’t know what you consider common sense, but if you’d care to analyze the data, you’d see that the planet is more than capable of handling the current population and more as technology progresses. But it won’t have to since, at the current rate of declining population growth, the world population is predicted by the UN to reach a maximum of 9.2 billion by 2050. And imagine what efficiencies technology will enable for us by 2050 at the current rate of progress.
The planet may have enough resources in essence, but the reality is given our current technology with energy harnessing, and the fact that civilization as a whole is still ignorant, we shouldn’t want 7 billion people on this earth, nor can we sustain them with adequate basic needs. 1 Billion people should be the maximum allowable global population, in order to facilitate a sustainability and productivity level far exceeding anything observed before. As it is, the majority of humanity is actually becoming less intelligent, and more of a burden, and an inhibiting factor to our evolution as a species… Because of the unhealthy obsession with the idea that “everyone is equal”, substandard intelligence and destructive social behaviors grow at an alarming rate, when naturally the weak and malevolent are killed- and for the very reason of survival and evolution.
So the question isn’t IF we can sustain 7 billion, but WHY would you want to?
On another note, in the future we will be one with technology, either through cybernetic augmentation, or fully immersable electronic reality as depicted in “The Matrix”. And I fully support both ideas, as a superior species we are capable of controlling our evolution and absolutely should. To not take advantage of every niche we are capable of controlling, is plain idiocracy and a complete waste of the very abilities we have. We are the gods of our world, our time, and our future- and we should act that way.
I think your idea’s can do with some nuanceing. You come across as angry. Second of all you contradict yourself. You believe technology will allow us to be one with machines (and I guess one with the rest of the world) But until that day the weak should be killed off? Is that the jist of it ?
Grow up.
282894jd – Who are you talking to? Who’s angry?
oops, now I got it. Didn’t see that your post was indented a tiny bit.
Yeah, ABeemer is apparently promoting eugenics, which has some logic to it but definitely a slippery slope. But I agree with his general idea – our lives will be better if there’s fewer of us on Earth. It won’t be as bad as he’s saying, since he’s assuming current technology for food and energy. Obviously that will change. The Idiocracy-style future is a different question altogether.
Another factor is if we can build a space elevator or some other low-cost access to space, then the whole question may become moot as many of the more motivated people will leave. Maybe make their own colonies on an asteroid or Mars.
Aside from the obvious and hopefully intuitive reasons to consider your fellow human beings equal to you in deserving of life there is a practical matter of self interest.
If you start dividing people up into groups or individually and deciding that this group or individual is more deserving than that group or individual. You might be the one cut from the team.
You say “1 billion”. That’s an arbitrary number. I bet there are folks that say “1 million” and would have no problem seeing you scrubbed clean from this world. Especially if what you do for them can be done by someone or something else.
You also apparently don’t care for actual data. Fact: The world population growth rate is slowing and has been slowing since the mid seventies.
Fact: Teen pregnancies continue to drop.
Fact: At least in the United States, instances of violent crime continue to decrease.
I could go on and on. At the end of the day, what I say to people like you who have a problem with 7 billion people sharing this world is if you have a problem with overpopulation, be and example to us all and take yourself out first.
Harsh, yes. But those 7 billion you talk about aren’t ants, they are your fellow living breathing human beings and are all deserving of life. If you can’t understand that, then that shows a disturbing lack of empathy and empathy is one of those evolutionary achievements humans have over other species. If you lack it, that to me is an indicator of subhumanity.
This planet EASILY has enough resources, and we can easily make more resources if we properly renew them, to support all 7 billion of us. Heck maybe even 10 billion. Sorry doom-sayers.
The problem is that right now, we simply don\’t use our resources properly. But that will change as technology advances, and we get more efficient at doing things. In almost every area there are better ways of doing things.. Whether it\’s generating energy or making food. Plenty of things can be done locally, especially food and energy, which would allow us to treat areas as self-sustaining pockets, rather than worrying about depleting the world on a whole.
AI will only make us more efficient at those things, as advanced enough AI will be able to come up with better technologies and efficiencies far faster than we can.
I think it\’s a bad idea to EVER assume we\’ll need population control, even with extended lifespans. And if it does become a problem, rather than limit people, we\’ll create incentives to move into space settlements.
Pretty much the same page as Keith here. I would hope that AI would consider us as likely many of us will have wetware AI augmenting something within us, memory storage, pattern retrieval, ..some thing (too many possible avenues to go in depth in a post), plus.. we’re mom and dad.
I think that AI will focus on changing paradigms (and our destructive habits) much like the robot talks to his charge in ‘Robot and Frank’. “That’s just not good for the environment sir, let’s try something else.”
As AI living assistants will likely be nearly 1:1 it will be a simple enough task to curb and change the populace towards a better path. Perhaps though I’m too optimistic, it’s a phase that’s hit me this past year.
For most of humanity’s past, we existed at maybe 20-100 million people. So that surely is sustainable (although as hunter-gatherers, we also had a smaller ecological footprint).
We could probably provide a decent standard of living to maybe a billion people, with no further destruction of the environment (barring some mining for non-renewables). Of course, the attraction of the singularity is that our technology will improve our energy generation, energy usage and food production so that we can maintain more people with the same ecological impact.
But let’s not forget that the robotic workforce and AI itself will also have an impact. It takes a lot of energy to build, create and operate the robots, as well as to maintain & power the database servers that a good AI would need. Presumably we’d build robots that are really good at dissecting trash for the recyclables, so the impact of mining for metals would be greatly diminished. Even so, the technology needs to be part of the equation. Fewer ‘bots = more humans, but at a lower lifestyle.
If lifespans are dramatically improved, that would give another boost to the population growth, so we may need to mandate a system where people taking advantage of life extension technology need to move off-planet.
Considering the ecology of the planet, AI might not recommend any humans at all, lol! But seriously, if you look at where things are going, and if you listen to what Kurzweil has said over and over again, we are moving toward a future of human and AI/Robot coexistence. The AI will not rule us or take us over or choose how many of us get to live. We will coexist with AI in a sometimes symbiotic and sometimes confrontational relationship. It won’t likely be humans vs AI. Rather, the future will likely be one faction of humans, AI, and quasi human/AI combinations vs other factions of humans, AI, and quasi human/AI combinations.