10 ms·

Could technology, defined as the elaborate (=intelligent) and large scale manipulation of non-biological environments be incompatible with the long term surviva

Could technology, defined as the elaborate (=intelligent) and large scale manipulation of non-biological environments be incompatible with the long term survival of biological life (i.e. it is an unstable evolutionary process)? Its a difficult argument, as all of life manipulates its abiotic surroundings one way or another. Yet the antropocene is clearly at least one qualitative step up. We only have this one data point (our own) so make of that whatever you will. But it doesn't take an ultra-pessimist or doomist psychology to see that on the basis of our behavior the odds that technologically enhanced life self-destructs in short timescales are, indeed, non-zero. If "intelligent" biology is an intrinsically unstable system (can't self-regulate because primal drives for reproduction, dominance etc highjack mechanisms that are too powerful for its own good) this would make the absence of technosignals self-evident.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Some philosophers in the metaphysics of technology have also proposed this idea. The idea is that the arms race or prisoner's dilemma-type situations make the advance of technology unavoidable (technological determinism) and that its inexorable rise forward eventually has a high probability of extinguishing all life on a planet. (More precisely, determinism states that technological development is a strong force; it can be influenced but it is hard). We already have climate change, advanced AI (that may eventually be able to produce more technology by itself), and a planet of organisms that are counter to growth. Deforestation happens because the long-term costs are not shouldered by the present generation. In some way, I believe the end of times is near, but that humanity has TWO possibilities: (A) The planet is destroyed via advanced technology and most humans die, only to repeat the same mistakes again, OR (B) We reach a critical mass of enlightenment that consists of (1) a cautious approach to growth, (2) a moderation in the use of technology, and (3) a stable, healthy relationship with the biosphere. The eventuality (B) is certainly possible if one by one, we start to adopt a philosophy that economic and technological growth isn't the right path and we slowly give up all this advanced stuff for a slower-paced life centered on local communities, local economies, and less efficiency in return for a more peaceful life.
- mikro2nd 3y ago
  2 Points: 1. We do not have advanced AI. We have LLMs. They're not intelligent, not creative, and are never going to be. I'm with you on the other things, though. 2. The planet will not be destroyed by anything we do. H. sap. might go extinct along with many, many other species, but give the biospehere a couple of million years and it will all bounce back, sans humans. I've been living/trialing the path you suggest in your last paragraph for 30 years. Sadly it's not gone viral. AMA. ;)
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Well, by "advanced AI", I did not mean truly intelligent AI of course. I meant sufficiently advanced to disrupt society to an extent that will make it worse that it was without it. Advanced as in "advanced weapon", not "smart". Yes, it is true that the planet won't be destroyed, that is a good point. Only we might, like you said. Though, if many other species go extinct, it is sort of like destruction in a way, even though it isn't total. Feel free to reach out through the contact info in my profile if you want to collaborate.
  - cduzz 3y ago
    The biosphere may well bounce back but it may take an absurdly long time to sequester carbon back into the ground. The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air, so things didn't burn and having megatons of carbon rich organic material lying around wasn't likely to catch fire and jump back into the air. Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air. I'm not sure how long that'll take to change, or what impact that has on future life here on earth, but we've got 2 examples of earthish planets that don't support life right next door.
    - fellowmartian 3y ago
      Why would Gaia try to sequester carbon back into the ground? It’s useful to her (but not to us).
    - edgyquant 3y ago
sampo 3y ago
On the opposite side, James Lovelock suggested that life controlling the planetary conditions, is a necessary property for long term survival of life. For example: Too little oxygen, too much CO2 in the atmosphere: CO2 feeds more plants, oxygen below 16% makes wildfires difficult. So plants grow more. Too much oxygen enhances wildfires, and huge wildfires would burn off parts of plant cover. Atmospheric oxygen concentration would go back down. [1,2] Lovelock's argument is, that on dead planets the environmental parameters vary in time, and in time they would randomly fluctuate outside of the zone where life is possible. But early life taking control of the planetary environment by establishing feedback mechanisms, is what the long term survival of life in that planed. Of course, Lovelock doesn't specify intelligent life. Even microbial life could establish feedback mechanisms and maintain planetary homeostasis. [1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-finds-its-place-earth-history https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Regulation_of_oxygen_in_the_atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Regulation_of_...
ben_w 3y ago
Evolution is a form of intelligence, and the oxygenation catastrophe was definitely a large-scale manipulation of the environment. Anthropogenic changes are faster than evolution, but is that an important difference, or is what matters the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition? And beyond us, the same question comes for any AI tasked with doing a thing whose side effects develop not necessarily to our advantage: which is faster, the harm or the improved ability to resolve problems?
- nologic01 3y ago
  > the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition? yes, I too think this ratio is of vital importance (pun). I would not even call it "damage" (rather change) as this is quite anthropocentric and teleological. But the acceleration induced when moving from cellular trial-and-error biological intelligence to human intelligence seems dramatic. Watching Oppenheimer reminded me of this "funny" moment when people calculated the odds of "igniting the atmosphere". While that is apparently not possible, igniting, e.g., the RNA is more plausible and I would not put it beyond what current societies are capable of.
jl6 3y ago
We could make something like the opposite argument too: without technology, biological life has no hope of surviving events like planetary collisions, gamma ray bursts, or home star fuel exhaustion, which are rare on human timescales but common (or even inevitable) in the long-run.
- nologic01 3y ago
  That is clearly true, but you would have to explain the absence of "technosignatures" - even more so if survival means interstellar spead of intelligent / technological life forms.
slashdev 3y ago
“ He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” - H.G. Wells, The Time Machine That’s one of my favorite literary quotes. From long before nuclear weapons, or climate change. I think it’s entirely possible that technological civilization is unstable and self destructs. Certainly, at this point of our history, we can see what a fine line we walk. Had the twentieth century been but a little different at key moments, we could have already destroyed our civilization. As we speak there’s a land war in Europe from one great nuclear power, on the borders of the other. A third great nuclear power rises in Asia, as China is ramping up incredibly quickly - no doubt with a eye to deterrent over meddling in their aims on Taiwan. Their long term historical rivals in India, a rising economic power, will likely not sit idly by. They could be the fourth great nuclear power. That of course would force Pakistans hand to try to compete. Next door Iran desperately seeks the bomb to ensure they don’t get the freedom treatment from the West. Across the gulf lies their bitter rival Saudi Arabia, who warn they will have to pursue the bomb if Iran gets it. Meanwhile nuclear armed Israel has promised they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. And that’s not even 100 years yet since we developed that particular technology. Nor is it the only technology we have that threatens to be more than we can handle.
- nologic01 3y ago
  Without being a biologist my gut feeling is that our biggest immediate self-destruct risk is biological weapons like engineered viruses and the like. Once you start tinkering with the stuff you are made off while you have not controlled primal behaviors that were conditioned during eras of near zero technological competence the writing is on the wall. In a sense the nuclear era episode was a benign rehearsal granted to us by the Universe: Here is a black box (nuclear phenomena) that you can discover, use and self-destruct if you want, but it is quite hard to play with. Not so with genetic engineering.
  - slashdev 3y ago
    Indeed, as a programmer, I deeply understand the power of being able to modify the source code. Doing that with the code of life is a great responsibility we’re not ready for. What happens when it gets so easy and cheap that any malcontent group can engineer their own super virus? Will we have a defense for that?
dist-epoch 3y ago
From the point of view of physics, there is no fundamental difference between biological life (cell based) and digital life (computer based). You can easily imagine various scenarios in which computers wipe themselves out after taking over from us. Put another way, self-extinction is not something exclusive to biology. > would make the absence of technosignals self-evident The so called "grabby aliens" hypothesis suggests that after certain stages of advancement, live propagates at close to speed of light. So according to it we would see the technosignals just before contact/colonization/destruction.
akomtu 3y ago
The two futures of high tech civilizations are determined by who prevails: lifeforms may become "machinized" or machines may become enlighted with life. The first future is the doom of civilizations highly intelligent, but selfish and not gifted with intuition for this reason.
7thaccount 3y ago
A lot of modern conflict seems to arise from resource constraints. That doesn't mean removing those constraints wouldn't lead to peace (maybe just different constraints), but it seems possible. What if we somehow eventually figure out how to move our consciousness to computers? If possible, it would make our biological signals from earth of our current civilization only present for a blip on the radar and for all intents and purposes look like we were snuffed out. I'm assuming SETI already looks for Dyson Spheres/Swarms and civilizations around black holes though, so perhaps you're right and nobody ever quite makes it to that stage.
whoisthemachine 3y ago
This is one variant of "the great filter" theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- nologic01 3y ago
  This is also related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp... and this seems like a good summary: > Some examples of possible resolutions [of the paradox] are that intelligent life is rarer than is thought, that assumptions about the general development or behavior of intelligent species are flawed, or, more radically, that current scientific understanding of the nature of the universe itself is quite incomplete.
m3kw9 3y ago
My theory is that once a species has tech to make itself immortal, the drive to reproduce will be over. Thus you don’t see life everywhere, primitive life gets stuck in their own system. If you you see the pace of acceleration of humans, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can get immortality type tech with in 500 years
purpleflame1257 3y ago
The anthropocene ain't got shit on the evolution of photosynthesis. The Earth's atmosphere went from near 0 to 20 percent O2. We're in the PPM region for carbon dioxide.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

Some philosophers in the metaphysics of technology have also proposed this idea. The idea is that the arms race or prisoner's dilemma-type situations make the advance of technology unavoidable (technological determinism) and that its inexorable rise forward eventually has a high probability of extinguishing all life on a planet. (More precisely, determinism states that technological development is a strong force; it can be influenced but it is hard). We already have climate change, advanced AI (that may eventually be able to produce more technology by itself), and a planet of organisms that are counter to growth. Deforestation happens because the long-term costs are not shouldered by the present generation. In some way, I believe the end of times is near, but that humanity has TWO possibilities: (A) The planet is destroyed via advanced technology and most humans die, only to repeat the same mistakes again, OR (B) We reach a critical mass of enlightenment that consists of (1) a cautious approach to growth, (2) a moderation in the use of technology, and (3) a stable, healthy relationship with the biosphere. The eventuality (B) is certainly possible if one by one, we start to adopt a philosophy that economic and technological growth isn't the right path and we slowly give up all this advanced stuff for a slower-paced life centered on local communities, local economies, and less efficiency in return for a more peaceful life.

mikro2nd 3y ago
2 Points: 1. We do not have advanced AI. We have LLMs. They're not intelligent, not creative, and are never going to be. I'm with you on the other things, though. 2. The planet will not be destroyed by anything we do. H. sap. might go extinct along with many, many other species, but give the biospehere a couple of million years and it will all bounce back, sans humans. I've been living/trialing the path you suggest in your last paragraph for 30 years. Sadly it's not gone viral. AMA. ;)
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Well, by "advanced AI", I did not mean truly intelligent AI of course. I meant sufficiently advanced to disrupt society to an extent that will make it worse that it was without it. Advanced as in "advanced weapon", not "smart". Yes, it is true that the planet won't be destroyed, that is a good point. Only we might, like you said. Though, if many other species go extinct, it is sort of like destruction in a way, even though it isn't total. Feel free to reach out through the contact info in my profile if you want to collaborate.
- cduzz 3y ago
  The biosphere may well bounce back but it may take an absurdly long time to sequester carbon back into the ground. The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air, so things didn't burn and having megatons of carbon rich organic material lying around wasn't likely to catch fire and jump back into the air. Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air. I'm not sure how long that'll take to change, or what impact that has on future life here on earth, but we've got 2 examples of earthish planets that don't support life right next door.
  - fellowmartian 3y ago
    Why would Gaia try to sequester carbon back into the ground? It’s useful to her (but not to us).
  - edgyquant 3y ago

sampo 3y ago

On the opposite side, James Lovelock suggested that life controlling the planetary conditions, is a necessary property for long term survival of life. For example: Too little oxygen, too much CO2 in the atmosphere: CO2 feeds more plants, oxygen below 16% makes wildfires difficult. So plants grow more. Too much oxygen enhances wildfires, and huge wildfires would burn off parts of plant cover. Atmospheric oxygen concentration would go back down. [1,2] Lovelock's argument is, that on dead planets the environmental parameters vary in time, and in time they would randomly fluctuate outside of the zone where life is possible. But early life taking control of the planetary environment by establishing feedback mechanisms, is what the long term survival of life in that planed. Of course, Lovelock doesn't specify intelligent life. Even microbial life could establish feedback mechanisms and maintain planetary homeostasis. [1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-finds-its-place-earth-history https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Regulation_of_oxygen_in_the_atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Regulation_of_...

ben_w 3y ago

Evolution is a form of intelligence, and the oxygenation catastrophe was definitely a large-scale manipulation of the environment. Anthropogenic changes are faster than evolution, but is that an important difference, or is what matters the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition? And beyond us, the same question comes for any AI tasked with doing a thing whose side effects develop not necessarily to our advantage: which is faster, the harm or the improved ability to resolve problems?

nologic01 3y ago
> the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition? yes, I too think this ratio is of vital importance (pun). I would not even call it "damage" (rather change) as this is quite anthropocentric and teleological. But the acceleration induced when moving from cellular trial-and-error biological intelligence to human intelligence seems dramatic. Watching Oppenheimer reminded me of this "funny" moment when people calculated the odds of "igniting the atmosphere". While that is apparently not possible, igniting, e.g., the RNA is more plausible and I would not put it beyond what current societies are capable of.

jl6 3y ago

We could make something like the opposite argument too: without technology, biological life has no hope of surviving events like planetary collisions, gamma ray bursts, or home star fuel exhaustion, which are rare on human timescales but common (or even inevitable) in the long-run.

nologic01 3y ago
That is clearly true, but you would have to explain the absence of "technosignatures" - even more so if survival means interstellar spead of intelligent / technological life forms.

slashdev 3y ago

“ He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” - H.G. Wells, The Time Machine That’s one of my favorite literary quotes. From long before nuclear weapons, or climate change. I think it’s entirely possible that technological civilization is unstable and self destructs. Certainly, at this point of our history, we can see what a fine line we walk. Had the twentieth century been but a little different at key moments, we could have already destroyed our civilization. As we speak there’s a land war in Europe from one great nuclear power, on the borders of the other. A third great nuclear power rises in Asia, as China is ramping up incredibly quickly - no doubt with a eye to deterrent over meddling in their aims on Taiwan. Their long term historical rivals in India, a rising economic power, will likely not sit idly by. They could be the fourth great nuclear power. That of course would force Pakistans hand to try to compete. Next door Iran desperately seeks the bomb to ensure they don’t get the freedom treatment from the West. Across the gulf lies their bitter rival Saudi Arabia, who warn they will have to pursue the bomb if Iran gets it. Meanwhile nuclear armed Israel has promised they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. And that’s not even 100 years yet since we developed that particular technology. Nor is it the only technology we have that threatens to be more than we can handle.

nologic01 3y ago
Without being a biologist my gut feeling is that our biggest immediate self-destruct risk is biological weapons like engineered viruses and the like. Once you start tinkering with the stuff you are made off while you have not controlled primal behaviors that were conditioned during eras of near zero technological competence the writing is on the wall. In a sense the nuclear era episode was a benign rehearsal granted to us by the Universe: Here is a black box (nuclear phenomena) that you can discover, use and self-destruct if you want, but it is quite hard to play with. Not so with genetic engineering.
- slashdev 3y ago
  Indeed, as a programmer, I deeply understand the power of being able to modify the source code. Doing that with the code of life is a great responsibility we’re not ready for. What happens when it gets so easy and cheap that any malcontent group can engineer their own super virus? Will we have a defense for that?

dist-epoch 3y ago

From the point of view of physics, there is no fundamental difference between biological life (cell based) and digital life (computer based). You can easily imagine various scenarios in which computers wipe themselves out after taking over from us. Put another way, self-extinction is not something exclusive to biology. > would make the absence of technosignals self-evident The so called "grabby aliens" hypothesis suggests that after certain stages of advancement, live propagates at close to speed of light. So according to it we would see the technosignals just before contact/colonization/destruction.

akomtu 3y ago

The two futures of high tech civilizations are determined by who prevails: lifeforms may become "machinized" or machines may become enlighted with life. The first future is the doom of civilizations highly intelligent, but selfish and not gifted with intuition for this reason.

7thaccount 3y ago

A lot of modern conflict seems to arise from resource constraints. That doesn't mean removing those constraints wouldn't lead to peace (maybe just different constraints), but it seems possible. What if we somehow eventually figure out how to move our consciousness to computers? If possible, it would make our biological signals from earth of our current civilization only present for a blip on the radar and for all intents and purposes look like we were snuffed out. I'm assuming SETI already looks for Dyson Spheres/Swarms and civilizations around black holes though, so perhaps you're right and nobody ever quite makes it to that stage.

whoisthemachine 3y ago

This is one variant of "the great filter" theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

nologic01 3y ago
This is also related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_explanations_for_the_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp... and this seems like a good summary: > Some examples of possible resolutions [of the paradox] are that intelligent life is rarer than is thought, that assumptions about the general development or behavior of intelligent species are flawed, or, more radically, that current scientific understanding of the nature of the universe itself is quite incomplete.

m3kw9 3y ago

My theory is that once a species has tech to make itself immortal, the drive to reproduce will be over. Thus you don’t see life everywhere, primitive life gets stuck in their own system. If you you see the pace of acceleration of humans, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can get immortality type tech with in 500 years

purpleflame1257 3y ago

The anthropocene ain't got shit on the evolution of photosynthesis. The Earth's atmosphere went from near 0 to 20 percent O2. We're in the PPM region for carbon dioxide.