36 ms·

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order inte

• haolez 3y ago
  In the context of the universe, I wouldn't call it "intelligence" versus "artificial intelligence". I would call it "organic intelligence" vs "inorganic intelligence".
  • neom 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism :)
    • junon 3y ago
      Not quite sure this is what GP meant.
  • irrational 3y ago
    http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...
  • Koshkin 3y ago
    That's reductionist. (Also, can't A.I. be "organic," say, like the OLED? :)
• Avicebron 3y ago
  I imagine anything backing that up lends some credibility to the true believers, likely why this poorly written paper has made it to hn. A rule of thumb around here is I often measure my salt grain size by how self-important the article makes hners feel.
  • ta8645 3y ago
    Well it's true, or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it. It's just fun to wonder.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      >Well it's true, or not, regardless of how any of us feel about it Yes, but not with the same probabilities of being true in both cases (the cases being whether we feel good or bad about it). Something makes it to HN because HNers like it. And not true things (feel good articles and popular sentiments) are more likely to be liked while not being true, compared to true but not likable stories.
  • brabel 3y ago
    Are you aware that this "poorly written paper" is the work of a leading researcher of the origins of life on Earth?
• Cacti 3y ago
  AI is not intelligent, even in the abstract sense
  • coldtea 3y ago
    And I say it is. What now? How can these two statements be reconciliated? (Pointing out that this is like, your opinion, man)
  • willy_k 3y ago
    Could you elaborate? Do you mean the current state of AI? I would argue that current models have some behaviors that one could liken to intelligence, even if it’s all just operations on 1s and 0s. Of course, this depends on your definition of intelligence. Mine is along the lines of “can develop a representation of a problem space and use that to predict optimal actions given current input”. Which current AI, most animals, fungi, and humans can do. Sentience is a different question, I’d argue that only humans and a few species of animal (Dolphins, Elephants, apes) are sentient as of now, though it seems highly possible that machines will join that group by the end of the century, if not sooner.
  • MetallicDragon 3y ago
    Using what definition of intelligence?
• paxys 3y ago
  No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people? What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think AI should be, but that AI itself is nowhere in sight.
  • basil-rash 3y ago
    What makes you confident our evolution didn’t occur the same way? The “fossil records” of the two are similar in many ways: lots of baby steps, giant leap with no known intermediary states, lots of baby steps, …
    • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      > giant leap with no known intermediary states That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.
      • basil-rash 3y ago
        Yes and?
        • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
          And if we're building off a bad initial premise it weakens the whole argument. "AI could be evolving just like us!" doesn't make sense when we don't know how we evolved.
          • basil-rash 3y ago
            The initial argument was just as bad: “AI can’t be evolving like us”, when we have no clue how we evolved. All I’m doing is calling out the intellectual dishonesty is making any claims about something we know nothing of.
• throwaway143829 3y ago
  Makes you wonder what comes after AI. What's the "higher order" after AI that exists today or that will exist in 10 years? I'd guess we will never understand that level of intelligence, unless AI augments our brains somehow.
  • eagerpace 3y ago
    Perhaps they’ll keep creating smaller transistors and more powerful processors eventually landing on a soft tissue-based version powered by glucose.
    • ben_w 3y ago
      Even back in 2017, transistors were already smaller[0] and faster[1] than biological synapses to the same ratio by which wolves are smaller and faster than the hills they roam around on. [0] Human synapse size / 2017-transistor size ≅ 1µm / 11nm ≅ wolf body length / a specific hill I was thinking of ≅ 1.6m / 145m [3] [1] synaptic pulse rate / transistor transition rate ≅ 200 Hz / 30 GHz [2] ≅ 2 cm/year / 25 km/day ≅ speed of continental drift / average daily range of a wolf as a speed [3] [2] transistors flip significantly faster than overall clock speed [3] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/you-wont-believe-how-fast-transistors-are/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/you-wont-be...
  • idiotsecant 3y ago
    You mean the second order toposophic level? https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d6fafbef2a https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d6fafbef2a Careful you might be going down a 14 hour rabbit hole.
  • digging 3y ago
    > unless AI augments our brains somehow Frankly, the more I think about AI, the less sense it makes to me that biological, single-body humans have any place in the future. As soon as we can digitize our minds, why wouldn't people begin to do so? Bodies could be inhabited at will, and death will be a thing of the past as we're able to store backups. I'm sure some will refuse and be left behind, just as we have Amish communities today, with a similar level of influence on civilization. And in the case of digital people, I think it's likely they'll share in the intellectual advancements of AI, if such a distinction even exists.
• darepublic 3y ago
  By AI I guess you mean complex self replicating machines that were originally created by other forms of life
• SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  "expected phase transition" seems a loaded phrasing, and implies a deterministic evolution, which I really don't think we should assume.
  • jyounker 3y ago
    An expected phase transition in this context is stochastic. The transition to order is expected, and there are bulk properties that are the same on each run, but the exact details differ each time.
• HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  I'd say so - it seems that life has to be created via evolution/competition, and left to run long enough evolution (survival/proliferation of the fittest) is likely produce organisms/entities that are not only better fit to the environment, but also better fit to the game. Evolution will tend to producing things that are better at evolving (faster to adapt). This includes things like multi-cellular life and sexual reproduction (creating variety via DNA mixing). One type of evolutionary niche that seems almost inevitable to arise in any complex environment is intelligence - the generalist able to survive and thrive in a variety of circumstances, and in the competitive game of evolution greater intelligence should outcompete lesser intelligence. Eventually you'll get critters sufficiently intelligent to build AI of their own level or higher, which may be regarded as another way to win the game of evolution - an intelligence that can evolve much faster than the type that bootstrapped it. It's interesting to consider does AI/AL (artificial life) really need to become autonomous and stand-alone, or can it be more like a virus that needs a host to survive. Stage one AI obviously needs a host, but maybe it never really needs to become stand-alone? It reminds me of (git author) Linus Torvalds' quote "real mean don't need backups" - you just release your software and have confidence it'll get replicated in git repositories worldwide. Maybe AI can be robust to extinction (not need a backup/body) just by becoming ubiquitous ?
  • creer 3y ago
    Right: hosts - or symbiotic life forms are a perfectly legit way to go. Plenty of them. And some form of "augmentation" might more socially / politically acceptable (ugh) than "AI on the loose".
• nonameiguess 3y ago
  I'd reframe this question. What constitutes a phase transition at all in the sense being talked about here isn't super clear. There's a clear definition in chemistry and it has analogies in cosmology as the entire universe overall went through some early phase transitions in the vacuum state when it was of much greater average density. These are all related to qualititative changes in the properties of matter as temperature and density change. I would grant that life is a qualitatively different state of matter but it isn't as obvious as the more familiar phase transitions. We don't have a clear demarcation for what is and isn't life. This paper attempts to give a definition, but the fact that that is being done at all shows there isn't one already that is universally agreed-upon, unlike the definition of what is solid versus what is liquid. I guess all life we're aware of consists minimally of a semi-permeable barrier, ingests and stores energy inside of this barrier, and locally reduces entropy inside the barrier while dissipating heat and/or other byproducts into its environment. Life is, of course, not the only thing that does this. My house fits the same description. The only real line in the sand we have between things we consider alive and things we consider tools is that things we consider alive are all born and descended from other living creatures, not assembled from found or fabricated parts. Ultimately, though, this is a difference in origin, not a difference in quality or capability. Any tool, including electronic computing devices, can potentially have all of the same qualities as life if we could figure out how to make them self-assembling, self-healing, and self-reproducing. I guess we can do this with software, but it isn't obvious to me how to even demarcate a unit of "software" as an individual entity. How to demarcate intelligent from unintelligent software is even less clear, but nothing about the underlying state of matter the computations run on is any different, so I don't see how it involves anything we can call a phase transition without severely straining the term.
• creer 3y ago
  That seems pretty likely - with some chance of hybrid still possible. That is, does AI take off and leave the goop in the dust. Or does AI become an augmentation of the current life forms - in an integrated form which perhaps can be admitted as continuation. The current AI products require quite a bit of compute power - but then augmentation doesn't need to be "on-board" the organic life form.
• creer 3y ago
  Except for AI not being life yet. I'll go with intelligence already, but not yet growing, reproducing, producing, interacting or much of anything you might choose for "life". Which is cool: a (to be) life form which starts with intelligence before life!
• educaysean 3y ago
  Imagine if this was indeed the case, what a time to be alive! We're witnessing the moment as the noise in the sonogram morphs into a recognizable shape of a baby. It's our heritage, our future generation, human 2.0, Machina Sapiens. Literally created after our own image too. I'm so proud I could cry.
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    I would be more enthralled if this didn't also mean literal extinction of us and everything that matters to us.
    • namrog84 3y ago
      Is it an extinction or just another type of evolution of humans? Evolution isn't the right word but AI will presumably be from us and carry some or the things that matter to us most likely. Sure you aren't passing on dna like to natural born children but not all children have same ideals or cares of same things.
      • HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
        Evolution usually doesn't mean watching I and everyone I know die (or worse) in real-time. Many people want children but few would be willing to die in childbirth to achieve it. There's absolutely no guarantee that we can construct superintelligence that will perpetuate our values long-term or even short-term.
• TriangleEdge 3y ago
  Could be that what we experience as the universe is only a minor fraction of what exists. I define life as "processing information", so AI by definition is a life form given this definition.
• svachalek 3y ago
  In the 1980s Gregory Benford explored this with his Galactic Center Saga books. I really enjoyed the series especially the middle one, Great Sky River.
• lkadjal 3y ago
  We are not anywhere close to creating a conscious AI. An AI without humanity is completely pointless unless it is capable of building a conscious AI which I doubt it is.