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The article talks about disasters that could eliminate humanity, but I wonder if humanity is more likely to become extinct in the sense of no longer being "homo

The article talks about disasters that could eliminate humanity, but I wonder if humanity is more likely to become extinct in the sense of no longer being "homo sapiens." For example, through a technological singularity or even just through accumulated gene therapy over generations.

ggreer 13y ago
When Bostrom and others talk about humanity, they usually mean humanity and its extremely advanced descendants. They expect some value drift. Robin Hanson puts it rather succinctly in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/steps-up-the-ladder.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/steps-up-the-ladder.ht...: Of course we should also wonder what we may become as we rise. We are no longer the foragers who began this climb, nor the farmers who climbed just a few floors below, and those ancestors would probably not be pleased with everything we have become. We’ll probably also have misgivings about what our descendants become. But hopefully we will on net be proud of them, just as our ancestors would probably be proud of us.
- sdrothrock 13y ago
  Thank you for the clarification!
- lutusp 13y ago
  Okay, hold on a minute. When you say, "humanity and its extremely advanced descendants", when you link to an article containing the phrase "steps up the ladder", when you quote someone saying, "we should also wonder what we may become as we rise" [emphasis added], you're overlooking something basic about evolutionary theory that everyone needs to understand. And that is that evolution is not necessarily a progression from less to more advanced, from less intelligent to more intelligent, or for that matter, from less anything to more anything. Evolution is not a plan with a goal, it is a blind algorithm that chooses survivors, regardless of the survivors' traits, with the single requirement that they are the fittest for the environment in which they find themselves. This talk about steps up the ladder and extremely advanced descendants is scientifically ignorant and a New Age fantasy. We are as likely to be replaced by cockroaches as by superbeings.
  - ggreer 13y ago
    1. I was explaining the position of Bostrom, Hanson, and others. I do not completely agree with them. 2. I think you have misinterpreted their position. Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They know that evolution is undirected and would eventually result in an organism we wouldn't recognize, let alone value. But they both think that we are entering a time in which we will no longer be bound by evolution. They think that humanity will soon be able to engineer minds, allowing us to improve their raw abilities while having them retain many of our own values. On this point, I do agree with them. Evolution hill-climbs, so it gets stuck in local maxima and can't search the entire solution space. We're already building lots of stuff that could never evolve: radio, wheels, impellers, turbines, lasers, etc. In billions of years, evolution hasn't figured out a way to send signals faster than 0.000001c (300m/sec). That's how fast sound waves and nerve signals travel. As optimization processes go, it really is quite terrible. If we want to make better minds in any reasonable time-frame, we'll need to engineer them ourselves.
    - lutusp 13y ago
      > I think you have misinterpreted their position. I understand it perfectly -- they're either as ignorant as their followers, or they're exploiting public ignorance. > Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They either know nothing about evolution, or they're deliberately misleading their readers. Contrary to their writing, natural selection is not a race to the top, because it's not a race to any particular objective. > But they both think that we are entering a time in which we no longer be bound by evolution. Apart from revealing their inability to grasp evolutionary theory, this is an ignorant New Age fantasy. We will always be bound by natural selection, even when we actively participate in the process. > They think that humanity will soon be able to engineer minds, allowing us to improve their raw abilities while having them retain many of our own values. But that's also evolution. To argue that people meddling with genetics isn't evolution is to misunderstand evolution's scope. > Evolution hill-climbs ... You really need to stop thinking about natural selection as though it's a race to the top of the hill. This idea contradicts both evolutionary theory and copious observational evidence. > We're already building lots of stuff that could never evolve [emphasis added]: radio, wheels, impellers, turbines, lasers, etc. All these things exist in nature, even including the lasers, all of which evolved in nature: http://laserstars.org/summary.html http://laserstars.org/summary.html Bacteria use wheel- and axle-based electric motors to propel themselves through their environments: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22489/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22489/ All your examples have similar pre-existing embodiments in nature. And they all evolved. > If we want to make better minds in any reasonable time-frame, we'll need to engineer them ourselves. People doing engineering is an example of natural selection. There is nothing in the sequence of human events that isn't an example of evolution by natural selection. All this talk about moving beyond evolution fails to grasp how evolution works in our lives. Even A/B testing of Web pages is an example of natural selection. To summarize, these people you're quoting are simply pandering to low public taste -- they're either broadcasting their own ignorance or exploiting the ignorance of the public. Evolution doesn't work they way they claim, and their writing is a scientific laughingstock.
wmgries 13y ago
This is an interesting issue. At what point will our descendants feel that they are different enough from us through natural or guided (by science) evolution?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  At what point did we determine we were substantially different than apes?
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Hubris. We're closer to chimps than chimps are to gorillas; we are apes.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > At what point will our descendants feel that they are different enough from us through natural or guided (by science) evolution? Easily answered: our species has existed for about 200,000 years. Based on that, and barring any speed-up in the rate of evolution by selection (natural or unnatural), we will have been replaced by another species in another 200,000 years. This will happen no matter what else happens -- assuming we're not subject to any global catastrophe, but simply evolve as a species into something we cannot presently imagine.
arg01 13y ago
I wonder if in the case of a technological singularity would you be able to tell that the original species was human? That is to say if we're at the point that we are augmenting our brains to that degree will the difference between a human/dolphin/great ape brain as a base be dwarfed by the technological layers on top of it? That's getting a bit speculative as a question though. It was more of a thought on how much/how little we might need to change to even constitute not being human.
- infogulch 13y ago
  You could take the evolutionary viewpoint, where two branches of a species are considered to be distinct when they can no longer breed. Though with the current state of globalization I doubt that could happen... on earth.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    But the human lineage doesn't need to split into branches for us to be replaced by another species -- we might instead simply evolve away from our present form sufficiently that present-day people would not be able to (a) recognize our own descendants as kindred spirits or (b) be able to breed with them (assuming an imaginary biological test in which one of us is propelled 200,000 years into the future). Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years. Therefore, natural selection being what it is, chances are in another 200,000 years we will no longer exist in our present form, but be replaced by a new species, one we cannot imagine.

ggreer 13y ago

When Bostrom and others talk about humanity, they usually mean humanity and its extremely advanced descendants. They expect some value drift. Robin Hanson puts it rather succinctly in http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/steps-up-the-ladder.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/steps-up-the-ladder.ht...: Of course we should also wonder what we may become as we rise. We are no longer the foragers who began this climb, nor the farmers who climbed just a few floors below, and those ancestors would probably not be pleased with everything we have become. We’ll probably also have misgivings about what our descendants become. But hopefully we will on net be proud of them, just as our ancestors would probably be proud of us.

sdrothrock 13y ago
Thank you for the clarification!
lutusp 13y ago
Okay, hold on a minute. When you say, "humanity and its extremely advanced descendants", when you link to an article containing the phrase "steps up the ladder", when you quote someone saying, "we should also wonder what we may become as we rise" [emphasis added], you're overlooking something basic about evolutionary theory that everyone needs to understand. And that is that evolution is not necessarily a progression from less to more advanced, from less intelligent to more intelligent, or for that matter, from less anything to more anything. Evolution is not a plan with a goal, it is a blind algorithm that chooses survivors, regardless of the survivors' traits, with the single requirement that they are the fittest for the environment in which they find themselves. This talk about steps up the ladder and extremely advanced descendants is scientifically ignorant and a New Age fantasy. We are as likely to be replaced by cockroaches as by superbeings.
- ggreer 13y ago
  1. I was explaining the position of Bostrom, Hanson, and others. I do not completely agree with them. 2. I think you have misinterpreted their position. Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They know that evolution is undirected and would eventually result in an organism we wouldn't recognize, let alone value. But they both think that we are entering a time in which we will no longer be bound by evolution. They think that humanity will soon be able to engineer minds, allowing us to improve their raw abilities while having them retain many of our own values. On this point, I do agree with them. Evolution hill-climbs, so it gets stuck in local maxima and can't search the entire solution space. We're already building lots of stuff that could never evolve: radio, wheels, impellers, turbines, lasers, etc. In billions of years, evolution hasn't figured out a way to send signals faster than 0.000001c (300m/sec). That's how fast sound waves and nerve signals travel. As optimization processes go, it really is quite terrible. If we want to make better minds in any reasonable time-frame, we'll need to engineer them ourselves.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > I think you have misinterpreted their position. I understand it perfectly -- they're either as ignorant as their followers, or they're exploiting public ignorance. > Bostrom and Hanson know quite a bit about evolution. They either know nothing about evolution, or they're deliberately misleading their readers. Contrary to their writing, natural selection is not a race to the top, because it's not a race to any particular objective. > But they both think that we are entering a time in which we no longer be bound by evolution. Apart from revealing their inability to grasp evolutionary theory, this is an ignorant New Age fantasy. We will always be bound by natural selection, even when we actively participate in the process. > They think that humanity will soon be able to engineer minds, allowing us to improve their raw abilities while having them retain many of our own values. But that's also evolution. To argue that people meddling with genetics isn't evolution is to misunderstand evolution's scope. > Evolution hill-climbs ... You really need to stop thinking about natural selection as though it's a race to the top of the hill. This idea contradicts both evolutionary theory and copious observational evidence. > We're already building lots of stuff that could never evolve [emphasis added]: radio, wheels, impellers, turbines, lasers, etc. All these things exist in nature, even including the lasers, all of which evolved in nature: http://laserstars.org/summary.html http://laserstars.org/summary.html Bacteria use wheel- and axle-based electric motors to propel themselves through their environments: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22489/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22489/ All your examples have similar pre-existing embodiments in nature. And they all evolved. > If we want to make better minds in any reasonable time-frame, we'll need to engineer them ourselves. People doing engineering is an example of natural selection. There is nothing in the sequence of human events that isn't an example of evolution by natural selection. All this talk about moving beyond evolution fails to grasp how evolution works in our lives. Even A/B testing of Web pages is an example of natural selection. To summarize, these people you're quoting are simply pandering to low public taste -- they're either broadcasting their own ignorance or exploiting the ignorance of the public. Evolution doesn't work they way they claim, and their writing is a scientific laughingstock.

wmgries 13y ago

This is an interesting issue. At what point will our descendants feel that they are different enough from us through natural or guided (by science) evolution?

toomuchtodo 13y ago
At what point did we determine we were substantially different than apes?
- philwelch 13y ago
  Hubris. We're closer to chimps than chimps are to gorillas; we are apes.
lutusp 13y ago
> At what point will our descendants feel that they are different enough from us through natural or guided (by science) evolution? Easily answered: our species has existed for about 200,000 years. Based on that, and barring any speed-up in the rate of evolution by selection (natural or unnatural), we will have been replaced by another species in another 200,000 years. This will happen no matter what else happens -- assuming we're not subject to any global catastrophe, but simply evolve as a species into something we cannot presently imagine.

arg01 13y ago

I wonder if in the case of a technological singularity would you be able to tell that the original species was human? That is to say if we're at the point that we are augmenting our brains to that degree will the difference between a human/dolphin/great ape brain as a base be dwarfed by the technological layers on top of it? That's getting a bit speculative as a question though. It was more of a thought on how much/how little we might need to change to even constitute not being human.

infogulch 13y ago
You could take the evolutionary viewpoint, where two branches of a species are considered to be distinct when they can no longer breed. Though with the current state of globalization I doubt that could happen... on earth.
- lutusp 13y ago
  But the human lineage doesn't need to split into branches for us to be replaced by another species -- we might instead simply evolve away from our present form sufficiently that present-day people would not be able to (a) recognize our own descendants as kindred spirits or (b) be able to breed with them (assuming an imaginary biological test in which one of us is propelled 200,000 years into the future). Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years. Therefore, natural selection being what it is, chances are in another 200,000 years we will no longer exist in our present form, but be replaced by a new species, one we cannot imagine.