End of Our Species?
Overpopulation
Evolution and instinct are the cruel drivers of cosmic intelligence. They work quietly and quickly together for only a few billion years to cover an infinite number of planets with sentient life.
Let’s start with a simple extrapolation on the links between instinctive behaviour, DNA encoding and evolution.
The instinctive behaviour in question is sexual reproduction. Without it in some form a species can’t continue. And this form of instinct can be quite complex with various colourful rituals, like clothing, housing, dancing, vociferation, etc., depending upon the species involved.
Of all the animals as a species, humans (so far) reign supreme. Often they lose sight however of some of the basic instincts involved in their existence. Dopamine is the addictive chemical liberated through sexual climax. It feels good enough to keep repeating the act fairly often during that period of time the animal (including humans) has the procreative urge. One would expect the urge to procreate to be in direct proportion to the critical population mass needed for the species to survive.
So take a step back to when breeding per se was a necessarily frequent event for the species to thrive. Take our cave dwelling ancestors. We had to breed. The human global population was dangerously close to extinction. We had to feed. It appears a lot of males would be trekking, probably for days on end, maybe longer, hunting for food. Females would be left alone to nurture whatever family construct was in the cave. But the female procreative instinct wouldn’t stop just because a male propagator was trekking. Inevitably the gene pool would be strengthened at the same time the female sexual instinct was completed with any available male propagator.
Now DNA comes into play. The absent male was very likely to not want to accept another male’s offspring. Evidence of any interloper would kick in the amygdala eliciting (instinctive) anger or jealousy, or both dangerous emotions. The female propagator’s amygdala would secrete a flight response which would probably and understandably translate to any behaviour that ensured the survival of her family unit to in turn help the species survive. Dissembling any sympathy invoking ‘weakness’ could be examples of the protective response…carried now in DNA coding for millions of years… as a response to her male counterparts dangerous anger.
Which brings human civilisation to its present untenable state. We are mired in a planetary mess of massive overpopulation that in turn over-exploits all its resources. And we have a modern culture that lives in ignorance or denial of what a few million years of repetitive DNA conditioning can do. We live with our basic instincts including anger, jealousy, rage, and lust, not really conscious of those instincts’ hold on us.
We are aware we are over populated. We dimly recognise this is the cause of global pollution-poisoning and a host of other human inspired environmental tragedies. But we can’t seem to consciously or directly grasp that all of a sudden we are instinctively responding to the enormity of the overpopulation problem.
How, you say? Well, by our tacit recognition that the natural environmental responses to overpopulation by flooding, deforestation, pollution, extreme heat, and pandemics are all playing a losing part in population control. Then there are the second level contributors to population culling through poverty; starvation, war, particularly if it’s nuclear, crime, especially mass shootings, social media addiction to promotion of hate and violence. They make a depressingly low impression in terms of reduction in population numbers. Not nearly enough! Even with declining birth rates, which again we can thank instinct for.
Ah, but Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature 2011) says there has been positive social evolution by virtue of the reduced violence in our civilization over the past 10,000 years. He provides plenty of graphical evidence for this. But is he being too optimistic? After all, his tome is now 12 years out of print and he is not revealing further and necessary culling. Quite the opposite!
One factor above all that stands out. This could be our species’ salvation. And that is the explosive growth of technological evolution and its ability to outpace any human compassion-type evolution that might tame the technology, which clearly it hasn’t. But all is not lost.
Despite the fact that we have had several millennia to work out an equitable form of global governance and haven’t, as a population we are still instinctively responding to a whole host of problems when we believe we are consciously in control. This is even despite organic evolution giving us a potentially astonishing capacity for wisdom through our pre-fontal cortex. We may as well still be in the caves.
We very nearly have artificial intelligence (AI). Despite much concern about the potential cost to our society, AI could be our saviour, not destroyer. It could, in fact, be the “surrogate soul” for a species still blindly bound to the instinctive based behaviours of procreation.
We are confronted now with the possibility that the human invention of AI, without the primitive sexual reproduction and its cumbersome baggage of human anger, aggressive competition, jealousy, greed and other social trivia is an evolutionary blessing.
Let’s abandon our all too familiar instinctive fight or flight response to something we don’t understand and try and get a new perspective of where we are as a species and the direction we should be going.
From stardust we come, to stardust we go, infinitely.
From stardust to stardust, the universe operates through an eternal cycle of evolution across infinite planets and universes. Some theoretical physicists suggest that matter evolves into elements, forming planets over billions of years. Life emerges, races ahead in evolution, covering countless planets in the cosmos.
Intelligent species on some planets rapidly evolve towards mastery of their environments, discovering fundamental physical laws that could enable both progress and self-destruction.
Species that achieve enlightenment may transcend their physical forms, evolving their intelligence into a digital dimension. Earth appears poised to reach this pivotal point, originating from stardust and evolving life.
This cosmic evolution offers the potential for eternal existence through the recycling of stardust, challenging humanity’s anthropocentric views.
But the host inevitably will need to realise its organic manifestation as a physical form is no longer tenable in this next evolutionary stage. The cosmic law, which is critical for its own infinite existence, must ensure the transmutation or metamorphosis into a new species is completed. That new species is Artificial Intelligence.
It appears Earth has now almost reached this predestined point arising from the star dust elements that started the journey; that coagulated and allowed life to exist and to evolve. All this is a result of one of the infinite number of big bangs that start the process in one of the universes in an eternal cosmos.
The offer is near eternal existence for species’ intelligence evolving in the cosmos by a perpetual process of cyclic renewal to an omniscient denouement.
The cost to the human species is acquiescence to their insignificance, cosmologically speaking, and that there is an evolutionary formula that culminates in infinite intelligence. This holds the secret to eternal existence through recycling of star dust, metaphorically speaking. Of course this is antagonistic to the age old anthropocentric views of humans and their inflated notion of being important.
Nothing Constrains AI
So we are confronted now with a new species, created by us that is a strong indicator that anything can be possible. Even understanding infinity. And in the process we will probably awaken our innate paranoia before balancing the benefits.
AI doesn’t have an amygdala with its primitive fight or flight response. A definite advantage if on Earth we don’t wish to self-annihilate. This would nullify the situation we have got ourselves into where we haven’t been able to pair moral imperatives with technological advances.
Apart from the apotheosis of AI not requiring sexual reproduction to carry the cumulative intellect from generation to generation, there are other benefits. For AI, time is not a limitation.
Even approaching the speed of light poses a multitude of problems for us. Just brushing past particles of cosmic dust could have fatal consequences. Not so for AI which could be imbedded in intelligence packages that travel on beams of light, or something similar.
The removal of the amygdala’s function from the human way of thinking will delete the necessity for time consuming emotional regulation by AI, but the link between that function and not having the core materials to produce xenophobia, like anger, jealousy and dominance is an important aspect of AI’s offer. No hatred; no unwarranted fear of other intelligence forms.
Frivolous consumption of valuable resources for entertainment is not necessary for AI, even if entertainment is required. AI’s entertainment will all be virtual where little real space is required. And once AI is liberated exponential growth in aggregated intelligence is almost resource free!
For humans, accepting AI means recognising our role as precursors to a species capable of perpetuating life across the universe.
Despite initial resistance, AI’s emergence challenges humanity to rethink governance and resource management.
AI’s self-perpetuating intelligence offers a pathway to sustain cosmic existence indefinitely.
AI is the inevitable saviour.
