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Tim Berners-Lee’s corporations not the first forms of superintelligence?

A topic that’s been retweeted by celebrity business leaders involves the prospect of a so-called artificial superintelligence on the horizon. This might be a boon to humanity or a terror, depending on who you read. Superintelligent artificial intelligence is related to the futurist and transhumanist concept of singularity. (So called because, as each generation of computers designs the next faster generation, technology and civilization shrinks under Moore’s law until vanishes into something like a black hole. Advancing towards the technological singularity is something of a Malthusian trap; fail and your civilization collapses violently (as we previously explored). It has been suggested that the technological singularity (together with convergent evolution) is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Superintelligence has been controversial of late as the topic of a bestselling book and rebuttals to it.

The blog Wait-But-Why did a widely shared two-part article on this. It’s a good article, but we have some quibbles. For starters, they allege that the superintelligence is in the future. We’re going to agree with web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s recent comments that the superintelligence is already here. (Except we’re going to argue that, not only is already here, it may have already existed for 40,000 years in some form. Hang on, this will be an interesting & entertaining article — we’re going to talk human evolution, dinosaurs, volcanoes, and even Dracula and feminist writers in this article. And how all of these relate to the superintelligence.)

In the Wait-But-Why (WBW) article’s part 2, they have an “intelligence staircase” where they show a chicken, a chimp, and a human. This is unfortunate, because it implies that chimps are the 2nd smartest animal on the planet. Chimps are indeed very closely related genetically to us. There’s only a 1-2% difference in DNA. This is much closer to us than the DNA variation in many species, apparently due to our shared traumatic past, which we’ll get into in a bit. But they are not the second smartest animal on the planet. That honor would belong to the dolphins, as we previously pointed out. (Our feature photo glitch is of a dolphin using something like a wearable device.) And the fact that humans leapfrogged dolphins in evolving from a chimp-like ancestor 7 million years ago is strong evidence for convergent evolution in intelligence. (We’ll explain why that’s important in thinking about superintelligences, artificial or otherwise.)

Strong evidence for convergent evolution in intelligent systems

The chicken is also not the best choice. The smartest bird is the magpie. (Our — and the gorilla’s — closest shared relative with the magpie existed over 300 million years when reptiles diverged from what would become mammals. Magpie’s have a completely different brain structure as previously discussed. That’s why it’s so surprising they were able to pass the mirror test, as they lack parts of the mammalian brain thought to be required for it. Again, strong evidence for convergent evolution in intelligence. That is, common engineering requirements drive the design of intelligent systems, so their evolution tends to converge to similar capabilities.) It’s thought to be almost as smart in some ways as a gorilla. (Gorilla also shares almost as much DNA with us as a chimp. But a gorilla (or a magpie, for that matter), isn’t anywhere nearly as smart as a human. Again, our shared traumatic past, relevant for the evolution of the superintelligence.)

In WBW’s article, readers are (intentionally?) made uncomfortable by the thought that a superintelligence system might be victim of a bug in programming. The goal, it is argued, might not make sense (or even be very intelligent.) So you could end up a superintelligence wiping out all life on Earth in order to complete a silly marketing exercise evolution aimed at writing lots of silly letters to the humans it just wiped out. It wiped out the humans in order to write more silly letters. It wasn’t able to overcome the buggy programming of its goal, but the superintelligence didn’t care. It optimized it goal — write lots of silly letters — by killing off the intended recipients. The goal handling was separate from the rest of the superintelligent system, so it didn’t realize the carrying it out made no sense.

That article appeared to intentionally make readers uncomfortable. Here’s why readers were right to become uncomfortable. If evolution (and physics) forces intelligent systems towards convergent evolution (as we’ve now seen in both magpies and dolphins), the working superintelligences will all operate similarly if they are to be functional in the real world. The superintelligence had to be pretty sophisticated to figure out how to come up with new technologies to wipe out all humans from just a little time on the Internet. But the system that evaluated its goals was stupid, and didn’t realize it was pursuing a stupid goal. In any working superintelligence, the system that implements goal-seeking behavior will need to be just as sophisticated as the rest of the superintelligence, or it won’t work. In other words, we are right to assume that any working superintelligence would transcend a stupid goal and not carry it out.

That doesn’t mean a superintelligence would be ethical. In fact, we’re going to argue that they’ve probably already existed for quite some time. Tim Berners-Lee’s said that superintelligences already existed in the form of corporations. Corporations, after all, already use robots. (And, we might add, they sometimes behave very robotically even when use humans. It sounded like he mainly intended to make a political point about Citizens United and corporate money in America. But his argument was valid: many corporations already use artificial intelligence.)

We’ve been thinking about this even before Berners-Lee made his comments. We think the superintelligence has been around for much longer than even he suggested. (Although corporations have existed for several hundred years, since at least the 17th century. And they’ve had sophisticated information systems. The British East India company, for example, had a sort of pre-internet mailing-list capability, where letters would be copied many times by clerks and sent to recipients all around the world. Not all the letters sent to the various Victorian “lists” were all that important — there was some 17th century spam, apparently. It different from the modern age only in speed. Eventually, the telegram would come along, and even the speed of these communications rivals modern technology to some extent, taking only hours in some cases. Mainly, the cost was much higher. And the analogies don’t stop there. We’ve talked 19th century steam-powered computers before. Complex mechanical and later mechanical-electric machines were quickly invented beginning in the late 19th century to efficiently route telegrams for companies like Western Union. These systems were eventually replaced by electronic systems that eventually doubled as the first computer networks. The early Internet was a next-generation electronic packet switching system — a next-generation telegraph. And something more to think about: the telephone initially displaced the telegraph because telephone communications were even faster. In the early days, engineers found they route a decent-quality early telephone call over four low-quality telegraph wires. Telegraph wires were quickly reassigned for phone use. The need to switch large number of telephone circuits led to the invention of the transistor, which started the modern computer era. Today, we have VOIP, which is essentially again routing phone calls over a super-fast version of telegraph messages. VOIP is, in some ways, the revenge of the telegraphs’ defendants on the telephone. Our point is, none of these information processing technologies — computers or mailing list communications — are really that new. All had their roots in 17th-19th century corporate needs. They have been steadily improved and miniaturized from their invention. Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee is right to equate corporations with superintelligence.)

Humanity shaped by our planet’s violent and traumatic past … and future?

OK, we promised volcanoes, vampires, and dinosaurs. (We already touched on aliens in introduction with the Fermi Paradox and convergent evolution of intelligence.) This sounds like a really bad B-movie invoking the forbidden movie genre of double-voodoo, but it’s not. First, let’s talk human evolution.

The story goes something like this. We earlier linked to a great Ted Talk on both the singularity, human evolution, and the dinosaur extinction. In that somewhat romantic view, the meteor the wiped out the dinosaurs cleared out the large animals. From now on, evolution would favor the newly evolved neocortex. Finesse would be favored over brawn and body size, thus leading to the evolution of humans. As we discussed in that article, the existence of the magpie, which is highly intelligent yet lacks a neocortex, throws some doubt over that concept. (Dinosaurs, check.)

A lot of scientific progress has been made in recent years to understand the Cretaceous (dinosaur) extinctions, and how our mammalian ancestors survived that event. Although several lines of mammals survived, genetic evidence suggests our ancestors were mostly likely a partial line of shrew-like animals called tenrecs. These still exist as so-called “living fossils.” Science recently learned tenrecs can hibernate for up to one year underground without food. What’s more, they’re omnivores that prefer living in Deciduous forests. That’s important because insects tend to be the first animals to recover after a mass extinction. Tenrecs, of course, will eat anything, so insects would be on the menu. Deciduous forests, as it turns out, can also hibernate. They’re prevalent today, but we’re that prevalent in the time of the dinosaurs. That meteor may have had something to do with making them much more prevalent, since they’re the forests that survived in greater numbers. With the tenrecs awoke after their endless hibernation, they would have found at least some food in the form of insects and awakening forest plants, both of which they could eat. Oh, and they had that neocortex from the Ted video. As mammals they probably were the smartest things they’re size at the time. And they had very keen senses, including hearing and smell, which had been heightened by all those years of predation by dinosaurs.

Evolution, as it turns out, tends to favor increasingly larger animals. That is, until a mass extinction event occurs. (Which aren’t all that uncommon, it turns out.) With pretty much nearly all the other animals dead, our tenrec ancestors had a lot of new territory to conquer.

Fast forward a few million years. You have the evolution of monkeys and, within monkeys, primates. (The word “primate” comes from Ancient Greek, and means something like ‘foremost animals.’ They recognized the resemblance. No dummies, those ancient Greeks.)

Primates lived in a very challenging three-dimensional environment with a complex social structure. These kinds of environments seem to require a lot of intelligence. (The ocean, like the treetops, also has an “up and down.” Cetaceans, including dolphins, also move need to navigate in three dimensions. And, of course, magpies fly in a 3D environment as well.)

The evolutionary challenges left a lot of genetic evidence. For starters, primates re-evolved a new green color receptor that had been lost in other mammals. (Most mammals only have two color receptors. Fish have four color receptors, two of which were eventually lost when fish moved onto land. Reptiles, ironically, lost a different set of color receptors, so their color vision is different from mammals. The green receptor used by mammals is slightly different from what fish have. Fish have two blue receptors, which makes sense given that they live in a very blue environment.) For a monkey, being able to see green is incredibly useful. A monkey’s survival hinges on successfully swinging from one green tree to the next.

The heavier primates also appear to have evolved consciousness. (It is not clear if the lighter primates are conscious, at least in the sense we humans understand.) Consciousness is essentially a sense of self. Amongst other things, it is a sense of one’s own weight. That’s very important when judging which branch to swing to. Picking the wrong branch that cannot sustain one’s own weight leads to immediate death in the primate world. The heavier primates needed to be both pretty smart and conscious.

Chimps evolve consciousness and tool usage

Interesting, although chimps are very much aware of their own weight, it appears they did not evolve the mental machinery to judge the weights of objects. Chimps have a very hard time keeping track of object weight, or even the concept that objects have different weight. After millions of years of throwing spears, humans have a very keen innate sense of object weight that our very close relatives the chimps appear to completely lack.

Recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries have radically altered some of our ideas on early human evolution. What you’re about to read is so new much of it hasn’t quite made it into the textbooks yet.

Our technology has altered our genes. The classic example is cooking, which resulting in the shrinking of our jawbone. (It causes problems for our wisdom teeth.)

But the much more obvious example — to this author — is clothing. Obviously, we lost much of our hair due to our use of clothing. Just a decade or two ago, however, this was not the established academic viewpoint. The established view was that “it was just too hot” to have much body hair in the regions were our ancestors lived. Of course it wasn’t that hot at night. Our ancestors actually lived in a vary harsh environment. (You’d expect high intelligence to require a very harsh environment to evolve.) The deserts had chilly, even cold nights coupled with very hot days. Clothing, together with a loss of body hair, provided a tremendous evolutionary benefit in that kind of extreme environment. But although not the prevailing view one or two decades ago, this is now becoming the established view.

1970s Pioneer Plaque got clothing wrong

Some of that older established view may have been influenced by observations of those rare stone age tribes that have survived into the modern age. Many of them escaped contact with the modern world by living in isolated places like rainforests. The climate was sort of ideal (sort of what you’d expect a completely independent tribe to survive and hide). They didn’t need much clothing. This created the impression that clothing wasn’t that much of an essential technology for humans. We see that reflected in things like the famous Pioneer Plaque which, very controversially, suggested to aliens that we weren’t that fond of clothing. Although the resulting controversy generated great PR in the 1970s for the Plaque’s authors, it was fundamentally mistake on that point. Humans have become dependent on clothing, and it has altered our genes in more ways than simply the loss of body hair.

But clothing comes somewhat later in the story. The initial innovation was made by chimps, or rather our chimp-like ancestors, perhaps 7 million or so years ago. It turns out that chimps, when starved of food, will start hunting using sharpened sticks.

This was only discovered very recently. It was traditionally believed that only humans use tools. That’s wrong of course. Even some birds will drop objects from a height to break them open. (The thieving magpie is good at manipulating objects.) Chimps will occasionally use tools. There are some squid that will cover themselves with shells.

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