It’s fascinating to realize how we are evolved in a perfectly imperfect way that prevents us from turning into the super-conscious overlords we fear to create.

This is the story of a creator called Nature, a tool called Evolution and a creation called Life and how it would help us tackle the existential threat we pose from our AI creations.

From the dawn of the creation, we’ve pondered upon the reason behind our imperfections.

Why don’t snakes fly?

Why can’t trees talk?

No Unicorns, No Pokémons?

Vampires, Werewolves and Telepaths, our fiction is full of fantasies of transcending perfection. All of hippy culture is based around things, anything, one thing that’s believed to immediately transform you into something more, better.

We dream of a Super-Conscious AI and then we fear it. You see, Perfection is threatening.

What sort of creator would he be, if he doesn’t desire perfection in his creations?

Enter calculated imperfections, these cunningly designed imperfections of nature are the safety switches, the reason the life is still sustained on this planet and an insight to how we might keep it that way.

Observations below are referred to people, refer them as AI instead to get the idea.

# Bolted to physical bodies :

No intelligent architecture is ever a threat, it’s the consciousness that resides within. Our bodies are made imperfect in fascinating ways that no Hitler could reign over ever forever.

# Sorry Super-consciousness but we’ll bring a whole species! :

Instead of being a single life-form with all the brain on Earth, we are billions in number, each having their own little brains. This ensures that no Skynet ever goes nuke-mode on whims; instructions and controls are replaced by requests, which of course won’t be granted. It’s similar to Random forests over decision tree.

# Time degrading physical bodies :

To each his own, every consciousness is bolted to a specific physical body, you can not change or choose; you develop faults, you’re replaced and it degrades anyway so you don’t stay forever.

# No Telepathy :

There’s a reason why we never developed telepathy or don’t see ghosts around. It ensures that you use imperfect ways of communication,the bottlenecks, such as speaking and acting and since, not each and everything you think can be articulated into speech, you could never convey your exact line of thought, the exact experience, your drives, motivations that led you to the idea. This prevents any perfect transfer of consciousness into another bodies and setting free from it’s own degrading architecture. We can’t handle more Hitlers, could we?

# The idea of diversity :

There’s a reason why we don’t have a common thumb-drive lying around with all the school knowledge in it. Everyone has different experiences.

# Black-boxing :

Each body is a black-box, you can not see what exactly they are thinking, you can only get a general idea by the actions.Not so that you can hide your thoughts but to prevent cloning of consciousness.

# The Idea of Mortality :

That anybody can kill anybody else and the fear it elicits and the way it inhibits the socially unacceptable actions. The fear arises from the sense of individuality out of diversity.

# The Principle of least privilege :

Just like in our systems, each entity is only given access enough to carry out its supposed tasks, the nature has its own flavor of this principle. Everyone is given only that much of brain it needs to carry their supposed work and survival, butterfly for pollination, bees for collecting honey, trees for terraforming(No brain) etc.

It’s just fascinating how bees work mindlessly like drones, doing everything in their roles, collecting honey life-long, queen laying eggs forever, workers killing stranger queens, nursing larvae.

This principle is not explicit either, but hidden between the lines of evolution.

The whole evolution is not just based on “The survival of the fittest” and passing those traits, Of course there’s more to it, but another pillar I believe it stands on is the principle of least effort, that no trait is ever evolved unless needed, the body tries to survive with least possible effort and resources, the very reason you don’t see unnecessary Kryptonians flying around or Wolverine stealing your cows.

# The idea of Comfort zone :

Every living being is bolted to it’s environmental comforts, humans to relationships, even migratory birds to their suited seasons. Imagine the havoc if every snake, pest, parasite and vampire bat suddenly decides to go on a world tour and of course if there were women on Mars, There’d be a spaceship in every backyard.