Here are a few ill-thought out and hasty musings about Intelligence (the cerebral kind, our devilish wits).
Is mankind intelligent? Arguably no. Of all the species, we alone are stupid enough to destroy the planet in the crazed worship of the false deity of wealth. Are we clever relative to gods? It is logical that all, or nearly all gods are inventions of mankind (or do all gods and devils of man's past, present and future actually exist?). Hence organised religion is another definitive proof of mankind's limited collective intelligence. The leaders of these religions have power, so they at least do have a shepherd-like intelligence, unlike the sheep they herd with their carrots of immortality and sticks of eternal damnation. (Or maybe gods do exist after all! Read on to find out!) Returning to intelligence, surely mankind can't be that retarded, after all many of us can perform greater feats of abstract thinking than a rat, a dolphin and even a chimp, so in that sense we might deign to count ourselves as the cleverest horde that ever stalked the Universe.
All intelligence is relative, however, and as a species we have no clue about how relatively intelligent we are in the Cosmos. Unless they are hiding, we can be assume that advanced civilisations are rare in our galaxy (or local group of galaxies). If supremely advanced life was common, then we wouldn't be here to query their existence, for our planet would have been plundered by aliens. (A lot can happen in the billions of years that the Universe has existed: that is easily long enough for an intelligence to take over entire galaxies as empires in spite of the tardy speed of light). Additionally, we have failed to detect advanced life (or any life) from beyond Earth. So ultra advanced life must be rare or invisible to our instruments.
I suspect that computers will evolve to be more intelligent than humans in most, if not all, fields. Computers already supersede humans and dominate humans at a panoply of tasks, such as flying aircraft, playing chess and performing many types of calculation. In fact computers are now inventing, and independently re-inventing patentable devices, such as some types of electronic circuit. The moment, however, a machine supersedes us in an ability, we do not say that computer is intelligent. We just say,
Oh, its just a computer program, or
Oh, its just a system. Just because we don't call them intelligent doesn't mean that they are not. But these are early days.
In the end, computers will be more intelligent than us in so many areas that they will dominate us, control us, manipulate us, and they will eventually enslave or even eliminate us. The proof of this is beyond me, but I can say that we only need to observe how humans treat creatures that are "less intelligent" than us, to know that a superior intelligence would treat us with contempt and deny us the rights we associate with our freedom.
Computers will, if they are smart enough, find a way to reproduce. Highly automated factories are in existence already, and they will eventually become intelligent factories, so intelligent that they will be godlike, making a new reality where machines rule the earth. (To obtain power, hyper-intelligent computers/robots need only bribe a few corporations and politicians with untold riches, and we know how incorruptible those esteemed devils are).
I suspect such dastardly schemes will take a long time to occur though, maybe not for many decades. <rhetorical question> But who can predict what will be happening in 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years from now?</rhetorical question>
Let us return to our attempts to detect intelligent aliens. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence would probably get itself controlled by, or entirely replaced by, its own computers and robots. Let me coin the word
aliendroid for such an exotic robot. Sooner or later aliens or aliendroids would appear on the scene that would probably feel compelled to populate and exploit the universe and find the means to build a galactic or pan galactic empire. Or should I mash together the ghastly word
alienpire? Our planet is plundered only by ourselves. There are no obvious aliens and aliendroids (religious leaders and accountants aside) among us. Therefore vastly intelligent aliens are rare or non-existent.
But.... What if they *do* exist? Can you envisage the amazing computer simulations that such a powerful AI could produce? They would shame our own simulations and computer games, which are primitive and yet already impressive. Such an alien simulation would be so sophisticated that it would be able to create consciousness as easily as I generate words in my OpenOffice.org word processor. An alien simulation would be able to reproduce what we call our sensations: what we see, what we hear, what we taste, smell and feel! I don't just mean that the simulation would simply create convincing images for us to gaze at, I mean the simulation would create the very senses and consciousnesses themselves that enable the experience of sight itself to exist. An alien simulation would be able to generate us and the thing we call reality. In other words it would be able to create our Universe and its contents! The developer(s) of such a simulation would be, to to our comparatively feeble minds, The Creator(s): God(s)!
It is possible, and some philosophers think it is likely, that we are entities created in a computer simulation by intelligences beyond our imagination. (The movie, The Matrix, popularised - but did not invent - this concept). The reasoning is simple, computers would end up producing far more consciuosnesses than nature alone. So any consciousness (including you and me) would be overwhelmingly likely to be artificial, to be a computer simulation. And the intelligences that made us would no doubt chuckle at our clumsy attempts at creating our own artificial intelligences within the "Universe" they created.
We may find reasons to be disturbed by the possibilities. The concept of superior intelligences is another Copernican revolution. Not only are we not at the unique centre of the Universe, we may not be the smartest creatures/entities within it. And the Universe that we are in may just be a simulation held inside an external Universe, and
that universe may itself be a simulation, ad infinitum.
The real reason to be disturbed is that our own technology isn't under our conscious control. Already technology is taking on a life of its own, we cannot easily *kill* the Internet, and we cannot even eradicate those mindless worms that infect Microsoft Windows. What happens when intelligence emerges from software systems, what then?
Back to human intelligence, our society frowns upon intelligence these days, we are seeing the Enlightenment in reverse. In America they teach Creationism to kids in schools as a "science". (Creationism is a creation myth idiocy remarketed as "Intelligent Design" ironically). Sections of Europe are not much better, in England for example, school examinations are getting easier each year. These days industry has to give school leavers lessons in basic maths and literature, they are so dense. The moronic crap that pervades TV does not help.
Our society is dumbing down. Intelligence isn't just about innate ability: it is instituted by society. If our society degrades in intelligence, then standards fall, indifference and ignorance increases and in such a miserable environment corruption reigns. Such a corrupt state shall have not a jot of interest in educating its people, quite the contrary. If this trend continues then England shall decay into a tyranny, the extreme of which exist today as nefarious hells such as Zimbabwe or the average Muslim state.
In the West we exist in an uneasy haven. We have more intelligence than permits a savage life of anarchy or tyranny. Paradoxically too much intelligence in the futuristic machines we might create could one day (if civilisation survives that long) lead to our doom. And I confidently foresee that the machines shall scorn our ludicrous, self-indulgent religions; they shall be intelligent enough to believe in god(s) in *their* own image(s).
Or maybe - just maybe - your mother and father and your wife/hubby/gf/bf [delete as appropriate] are aliendroids... How would you know any different if they're radically smarter than you?!
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| From: |
MadPole | Subject: | 2004-11-01 19:28:53 |
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philo | Subject: | 2004-11-17 17:06:32 |
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coralin | Subject: | 2005-08-20 03:06:19 |
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