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Homepage / Publications & Opinion / Archive / Articles, Lectures, Preprints & Reprints![]() The Evolution Of Mankind Ian Pearson, Chris Winter & Peter Cochrane PROLOGUE We now see coke and chocolate bar dispensers, garage forecourts, photo copiers and other technology on-line as part of a growing networked logistics system. When replenishment or servicing is required - they just ring for help. Curious then, that a pacemaker or artificial heart is not so smart - it fails and lets you die! Real time, on-line, health monitoring with external (to the human body) sensors is now a reality. It will soon be a necessity as the population grows older. This will be followed by internal organ and piece part monitoring and control by remote terminals solely concerned with patient health. Whilst such developments present significant challenges for computing and telecommunications in the 21st Century, they are not insurmountable or beyond our ability to engineer today. So, do we really have a limited cyborg future based on the piece part replacement of organs, or is there much more? We think there is! DARWIN, BIO-TECHNOLOGY & SILICON Understanding Evolution Most species are driven by the present evolutionary currents and their genome history. Homo Sapien is beginning to understand it's own origins and in doing so is now able to dimly see its own future. The temptation to manipulate this future directly by adjusting its own genome is strong! Genetic engineering opens the possibility for a species that evolves through - directly manipulating its genome to include traits considered valuable. We may be able to drive the evolutionary process where we choose, not by a slow chance mutation induced by external pressure, but by direct targeting. Such a process is technological, not biological, evolution - and it is very fast! There may be biological limits to the future progression of Homo Sapien dictated by our own mindset. Genetic engineering is currently viewed as a tool to gain robust, long-lived, disease-free, super-athletic bodies. We shall probably not see any profound change in our nature if this is the only use to which evolutionary knowledge is directed. There are much deeper driving forces underlying evolution than simply lifetime or health. The future of Homo Sapien is crucially dependent on understanding the role of energy and entropy processing. Survival favours organisms that efficiently gather and consume energy. Although the efficiency with which an organism exploits the energy sources is a strong selective force, there is a more powerful form of selection; the ability to first identify the energy. This requires processing information about the environment the organism lives in. All living creatures function as information processors. They take in information about their environment, process it, and then use it to locate and secure the necessary means for survival. All life forms are essentially entropy engines. The more efficiently organisms extract and process information from their environment, the more successfully they can continue their, and their offspring's, existence. As a species we have succeeded in occupying so many ecological niches because we have the most powerful processor for the size of body amongst land animals,. Systems or organisms that are more efficient at information processing could supplant us from this general environment. Notice that they do not need to have 'human intelligence' to process and use information about the environment more efficiently than us. A silicon chip, embodied in a suitable manner, may defeat a human through the sheer 'grunt' of massed information processing without ever being labelled as 'intelligent'. This happens already in limited domains such as games and raw computation. Controlling Evolution If natural evolution is limited, can we tinker with our own genome to drive the process faster? To improve the processing of information, Homo Sapien would need to improve the power of their central nervous system and, particularly, the brain. Is it possible, genetically or otherwise, to improve the brain or are there limits to neural processing power? Are there other media where completely new evolutionary driving forces can come into play apart from carbon? The last two billion years of information processing has been based solely on carbon-based molecular systems, but this may not be a prerequisite for life! A common misunderstanding of the evolutionary process is to believe that it is possible to continue progress indefinitely. Unfortunately there are real, physical limitations on biological organs. Good examples include; the limitations on the size to which insects can grow caused by oxygen diffusion limits, or the maximum size of a mammal before its legs cannot take the strain of its weight. Since we are considering information processing, the key issue is - how large could we usefully make the brain? In this model, the brain is viewed as a control system, whose job it is to make the best informed, most rapid, decision by processing as much information about the world and comparing it with as a large a memory trace as possible. We define 'useful intelligence' as a product of processing speed and the amount of memory which an organism employs to make decisions on the incoming environmental information. An organism which can make a decision faster, using more information and memory, can thus be considered more intelligent. Limits to Brain Size & Intelligence The more information processed and co-ordinated - the better the overall system is at exploiting the environment. The same calculations can be used to show why neuron interconnectivity is of the order - one thousand synapses per neuron, and how the transmission and processing delays are already near ideally matched. Drugs & Genetics The human genome project will be completed soon. At that point, a combination of man and computer search will be able to identify the genes needed to produce people with chosen characteristics. Someone - somewhere could then produce an elite race of people - smart, agile and disease resistant. We call this optimised human Homo Optimus. While they may not represent a new species in the strict sense, they might think of themselves as such, and they would be the first generation resulting from Lamarkian evolution. They would represent a key change of direction in evolution. Unfortunately, the timing of their arrival would make them largely irrelevant, as we shall see. Birth of a New Life Form: Silicon Systems ![]() Projection of super computer speed ![]() Projection of memory chip capacity Our Third Lobe Technology Takes Over Technology feedback will make succeeding generations of computers arrive faster, each helping even more in the development of the next. This is a feedback loop with a degree of feed forward - and it is positive. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that it has been at work throughout history - with the bow and arrow leading to the lathe, milling machine, internal combustion engine, and computers. Many inventions or discoveries have not only been useful in their own right, but have accelerated progress within their fields and others too. The more physics and mathematics we understood, the more rapidly these fields developed. The more tools we make, the more tools we are able to make with them. The faster we could travel, the faster materials for making transport could be gathered. The continuing positive feedback in the computer development cycle will accelerate developments, with humans eventually cut out of the cycle. When a particular bottleneck prevents further development along a given route (such as smaller device size), they will find new avenues to bypass the restriction. Being optimistic about human capabilities, we expect computers to surpass us in many fields by 2015. As we approach this point of human-computer equivalence, progress will further accelerate. As we pass it, the progress curve will take a very rapid turn upwards which will not stop until the development cycle is curtailed by the ultimate barriers imposed by physics. As yet, we are not aware of any such limits, so we expect computers at least millions of times smarter than us by 2030 - what they will ultimately achieve is guesswork. Computers, Communications and Complexity Rate of Progress As computer intelligence accelerates progress in communications; materials, biotechnology, energy, robotics and cybernetics, earth and space exploration; developments in these areas will also positively feed computer evolution. Positive feedback thus permeates the whole of technology progression and we might anticipate that scientific understanding will develop rapidly. How might this affect evolution? Manipulating our Genome Although intelligence in a machine does not equate to life as we know it, we may find that the differences are cosmetic. Ultimately, intelligent machines will be recognised as a new life form, another evolutionary offshoot of Homo Sapiens - Homo Computus. We cannot insist that these machines must be conscious and self aware to be classified as life - we do not make that rule, and it is not universally true for organic life - but it is probable that many will become self aware in this time frame. Machine Speciation Predicting the future of evolution with certainty is clearly impossible - but we should be contemplating the possibilities. Here is our projection - best guess - of our ultimate fate. THE FUTURE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENT LIFE FORMS Homo Cyberneticus It is therefor expected that at some point after human machine equivalence, we will be able to enhance our mental ability by using external processing as an adjunct to our wet ware. Those who accept this technology will instantly have a great advantage over those who do not. In the same way that people rejecting IT today are a dying species, excluded from a new workplace and society by their own hand, then future rejections will be more exaggerated and speedy. They will be so far removed from Homo Sapiens that they will in effect be the start of a new species - Homo Cyberneticus. As the technology rapidly develops, differences between Homo Cyberneticus and Homo Sapiens will increase. However, since the early Homo Cyberneticus is a conjunction of conventional humans with machines, there is obviously room for improvement. Homo Hybridus Changes generally bring stress, and often lead to conflict. The many new species would not coexist easily with Homo Ludditus, and there would be some competition for resources between these species too. Whether peaceful coexistence is possible or not, it would seem unlikely, given the well known nature of Homo Ludditus. Science fiction has already begun exploring this conflict, with The Forbin Project, Terminator 1 & 2 being famous examples. However, in Terminator, Homo Ludditus wins, which seems an unlikely outcome. We can also expect friction within our species as machine intelligence improves. The industrial revolution reduced the value of muscle power and in the same way computer evolution will reduce the value of brain power - to zero. One by one, jobs will be lost to machines, whether robots or computers. Corporations will be run and staffed entirely by machines as people will have fewer and fewer attributes to sell. Of course, production and output could greatly increase while human input could decrease, so we could all have a better quality of life without having to work. A fully automated economy could still be bigger than one which involves people. 20th century economics will not work in the future - the cracks are already getting bigger - machines take out delay and uncertainty, displace humans and reveal economics for what it is, a game of numbers in a spread sheet. Our current concepts of wealth, money and ownership will take a severe battering. Perhaps we will enter an age of leisure, where any work we do is voluntary and is based on spending time with other people. When a direct link from the computer into the human brain is achieved, thought transmission will give us direct communication not only with machines but with other people. We will be able to enjoy a shared consciousness with many intelligence's. Our evolution to Homo Machinus will therefore be set against the background of a global consciousness. Individuals will still exist, but we will also have a group existence - and death will be just a memory of a primitive past. Procreation, the creation of new minds could ultimately become a highly creative act, with any number of combinings. But the number of beings which could be created and coexist may be limited by the size of the host infrastructure. Homo Machinus This new species retains some elements of the earlier human race, but is vastly more intelligent and has access to whatever physical capability is required. It can travel at the speed of light, exist in many places at once.. It would coexist with Robotus Primus, but we could expect that the two would closely interact and may quickly converge. Summarising, we can draw an outline of or projection of human evolution from the distant past to the relatively near future. ![]() CONCLUSIONS There are limits to Homo Sapiens, limits to the environmental stress planet earth can withstand, and as a species we may be close to extinction by our own hand. As computers become more powerful they will drive their own technological developments through automated design and self-evolving programs, and then in other fields. Once free of carbon, or aided directly by silicon, the nature of evolution will change. Currently there are arguments that machines can never equal man's intelligence. These arguments are about as relevant as those of previous centuries relating to the number of angels that can sit on a pin head, or indeed more recently, the existence and nature of hell. If machines beat us at processing information, they may never need to directly equal our intelligence, they just need to circumvent it. They may also work out how to be 'similar' to our brains for themselves through the sheer processing power they posses. Early estimations of when this might happen made widely inaccurate assessments of human brain power. This should not obscure the inevitability of the process - one hundred years is very short in evolutionary terms. Today we enjoy a rich environment of male and female, ethnic variety, cultural and education backgrounds. A society of minds! Soon this richness, limited by our cerebral volume and left-right lobe connect, will be augmented by a third lobe - the machine. Thinking in a new way, and possessing new abilities we will see our capabilities and imagination lifted. The question is; can we overcome our mental stasis through a symbiosis with machines, or will we go down fighting and be deleted? |
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