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The Evolution Of Mankind
Ian Pearson, Chris Winter & Peter Cochrane
PROLOGUE
When faced with death, or the prospect of a seriously degraded quality of life, even the most ardent technophobes and anti-vivisectionists do not refuse an artificial implant. Replacement hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys rescued from other humans are no longer big news. However, mechanical piece parts, or those created in any artificial way, are emotive and headline material. The reality is, that despite professed reservations, the immediacy of death prompts the vast majority to opt for life saving technology. It is not too difficult therefore to envisage a creeping evolution towards a cyborg world of partially artificial people.
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
The rapid development in silicon and bio technology could soon bring the human race to a critical point where it could break free of it's Darwinian roots. The potential impact of such an opportunity is profound, as the remaining lifetime of both Darwinian evolution and pure Homo Sapiens could be relatively short and limited. To explain why this is so, let us first examine why Darwinian evolution may be near exhaustion for Homo Sapiens. We can then explore the fundamental biological limits that block progress via genetic engineering; and finally examine how silicon technology may transcend these barriers.
Understanding Evolution
Homo Sapiens have now reached a position where three significant developments could radically change their evolutionary mechanisms. First, we have learned the fundamental concepts of evolution and can start using them, rather than being driven by them. Secondly, we are able to manipulate our own genome, making Lamarkian evolution a possibility. In this case the inheritance would be of desired, rather than acquired characteristics. Finally, and most significantly, we have created artificial life systems that may eventually supplant carbon-based life. Homo Sapien is now able to take control of both the speciation process and the move from carbon to silicon forms. This change may be inevitable as we try to avoid death and wear out through a series of incremental, but temporary solutions, such as artificial organs and electronic implants.
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
The key question then, is; can we improve our brain? Let us first consider the 'natural' route. So far, all species have evolved by the random creativity of mutations and selective pressures of their environment. The organisms that could be evolved in this manner may be limited in scope by the types of self-ordered structures that could undergo such Darwinian evolution. However, this does not indicate whether there are any detailed limitations to, say, brain size. Rather more importantly, it has been argued that Homo Sapiens' control of the environment, and mobility around it, has already removed one key mechanism - local isolation - that was believed to drive speciation and thus evolution. Homo Sapien may have limited his natural evolutionary ability by the mechanism of very successfully exploiting a wide range of ecological niches. This in part is dictated by our sensory organs, physiology, and physical attributes, as well as processing power. We are not wholly constrained by the power of our wet wear (brain).
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
We have recently shown that - using cell-based neurons, the human brain is limited to about 20 cm in diameter and to a maximum effective intelligence <20% greater than we currently enjoy. This is because of the time necessary to co-ordinate and process all information that could be relevant to a particular issue. The value is the result of trade-offs between synaptic density, signal transmission speed, processing speed, interconnectivity and thermal limits. Of course, it may be possible to store more, and process less, information - but this does not improve the generic intelligence or information processing.
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
Drugs or genetic engineering would need to improve both synaptic transmission times and neural transmission speeds to enhance the brain's processing performance. Neural transmission speed is a fundamental feature of biological membranes, as it evolved from the very mechanisms that preserve an action potential across all cell membranes. It may prove impossible to 'tinker' with it. Currently, biological nerve evolution has taken the course of wrapping the nerve with a gapped insulator and leaving the underlying chemical technology alone. Further improvements need a change of 'hardware', perhaps we would need to evolve electronic conduction along polymers to produce a significant increase in intelligence. Small enhancements via drugs or genetic engineering which produce, say, a factor of ten improvement merely delay machine superiority by about 5 years.
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
If current trends are extrapolated, we can (very conservatively) expect the descendants of our desktop computers to be at least 50,000 times faster with at least 50,000 times more memory by 2015. A typical machine then processing at about 5M MIPS with 1TByte of RAM. However, such extrapolation ignores the extra assistance we can expect from computers as they progress. Ten years ago, computers began to assist with circuits design and layout, now they do it far faster than us. As they become faster and more intelligent, with access to a rapidly growing world knowledge base and a growing range of tools, they will assist and eventually replace more people in ever more activities. The evolution of silicon will thus eventually be driven by silicon, rather than carbon based devices - us! So the above figure of 50,000 may turn out to be a gross underestimate and a 1M fold increase over today's performance may be nearer the mark. In comparison, the limits referred to above give the human brain a processing power of around 1000 Tops/s, with a memory of 10 TBytes. We have supposed that future computing devices will remain silicon based. But this may not be true, and we acknowledge that other materials may prove better, indeed there may be a move away from electronics to photonics, a merging of the two, as well as links to carbon based systems. The consequences however are largely material independent since these alternatives are unlikely to replace silicon unless they improve processing speeds, density and power consumption.
Projection of super computer speed
Projection of memory chip capacity
Our Third Lobe
Computers are already helping us to become smarter. Without them we would have no understanding of fractals, chaos, distant galaxies, black holes and other complex phenomena. But gaining extra assistance from machines is not new - it has happened since humans used the first tool. When all we had was slide rules or log tables, the invention of the first computers was a big step which accelerated our calculations enormously. However, people were too short sighted to see that computers would become fast and cheap. Most could not foresee that they would revolutionise everything: not just arithmetic calculations, but all kinds of information processing. Today most cannot see that machines are becoming an effective third lobe - helping us solve problems, remember, find, communicate, manufacture and cope - with them!
Technology Takes Over
We have now reached the point where our total reliance on technology is axiomatic. We no longer bake bread, smelt steel, weld cars or assemble TV sets - machines do. Turn off the communications systems and computers and a large proportion of human kind would die, and there is no going back. You cannot support the numbers of people now living on the planet without advanced technologies.
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
We can expect future computers to change whole fields of communications, business and society. They will not however emulate human intelligence, rather they will develop in parallel surpassing humans in many tasks for which they are best suitable, opening new fields not currently accessible. We can expect computers to evolve their own code and rapidly move to a level of complexity beyond our understanding. Whether they are more intelligent than us will become as irrelevant as asking whether your car is as fast as your PC. Computers generally require ever more capacity for machine-machine communications. Binary is already the dominant language on planet earth with today's machines having more conversations in 24 hours the whole of human kind since the birth of Eve. As they grow more powerful, automatic machine-machine communications will swamp human-human communication completely. The information SuperHighway is really about machines talking - distributed intelligence - a distributed being. So, current arguments about whether it is possible to justify broadband communications will become a strange historical tale.
Rate of Progress
A mistake which is often made in any field is to assume progress will continue at today's rates. Consequently, we tend to put small advances in the near future and large advances in the very distant future - even centuries away. But technology feedback in computing will not just bring us smarter computers, it will accelerate development in every other field. Advances that might otherwise take many decades, or be fundamentally impossible for us, may only require a few months or years when we get ever smarter computers. We might even ask ourselves whether it is worth tackling some big (complex) problems now, as our lengthy efforts now may only save a little time, and we may not make it.
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
In the same time frame that we learn how to manipulate our own genome to produce Homo Optimus, developments in computer technology will bring about smart machines. There are many possible routes to this realisation and we cannot be certain which will win, but we can be sure one will. But artificial intelligence will probably access the increased understanding of humans, and will tap other fields of knowledge too. There may even have a strong evolutionary or self learning element in the process - but in a directed rather than chance mutation sense. In any case, we can expect the nature of this intelligence to have some similarities with our own, but not to be identical. This will produce an added richness of thinking - male, female, and machine.
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
As in biological organisms, we already see speciation of machines by generation and purpose - all machines are not be equal - intelligence levels are very different, but useful. However, we cannot assume that artificial offspring will always be our friends. If they are designed to optimise success in their environment, and have independent thought, then they may well evolve beyond us. Obviously, there are many nightmare scenarios that have been explored in science fiction, but we need not remain in stasis - our own evolution can continue!
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
Robotus Primus
For a time at least, we will be the second smartest beings on Earth. Computers will probably surpass our intelligence around 2015, and it will be some time after that before they develop the technology to bring us up to speed. So the first major impact is a new intelligence sharing the planet - Robotus Primus. In the 2015 time frame, it is reasonable to expect that computers could be accompanied by sufficiently developed robotics technology to make them mobile, though their 'minds' are not tied to any particular machine or location - but distributed. The early generations will rely on relatively crude robots, but these will quickly evolve into sophisticated androids. We stress again that Robotus Primus is not the android itself, which is merely a tool, but the intelligent mind inside.
Homo Cyberneticus
Even in 1995, people have developed silicon chips to interface directly with human nerve cells. Various cybernetic prostheses and other extensions to the body are available or in development. Others have demonstrated that thoughts can be detected and recognised, even without physical contact with the body. Although no-one has yet demonstrated a means of putting thoughts into a human, we should not assume it cannot be done.
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
It is likely that many of the people who accept cybernetic enhancement would lend themselves to genetic enhancement too, or would allow enhancement of their offspring. A further branch of optimised biological man with some cybernetic links can therefore be expected. Perhaps their genes could be selected to work better with cybernetics than conventional organisms. We call this species Homo Hybridus. This species makes Homo Optimus rather redundant very soon after its creation. Similarly, the first generation of Homo Cyberneticus would become obsolete, since the human bodies connected would be inferior to those of 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
The two enhancements of biological optimisation and connection to synthetic intelligence are not equal in potential impact. Due to speed of development, we can reasonably assume that some of each of the above species would exist, but we can argue that they would soon become obsolete. Homo Optimus, would be left behind by Homo Cyberneticus and they in turn would be succeeded by Homo Hybridus. However, as the mind machine link becomes completely transparent, and as materials and cybernetic technology improve, Homo Hybridus would rapidly find most of its intelligence and physical capability residing in the machine rather than the organic residue. As the human mind gradually moves further into the machine world, it would become apparent that the organic body is redundant. If it died, it would be a minor inconvenience, requiring a cybernetic replacement. As the bodies die out, Homo Hybridus would too, become a non corporeal being - 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
It is certain that there will be strong reaction to tinkering with the human species. Not everyone will welcome it, and many will dissociate themselves from genetic manipulation or cybernetic technology. These people will remain as conventional Homo Sapiens - or Homo Ludditus. They would at best have to co-exist with these other human offshoots, who would dwarf them mentally and physically as they would not be able, and may not want to compete. Knowing that they too could at any time accept the new technology and move onto the higher planes of existence would probably rapidly diminish the numbers of Homo Ludditus. The race might just fizzle out due to lack of interest!
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?