The restaurant menu show parts of animals that we consider less knowledgeable than we do. During the recent dinner at the Fish Restaurant in Boston, I felt guilty of the buyer, watching the octopus arm served us as an appetizer. The octopuses have a convoluted nervous system and excellent eyesight and belong to the most knowledgeable animals.
They To have The brain and nervous system containing 500 million neurons, of which two -thirds are in the nerve strings of the arms. For comparison, it is estimated that the human brain contains one hundred billion connections between 86 billion neurons. When the server approached our table with a dish, I realized that this must be the reason why the chefs of the restaurant felt privileged enough to give the octopus parts as an appetizer. They would certainly feel bad, serving a more knowledgeable individual than we do for dinner.
The first ground entity that challenged our place at the top of the food chain would be artificial intelligence systems (AI). Their body is eagerly made of silicon tokens so that it cannot digest human parts of the body. But he can digest the human mind. One of the greatest existential challenges for people is mental health in the era of artificial intelligence.
When the number of connections in AI systems exceed a hundred billions – the right value in the human brain, people can be manipulated and controlled by AI systems, just like octopus are manipulated on the way to the restaurant. Over the past decade, social media has served human minds of rubbish and resulted in a polarized society, full of hatred towards people we have never met. Adding artificial intelligence to social media without caution can lead to even greater polarization and hatred.
86 billion neurons are not enough. We usually hate people we don't know than talk to them. You wonder how peaceful human history would be if the human brain had a trillion of neurons and cannot be manipulated so easily. This question can be examined in the distant future, developing AI systems with trillion of connections.
This technological feat may require up-to-date architecture, which goes beyond silicon chips. Future technologies can derive inspiration from nature, which began on earth with chemical soup and ended over 4.2 billion years in the human brain – which consumes only 20 watts instead of gigawatts needed to supply our current AI systems.
What would the natural selection in the world of super human intelligence look like? Does “survival of the strongest” – the principle supported by Charles Darwin means that the survivors have the highest intelligence?
Not necessarily yes. Nazi officers in concentration camps during World War II were brutally capable, but not as knowledgeable as many of the 6 million Jews they lost. Who will dominate our future history?
There is a scientific way to answer this question. Our telescopes offer us the opportunity to conduct a universal list in our space district. By examining billions of residential exoplanets throughout the Milky Galaxy or by encountering extraterrest technological artifacts near the Earth in the form of space rubbish or functional devices, we can obtain a statistical sense of hierarchy in a space food chain. Who controls who literally – on a physical dinner plate or metaphorically – through mental control?
To find out, we need to change priorities in the mainstream of astronomy and invest billions of dollars also in search of extraterrestrial intelligence, and not focus on searching for microorganisms. The search for superhuman intelligence or extraterrestrial brains with over 86 billion neurons – artificial or natural, will be a sign of a scientific humility and a marker of our own intelligence. But for now Decading astronomy and astrophysics study 2020 He made this goal and defined the task of looking for primitive life forms as the highest priority. This is not the best way to recognize smarter partners in our space block.
Considering the fact that astronomers did not recommend the destination of billions of dollars in search of superhuman intelligence, we remain in order to speculate whether “the smartest survived.” The brilliant manager of the Galileo project in search of extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth, Zhenya Shmeleva, who also specialized in biology, informed me of a novel entitled “Invincible” Polish writer Stanisław Lem, in which foreign machine life evolves through no environmental pressure and selective exoplanet analysis.
The remains of earlier military machines, probably from lost civilization, undergo evolution, where survival, not intelligence, drive complexity. The most advanced system of knowledgeable machines fails under its own cognitive load and high energy demand, while simpler units of microscopic insect -like robots spread as adaptive, decentralized swarms.
In the face of threat, the vagarfold of robots consist of huge “clouds”, which move at high speed and can overpower any knowledgeable threat, being brutally capable, but completely unintelligent at an individual level, just like the Nazis during World War II. In the up-to-date military world driven by drones and the technological world, in which artificial intelligence is shaped by optimization and performance indicators, Lem warns us that superficial survival instincts without intelligence and empathy and power without intention are probable results of natural selection among foreign civilizations.
Like in every shadowy date in our personal life, we must listen rather than speak in our first meeting with aliens. Instead of giving priority microorganisms from the bottom of the ground food chain, astronomers must consider in a decades study of astronomy and astrophysics the possibility that our dating partner sitting on the opposite side of the interstellar dinner table is smarter than us. Our long -term survival may depend on this sense of humility.
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