> The "Emergence of Life" paper is talking specifically about those sorts > of life that can emerge > WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF AN ALREADY SMARTER, MORE-ORGANIZED AGENT. > That's why that kind of life ("natural" life) is a truly emergent or > (emergent from less-order) system. >
Well, I'm an agnostic, but your point is well taken here. That said who was that talking about a "god program", Hal? > One way of looking at A.I. is that it may become in some attributes > life-like (I prefer just to say > it will become a true cognitive agent i.e. a true thinker (active > modeler) without NECESSARILY > also independently being a fully self-sufficient life-form. If WE can be > considered part of the environment > of AIs, then they are a life-form that uses US to reproduce (at least > initially). > Paraticism and symbiotic raltioanships are common amoung "natual" life forms. > It's traditional to think of the environment of a lifeform as less > ordered than the lifeform itself, so this > AI case, where the environment includes extremely ordered self-emergent > SAS's (ourselves) > is a little bit strange situation and it's hard to categorize. > Well, speaking of symbiosis, is my gut less "ordered" than the critters like ecoli that make a home there? I'm not sure I buy that generalization. I'm more of the Starr hierarchal ecology ilk (by way of Koestler) or perhaps Joslyn's meta-transition model; adaption is as much about feedback between hiearchal scales as within them... > With AI, it's probably best just to say that there is another emergent > system emerging, which is > (at this stage) a combination of humans (the human-species pattern and > its behaviours) and the software > (informational) and computing hardware technological/cultural artifacts > we produce, acting together > to form the new emergent system. > No issues with this view; I wouldn't be at all surprised if cyborgs inherit the earth. > People do talk about AI computers/robots and nano-tech, in combination > perhaps, becoming self-sufficient > (self-replicating and self-advancing/adapting independent of their human > creators.) > > I have no trouble believing that this is in-principle possible. I just > want to point out that > the properties for true long-term sustainability of pattern-order are > HARD (difficult, onerous) > requirements, not easy ones. Natural life (in the admittedly single case > we know) is highly constrained > because of the constraints on its long-term survival and incremental > improvement in a less-ordered > environment. > "Hard" may not be the most useful term here; highly constrained, yes; Once the conditions were sufficient, I think the rest was inevitable. Here I have to play the "nano-tech" card; one can imagine some uber termite mound encompassing the globe (and beyond) custom designed (grown?) from the atomic scale up to our progeny's specs; The prototype of just such an ecology may well already be in place (were leveraging it now); with evermore bandwidth, interconnectivity, agency and now the advent of "grid" distributed computation it's conceivable that "something" is already in gestation. But I haven't a clue about that.. > It seems easier (but is it much easier really?) to get AIs to > self-improve/self-sustain purely as virtual (informational) patterns > or entities (i.e. as software and data ie. pure-informational > entities/thinkers/knowledge-bases) rather than as informational/physical > hybrids as we are. I suppose some of the people on the everything-list, > myself included, may see the > distinction between informational and physical as more just a matter of > degree than of substance, > so this is a puzzling area. Certainly both human-built computers and > physical machines (robots eg mars rovers, > nanobots etc) have a long way to go, not only in their basic FUNCTIONAL > development, but > perhaps more significantly and certainly more difficultly in their > ROBUSTNESS (lack of brittleness) > AND EVOLVABILITY (& META-EVOLVABILITY?) criteria, and their raw-material > choice > (natural life uses primarily the most commonly occurring-in-the-universe > chemically-bondable elements > (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen etc) for good reason), before they > could hope to be very self-sustainable. > Lanier's "phenotropics" speaks to that brittleness factor. The promise and the danger may both lay in unleashing genetic programming type strategies on the problem; "evolving" our broods towards those goals of robustness and self sustainability w/o really having a handle on the process. Might be prudent to review Asimov! > It is interesting to speculate that the mechanisms available to a future > AI robot/nanotech-conglomerate/web-dweller > for self-adaptation might be far more flexible and wide-ranging than > those available to early natural life on Earth, > because we are building AI's partly in our image, and > we, after all, by becoming general thinker/planners (information > maestros if you will) have managed > to increase enormously the range of ways we can adapt the environment to > our needs. (Caveat: As an eco-aware > person however I can tell you the jury's out on whether we're doing this > to system-survival-levels of sophistication, > and the jury's leaning toward "guilty" of eco-cide - or more precisely > guilty of severe eco-impoverishment and disordering). > > I'm no extropian; at some level I'm scared to death (a state of being I apparently share with Sun's former CTO); Just because we managed not to nuke ourselves into oblivion ( so far), it doesn't necessarily follow that we'll weather the coming info-nano-genetic age; far from it. But I'm also fascinated by these musings. The combination of being a reformed sci-fi buff and having background in evolutionary theory, I suppose. > > BTW I'm most excited today in the AI field by the possibilities that the > combination of the WWWeb's > information as accessed via google (and similar) and AI > insights/technologies will have. The web is > not a big distributed brain yet, but it could get there. > Then you gotta be finding the semantic web project intriguing, I would imagine