'We will invent our successors'

I was extremely struck by this sample of what some respected scientists predict will be the next great discoveries.

These were, in headline form:

• The creation of sentient computers that will displace humans
• A serious understanding of the human mind
• The existence of parallel universes
• The changing of the genetic makup of humans
• The discovery of life elsewhere in the universe
• Humans becoming a collective intelligence
• A serious understanding of the mechanism of human emotion
• The end of the individual
• The discovery that ‘God’ is function of the brain
• Understanding the underlying mechanism of the brain
• Machines with consciousness
• The discovery of higher dimensions
• The discovery that the rules governing human nature are simple

Well, a whole number of observations suggest themselves here.

First, all of the predictions fit into the ‘big pattern’ of scientific anti-anthropocentrism: the theme running from Copernicus through Darwin, (Marx, Freud), Einstein and on that we, humans, are not nearly as special as we like to think we are. This is attacked in these predictions from a number of angles: our thoughts, emotions, consciousness, behaviour, sense of the divine, even our self of self, are all set to be explained in mechanistic terms.

The long intellectual history of the slow displacement of humanity from centre stage continues in the other predictions: that there is other intelligent life, that there are other dimensions than ours, that there are even other universes, some containing other versions of us. Just think, thousands upon millions of alternate Earths with a functionally endless number of variations on you. If that massages your ego, think on this: on average, fifty percent of those other versions of you will be better than you.

The next thing that struck me about the predictions was their cavalier nature. Such confidence! Ask a bunch of leading philosophers for their predictions for the field, and you would receive a sorrier and, perhaps, wiser set of answers. In philosophy, after all, the sense of ‘progress’, the sense of a community constructing a great edifice of well-established hypotheses upon which the next generation can safely build, is much thinner. Astonishingly, scientific endeavour is so neatly metricated that news reports are constantly containing secure predictions that a breakthrough in a field (say, medicine) will arrive in a set number of years. No philosopher could or would commit themselves to a timescale for their tentative hypotheses. (The essential difference being that philosophical hypotheses are rarely testable, and hence rarely falsifiable.)

The third thing that struck me was the essential conservatism of the predictions. Yes, certainly the demonstration of any one of these would be enormous news. But each fits quite squarely in a course of larger scientific investigation. Each hypothesis has been around for years; in some cases, as with life on other planets, centuries. These are not scientific mavericks.

I suppose, in the end, I was a little disappointed, not because each of these wasn’t a big, beefy concept with a positively gargantuan hinterland of potential consequences. It must be that I was hoping for something a bit more dangerous, a bit more random. A little more mad.

One final thought. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Seti Institute in California, contributed (in part) the following:

It strikes me as likely that, sometime this century, we will build a thinking computer. That machine will run the planet. Competitive pressures will ensure this (if we don’t have a machine running our society, we’ll fall behind those that do). We will no longer be the smartest things on Earth. Our mantle of superiority will be donned by our own creations.

Then what? Will the machines get rid of us? A machine that dwarfs our intelligence might regard us as we regard budgies or goldfish: diverting. Our role as second intellectual fiddle may be to serve as pets for the sentients in charge.

All of this would be dismaying enough if it were merely a science fiction story. But I suspect that the first steps will be taken by mid-century. We could well be the last generation of humans to dominate Earth.

I was reading this on the train. I put the paper down, looked up at the aisles of housing sweeping past, looked around me at this Smartie tube full of shuttling people, and wondered. Hasn’t this already happened once?

Aren’t we, the expressions of our DNA, just bastard machines that were built entirely by little-suspecting germ viruses? Don’t we intellectually dwarf the very things that made us?

Just think of those terrible science fiction horrorshows where a vast, unempathic supercomputer takes over the entire planet. You side with the puny humans. Really, you should be siding with the apocalyptic machine, because that’s you.