On Life 3.0 (not a review)

To continue with what I have written previously, I have finally finished reading Life 3.0. The book is more of a philosophical or similar to a what-if future scenario discussions that is easy to digest without requiring the readers to have a deep background in computer science, physics, mathematics, biology or science in general. Though, an interest in the respective fields is necessary in order to follow the thoughts being written there.

AI safety research is basically the focus of the book. But, I consider the ideas and future scenarios written there as a way of looking at how life has progressed and how it will become in the future, or at least how we will imagine it will be. A more fundamental question in my mind is: what is life and reality in itself. Human evolution is still a big mystery as to why we have become what we are, where are we going, and why do we have to go there.

I would like think of Artificial Intelligence as this collective intelligence that is not associated to a particular machine, system, process, software, or a particular algorithm. But, it's a synthesized intelligence that we can trace where it origins are from.

For example, we could understand that Atlas ' — one of the Boston Dynamics robots — intelligence is artificial. It is the product of bipedal kinematics movement algorithm being programmed into a computation processing unit. We could say that the intelligence originate from human beings. While a human baby awareness of its surroundings can be artificial, but we don't really know how exactly it evolved and we don't have enough information of its origin.

With our current cultural knowledge being hands down from history and people before us. There are various relationships between our biological nature and cultural convention or intelligence that has been developed so far. Our biological advantage has been optimized for its capacity to survive and reproduce. Physical health and hygiene will increase the longevity of our species, which will increase the opportunity for reproduction, and a lot of cultural conventions or intellectual development has been optimized for collaboration in order to scale humans to a larger size.

But, on the other hand, biological or genetic variations put on certain limits on our potential to collaborate and scale. The strong tend to prey on the weak. The smart ones will make the gullible obsolete. Those with a physical or genetic disadvantage will not survive without the products of intellectual and cultural ethics to help them communicate, cooperate, and live with the rest of the society. At some point, I would imagine there are only a few of basic biological traits that can be sustained in the future, and a lot of them disappeared, and new traits emerge out of the existing ones.

In some way, I could see the pattern that human culture and civilization system tried to control the natural behavior of biological development and its interaction to a degree. In other words, we either deliberately or accidentally trying to create an artificial version of ourselves for whatever reason. Perhaps even, to the extent where in the future, sperms and ovum will be filtered and selected for improved reproduction results, or as it has been discussed in the AI community, our minds being uploaded for preservation and re-downloaded to new generations. If a mind can be processed offline then it can be analyzed thoroughly without probing the brain or neurons, which tend to not be an effective process to understand how it works.

If we think about cooperation and scale of human beings from a pure optimization perspective, our current biological system is a bottleneck. The only reason that we still rely on them is because we don't completely understand some of its characteristics in order to fully control its behavior and predict its trajectory in the future. There is still an element of unpredictability or chaotic process that we also cherish and protect with our certain cultural wisdom and conventions, depending on each society.

An icon of chaos theory - the Lorenz attractor. Projection of trajectory of Lorenz system in phase space with "canonical" values of parameters r=28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 (or 2.666667) and integration timestep 0.001. Computed in Fractint by Wikimol [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In summary, the fundamental question that I have is: how do we value this randomness and chaotic system behavior within us? How do we want to preserve it? or should we? and why shouldn't we? Why do we discriminate such emergence of chaos in society and living organism with various repressions and deliberate elimination?

What will we gain if it disappears? That is basically the eventual result of a very efficient AI super-intelligence, the non-existence of apparent randomness, chaos, or the unknowable. At the very least, in this scenario you can seek the answers to the mystery if you seek them from this AI super-intelligent system, regardless of whether that is the truth or regardless of what is real.