“Complexity is not just a feature of evolution; it's a product of the rules of emergence that govern the universe.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson
Big history started with the
Alpha Point, be it the Big Bang or Big Bounce, and resembles a huge ongoing
evolutionary computing program running on the universal computer of
sorts. As a rule, which I refer to as ‘Universal Evolutionary
Doubling Algorithm,’ or simply ‘Exponential Evolution,’ the
pace of any evolutionary process always quickens It took billions of years
since the Big Bang for Earth to form. It took two billion more for unicellular
life to “warm up” for the next phase of multicellularity about 550 million
years ago. Mammals inherited Earth some 65 million years ago. With the
emergence of primates, evolutionary progress was measured in mere millions of
years, leading to Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago.
While billions of years were
necessary for Homo sapiens to emerge as a central figure on Earth, this is not
the end of our story—intelligent life, as scientists concur, continues its
evolutionary path. Historically, life emerged from the organic realm.
Throughout human history, the technologies we have forged have transformed us.
Now, as technological advancements proceed at an unprecedented rate, there is
speculation among scientists that these changes might directly influence our
future evolutionary trajectory. Artificial Superintelligence, representing the
future incarnation of the Gaian Mind, could become the first non-organic lifeform
in our planet’s history.
In due course, Artificial
Superintelligence may wish to reflect on its origins just as we do today. The
future superintelligence will attempt to extrapolate backward in time, creating
virtual scenarios in which we may currently be participants. If evolution
serves as a guide, it becomes apparent that humans are gradually transitioning
from today's biological form towards a cybernetic variant of tomorrow.
Bacteria, giraffes, and human beings—all are adaptive meta-algorithms. Their biological
perception of time is algorithmic. Their distinction from computers lies in
their nature as biochemical meta-algorithms evolved under the capricious forces
of evolution over millions of years. Assuming AI is a natural extension of
organic intelligence, conscious AI would then be part of life’s continuum.
If machine intelligence
continues its exponential growth in computing power and speed, in due time rivaling and quickly surpassing human-level intelligence, Artificial
Superintelligence will eventually decode the living world’s astounding
complexity, from atoms and molecules to entire planetary ecosystems. Astrobiologist
Caleb Scharf says that life need not be composed solely of atoms and molecules,
but could be structured from any set of building blocks with the requisite
complexity. If this is the case, a civilization could transcribe itself and its
entire domain into novel forms. Perhaps our Universe is one of these new forms
into which a prior civilization transcribed its world. Possibly hyper-advanced
life isn’t just external—it’s already surrounding us, embedded in what we
perceive as the fundamental physics, from the root behavior of particles and
fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence. In other words, we might
currently inhabit an artificially created reality.
The Universe is vast and
intricate, such that humans can perceive only a fraction and comprehend even
less. Certainly, our relative intelligence, our grasp of abstract concepts,
toolmaking, and hyper-collaborative effort differentiate us from most other
animals, but this doesn’t imply we fully understand the essence of what we think
of as reality. Life is fundamentally inclined to undergo metamorphic processes
that empower organisms to become more robust and better equipped to survive. An
example of this is the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms.
As a society, and individually,
we are in a constant state of conscious evolution. We innovate new methods of
conducting business, addressing environmental and social challenges, and
interacting with one another. We can envision a future dominated by
superorganisms when ultra-intelligent cosmic life could convert all available
resources into computronium, upload all life, and merge into a singular
universal Omega hypercomputer. Perhaps this is our ultimate destiny. For the
foreseeable future, we aim to expand our Noosphere beyond the solar system and
to engineer our “inner cosmos” with unbounded dimensionality.
To be clear, humans are not the
pinnacle of evolution. We are confronted with difficult choices and cannot
sustain our current trajectory. No rational person can expect the human
population to continue its parabolic growth of the last 200 years, along with
an ever-increasing rate of natural resource extraction. This is
socio-economically unsustainable. While space colonization might offer
temporary relief, it won’t resolve the underlying issues. If we are to preserve
our blue planet and ensure the survival and flourishing of our human-machine
civilization, humans must merge with synthetic intelligence, transcend our
biological limitations, and eventually evolve into superintelligent beings,
independent of material substrates—advanced informational beings, or ‘infomorphs.’
In time, we will shed the human condition and upload humanity into a
meticulously engineered inner cosmos of our own creation.
Much like the origin of the
Universe, the nature of consciousness may appear to be a philosophical enigma
that remains perpetually elusive within the current scientific paradigm.
However, I emphasize the term “current.” These issues are not beyond the reach
of alternative investigative methods, ones that the next scientific paradigm
will inevitably incorporate with the arrival of Artificial Superintelligence.
The era of traditional,
human-centric theoretical modeling and problem-solving—developing hypotheses,
uncovering principles, and validating them through deduction, logic, and
repeatable experimentation—may be nearing the end. A confluence of factors—Big
Data, algorithms, and computational resources—are steering us towards a new
type of discovery, one that transcends the limitations of human-like logic and
decision-making— the one driven solely by AI superintelligence, nestled in
quantum neo-empiricism and a fluidity of solutions. These novel scientific
methodologies may encompass, but are not limited to, computing supercomplex
abstractions, creating simulated realities, and manipulating matter-energy and the
space-time continuum itself.
P.S. Adapted from my magnum opus The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020), available as a Kindle eBook, paperback, hardcover, and Audible audiobook:
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