Biologists Taboo Artificial Life

Recently I’ve reviewed three new books by academic biologists on the future of life in the universe. All three books have gained high profile and prestigious reviews in major media and academia. (Which is how I heard of them.) And all of these books, and all of these prestigious reviews, seem to share and enforce a taboo against seriously considering the possibility that artificial life will make a big difference to the cosmos.

For example:

Arthur admits the possibility of intelligent life spreading across planets, … and Arthur admits the possibility of artificial life. … But somehow these admissions make little difference to his forecasts, which ignore the possibility of artificial life at places other than planets, or made out of stuff other than carbon. And which ignore the possibility of intelligent artificial life spreading very far and wide, to become even more common than non-artificial life.

Similarly:

I recently reviewed The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein a [Cambridge] zoologist says that aliens we meet would be much like us, even though they’d be many millions of years more advanced than us, apparently assuming that our descendants will not noticeably change in million of years.

And in a new book The Next 500 Years, a geneticist [and computational biologist] recommends that we take the next few centuries to genetically engineer humans to live in on other planets, apparently unaware that our descendants will most likely be artificial (like ems), who won’t need planets in particular except as a source of raw materials.

I actually just did a written debate with this last author, who wouldn’t even admit that I disagreed with him:

You write a long book mostly on the details of genetic engineering, saying we should use it to slowly change humans and their allied plants and animals, so that in 500 years we could launch them out to the cosmos, to arrive at other stars in a few thousand years.

I say, no, long before then artificial minds and life should have thoroughly replaced biology. A new kind of life, far more robust, able to grow far faster, able to travel out into space much sooner and faster, all made in factories out of stuff dug up in mines, and not at all based on biological cells, so that genetic engineering has little to offer them.

This all suggests more than just a few biologists with a mental block; it suggests an overall taboo within their shared intellectual culture, of biology academics who study astrobiology and our future. A taboo that has likely discouraged and distorted related research and analysis.

Added 30May: This post is discussed at Hacker News.