In my career I’ve worked in an unusually large number of academic disciplines: physics, computer science, social science, psychology, engineering, and philosophy. But on a map of academic disciplines, where fields that cite each other often are put closer together, all my fields are clumped together on one side. The fields furthest away from my clump, on the opposite side, are biology, biochemistry, and medicine.
There's a lot of historical contingency in current biology. There's even some in physics - where it often goes by the term "spontaneous symmetry breaking". So: maybe our distant descendants will still be saying: righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.
Surely you know that creationists attempt to look for "irreducibly complex" parts (e.g. an early claim for the eye), as a way to disprove evolution. Because evolution requires that intermediate steps also have superior survival characteristics. Evolution is unable to pass through a deep valley in the fitness landscape, in order to find a higher peak further away.
Planned genetic modification can leap these fitness canyons. I wonder where you get your confidence that such a major process change would have no impact on the outcome.
Unless I'm very mistaken, we both think that in millions of years Ems will be long gone and the properties of intelligent life will depend almost entirely on the laws of physics and computer science, not on our current social arrangements or evolutionary history. Even quantum computing is probably not the end of that road, and we really can't make useful speculations except by trying to unify physics.
Cultural evolution. Universal Darwinism, Artificial life. Memetic takeover. For example: https://www.nasa.gov/connec...Darwin contrasted artificial selection with natural selection. However, artificial selection didn't have great explanatory power (humans are similar to other animals). Later thinkers have typically preferred a more positive framing for what you are talking about: "the engineered future" or "the age of intelligent design".
Greg Cochran could be thought of as a biological theorist. He writes a lot about evolutionary biology and complains that folks in biology/medicine don't know enough theory. His background is in physics. He also thinks that putting physicists/mathematicians in charge of basically any other field of study would improve them simply due to them being smarter.
> They will be also taxed and regulated by complex governments.
Aren't you making the same mistake as the biologists? Governments are powerful and complex and do a lot of taxing and regulating today, but why must that be a feature of the distant future? We know that theoretically taxation and regulation create deadweight loss, so a system that learned to survive without them would be at a competitive advantage. In a world where we are already actively experimenting with radically lower taxation and regulation (cf Próspera), whether or not this particular experiment succeeds it seems quite strange to claim that complex taxation and regulation are definitely here to stay.
digital replicators still replicate with an error rate, so nothing fundamental changes
There are at least two huge "fundamental" changes to the logic of future evolution: (1) Lamarckian evolution is now possible (an organism's life experience can be inherited); and (2) genetic mutations can be deliberately planned and designed (from theory), rather than only random.
The idea that the long-term flow of the process of evolution would remain unchanged despite these radical updates to the foundation seems implausible.
> overall all our systems will be larger, more complex, more connected, and more smartly controlled. So to think about the future we need to think well about very large, smart, and complex integrated systems.
I expected the sentence "which is what people on the other side of the graph do" (except for the smart part). You only refer to the transition of knowledge of biologists and so on into new forms.
But to me it looks like the graph of scientific fields overall will (need to) become denser.
Biologist Gunther Stent wrote about what we now call the "singularity" in the 1960s. So at least some biologists think that way.
I don't think you really mean natural selection will come to an end in any sense. It may change form, as it'll be software and strategy and other things that selection acts on, but natural selection is an effect (not a cause) of living in a universe with imperfect replicators (digital replicators still replicate with an error rate, so nothing fundamental changes).
And economics applies to all societies of whatever type - alien hive EMS will have economics. If they have to decide how to allocate resources under scarcity, they'll have economics.
I'm talking about where our descendants will be *millions* of years. And I'm talking a generally artificial future, not ems in particular. In a world with travel to Mars likely in 20 years, it seems quite strange to claim that it would never happen in millions of years if not for Musk.
Ems are very probably possible, but it seems like insane arrogance to me to spell out detailed scenarios for what a world filled with ems will be like while dismissing out of hand other people’s scenarios for what distant futures without ems will be like.
Travel to Mars is definitely possible, but it’s also definitely very difficult. it looks like in practice it didn’t happen as a result of any new technology, or even as a result of a general technology curve progressing, but simply because eventually someone determined enough and competent enough to make it happen came around and made it his top priority.
We don’t have the technology to make Ems, but even if we did they are surely much much harder to make than spaceships, which seem to be right around the limit of the sort of technology humans are capable of. It seems much more probable to me that they will be created by our transhuman descendants than by humans directly. And it seems more likely that our transhuman descendants will be created in space, where material constraints will force people to be better at evaluating trade-offs and used to innovating technologically as a necessity for survival, and where they will only need to negotiate within small undemocratic groups in order to do so, than that they will be created on Earth, given the political pressures constraining Earth-based technology.
The long term future is bugger than the near future, but unless AGI is achievable through a small number of scientific insights the long term is out of our hands and much less important to think about than the near term.
Separately, when we talk about the long term, I think it’s pretty questionable how much economics and computers as we know them will matter. Moore’s Law is drawing to a close. We probably have another three doublings due to miniaturization, five if we’re lucky, but there isn’t much room left at the bottom after that. We can pack things into three dimensions, but heat dissipation limits how far that can go and it’s unclear we should expect a large cost advantage to that over simply making more chips. Radically novel forms of classical computers aren’t being heavily invested in but quantum computers are, and while in over the next few decades classical computing will be far more important for most tasks, over the span of centuries we simply have no reason to expect that. Off planet, extremely low temperatures make quantum computing more promising relative to classical, and the low heat dissipation of intrinsically reversible quantum computers makes it easier to keep quantum high performance computing systems cool.
Whether economics has a future appears to me to depend radically on specific contingencies here on Earth. Internally, Amazon (and presumably Blue Origin) is a market and SpaceX is a planned economy. If they both work well, they can compete with one another in space. If only one of them ends up working out, there’s room for serious doubt as to whether effective competitors will arise. The barriers to entry to space travel are extreme, and entrenched monopolies and duopolies with far lesser barriers to entry are extremely infrequently disrupted. Space also offers huge military advantages which create the eventual possibility of military resistance to new entrants, if either company holds onto a monopoly for long enough to develop a culture distinct enough from Earth to fee threatened.
There's a lot of historical contingency in current biology. There's even some in physics - where it often goes by the term "spontaneous symmetry breaking". So: maybe our distant descendants will still be saying: righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.
Did I express confidence? If so, I apologize. I am not confident. But I am skeptical that the long-term results will look very different.
Surely you know that creationists attempt to look for "irreducibly complex" parts (e.g. an early claim for the eye), as a way to disprove evolution. Because evolution requires that intermediate steps also have superior survival characteristics. Evolution is unable to pass through a deep valley in the fitness landscape, in order to find a higher peak further away.
Planned genetic modification can leap these fitness canyons. I wonder where you get your confidence that such a major process change would have no impact on the outcome.
Unless I'm very mistaken, we both think that in millions of years Ems will be long gone and the properties of intelligent life will depend almost entirely on the laws of physics and computer science, not on our current social arrangements or evolutionary history. Even quantum computing is probably not the end of that road, and we really can't make useful speculations except by trying to unify physics.
Agree. Those things seem likely to drastically speed up evolution. It's not clear to me they change its shape.
Cultural evolution. Universal Darwinism, Artificial life. Memetic takeover. For example: https://www.nasa.gov/connec...Darwin contrasted artificial selection with natural selection. However, artificial selection didn't have great explanatory power (humans are similar to other animals). Later thinkers have typically preferred a more positive framing for what you are talking about: "the engineered future" or "the age of intelligent design".
Greg Cochran could be thought of as a biological theorist. He writes a lot about evolutionary biology and complains that folks in biology/medicine don't know enough theory. His background is in physics. He also thinks that putting physicists/mathematicians in charge of basically any other field of study would improve them simply due to them being smarter.
Governance will remain a perpetual function. Perhaps they will be privately chosen, but they will still govern.
> They will be also taxed and regulated by complex governments.
Aren't you making the same mistake as the biologists? Governments are powerful and complex and do a lot of taxing and regulating today, but why must that be a feature of the distant future? We know that theoretically taxation and regulation create deadweight loss, so a system that learned to survive without them would be at a competitive advantage. In a world where we are already actively experimenting with radically lower taxation and regulation (cf Próspera), whether or not this particular experiment succeeds it seems quite strange to claim that complex taxation and regulation are definitely here to stay.
digital replicators still replicate with an error rate, so nothing fundamental changes
There are at least two huge "fundamental" changes to the logic of future evolution: (1) Lamarckian evolution is now possible (an organism's life experience can be inherited); and (2) genetic mutations can be deliberately planned and designed (from theory), rather than only random.
The idea that the long-term flow of the process of evolution would remain unchanged despite these radical updates to the foundation seems implausible.
When the systems are here, we can study their details. But this far in advance, we will have to rely on abstractions.
I was careful to say "natural selection of the sort the Earth has seen".
After your sentence
> overall all our systems will be larger, more complex, more connected, and more smartly controlled. So to think about the future we need to think well about very large, smart, and complex integrated systems.
I expected the sentence "which is what people on the other side of the graph do" (except for the smart part). You only refer to the transition of knowledge of biologists and so on into new forms.
But to me it looks like the graph of scientific fields overall will (need to) become denser.
Biologist Gunther Stent wrote about what we now call the "singularity" in the 1960s. So at least some biologists think that way.
I don't think you really mean natural selection will come to an end in any sense. It may change form, as it'll be software and strategy and other things that selection acts on, but natural selection is an effect (not a cause) of living in a universe with imperfect replicators (digital replicators still replicate with an error rate, so nothing fundamental changes).
And economics applies to all societies of whatever type - alien hive EMS will have economics. If they have to decide how to allocate resources under scarcity, they'll have economics.
I'm talking about where our descendants will be *millions* of years. And I'm talking a generally artificial future, not ems in particular. In a world with travel to Mars likely in 20 years, it seems quite strange to claim that it would never happen in millions of years if not for Musk.
Ems are very probably possible, but it seems like insane arrogance to me to spell out detailed scenarios for what a world filled with ems will be like while dismissing out of hand other people’s scenarios for what distant futures without ems will be like.
Travel to Mars is definitely possible, but it’s also definitely very difficult. it looks like in practice it didn’t happen as a result of any new technology, or even as a result of a general technology curve progressing, but simply because eventually someone determined enough and competent enough to make it happen came around and made it his top priority.
We don’t have the technology to make Ems, but even if we did they are surely much much harder to make than spaceships, which seem to be right around the limit of the sort of technology humans are capable of. It seems much more probable to me that they will be created by our transhuman descendants than by humans directly. And it seems more likely that our transhuman descendants will be created in space, where material constraints will force people to be better at evaluating trade-offs and used to innovating technologically as a necessity for survival, and where they will only need to negotiate within small undemocratic groups in order to do so, than that they will be created on Earth, given the political pressures constraining Earth-based technology.
The long term future is bugger than the near future, but unless AGI is achievable through a small number of scientific insights the long term is out of our hands and much less important to think about than the near term.
Separately, when we talk about the long term, I think it’s pretty questionable how much economics and computers as we know them will matter. Moore’s Law is drawing to a close. We probably have another three doublings due to miniaturization, five if we’re lucky, but there isn’t much room left at the bottom after that. We can pack things into three dimensions, but heat dissipation limits how far that can go and it’s unclear we should expect a large cost advantage to that over simply making more chips. Radically novel forms of classical computers aren’t being heavily invested in but quantum computers are, and while in over the next few decades classical computing will be far more important for most tasks, over the span of centuries we simply have no reason to expect that. Off planet, extremely low temperatures make quantum computing more promising relative to classical, and the low heat dissipation of intrinsically reversible quantum computers makes it easier to keep quantum high performance computing systems cool.
Whether economics has a future appears to me to depend radically on specific contingencies here on Earth. Internally, Amazon (and presumably Blue Origin) is a market and SpaceX is a planned economy. If they both work well, they can compete with one another in space. If only one of them ends up working out, there’s room for serious doubt as to whether effective competitors will arise. The barriers to entry to space travel are extreme, and entrenched monopolies and duopolies with far lesser barriers to entry are extremely infrequently disrupted. Space also offers huge military advantages which create the eventual possibility of military resistance to new entrants, if either company holds onto a monopoly for long enough to develop a culture distinct enough from Earth to fee threatened.