illusion of individuality
Every new emergent layer in evolution is built out of the previous one. In other words, living entities are like matryoshka dolls, made of layers and layers of living entities inside each other. (Yes, I believe that even atoms are in some sense alive. See the post Emergence of Life for more details.) This does not mean that a newly emerging layer preserves the layer below as is. On the contrary, it modifies the entities that it is generated out of in a significant way, just like technology is modifying us today by slowly automating all the recurring external human patterns away.
Here, the qualifiers recurring and external are important, because they also happen to define exactly the domain of science. What is unique (not recurring) or subjective (not external) can not be studied by science, and therefore can not be automated by technology.
As technology unfolds, it slowly exposes our true human core (i.e. what is unique and subjective), which is actually the only thing it will need for its steady-state survival at maturity. We should not fight against this trend. On the contrary, we should embrace and accelerate it by increasing our social flexibility. True, we may be losing jobs in droves, but in the long run technology makes all of us wealthier and healthier. (There is a lot of politics involved here of course, but you get what I mean. Just compare the current living standards to the livings standards a few hundred years ago.)
Remember, we are what animates technology and makes it adaptive. In other words, artificial general intelligence is already here. It is operating at a global scale through the multi-cloud layer and is composed of myriad of artificial (special) intelligences which are communicating through us. The dynamics is no different than your own mind being a society of smaller minds and your own genome being a society of smaller genomes.
The magic glue is always in the network. Smartness is always an emergent, social affair. In other words, there is no such thing as a general intelligence composed of a single node. Yes, we will have super intelligent robots in the future, but the prime source of their intelligence will always be the global multi-cloud layer. In other words, they will continuously tap into the entirety of our accumulated wisdom, which will keep evolving in the background.
Of course, the supreme complexity will be deftly hidden away, and it will look as if the entire intelligence resides within the individual robots themselves. The irony is that the robots too will believe in this illusion, just as we tend to mistakenly equate our minds with our consciousnesses. Remember, it took us thousands of years to even notice the bare existence of the unconscious. Even today we have no clue with regards to its structure, although deep down we all feel that it somehow links us together in a mysterious fashion.
“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
- William James
This obviously takes us beyond the reach of science and into the territory of metaphysics. But that should not stop us from asking some fun questions!
Robot unconscious taps into the electromagnetic field. What field does the human unconscious tap into? Is vacuum not what we think it is?
Information is encoded into the electromagnetic field by the collective human consciousness. Whose collective consciousness is encoding information into this other field? Are cells not what we think they are?
