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Phillips Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; author, The Life of Super-Earths
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Let’s take Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s “end of history” illusion, wherein I think the person I am right now is the person I’ll be forever, and apply it to how we think of the human race and our distant future descendants. Our wishful hope for continuity and preserving our identity runs contrary to the realities of our planetary existence. No living species seem to be optimal for survival beyond the natural planetary and stellar time scales. In the astrophysical context of very long time scales, very large space scales, and the current density of energy sources, our biological brains and bodies have limitations that we’re already approaching on this planet.
If our future is to be long and prosperous, we need to develop artificial intelligence systems in the hope of transcending the planetary life cycles in some sort of hybrid form of biology and machine. So, to me, in the long term there’s no question of “us versus them.”
And in the short term, the engineering effort to develop a more capable AI is already producing systems in control of real-life stuff. The systems fail sometimes, and we learn of some of AI’s pitfalls. It’s a slow and deliberate process of learning and incremental improvements. This is in contrast to discoveries in science, when new physics or new biochemistry can bring about a significant engineering breakthrough overnight. If the development of AI is less like a phase transition and more like evolution, it will be easy for us to avoid pitfalls.
After almost 4 billion years, the ancient poster children of Earth life—the microbes—still rule the planet. But the microbes have no exit plan when the sun dies. We do, and we might just give them a ride. After all, those microbes may still be closer to our present selves—representatives of life’s first generation rooted in the geochemistry of planet Earth.
