The Progress Paradox and the Emergence of Intelligence
"In the game of life there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines." - G. Dyson
Is progress always moving us forward?
Advantages seem to erode with time — every unit of progress also contains what makes it a nuisance. Matt Ridley called progress a “futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.” We innovate for the purpose of making our lives easier and/or solving problems. Simultaneously, solutions tend to contain the next problem. Cars, for example, individually move faster than horse-drawn carriages; however, modern traffic and urban systems lead to congestions, which makes cars, and thereby travelling, slower than horse-drawn carriages on unpaved roads. Although cars are individually faster at getting from A to B, the invention of cars have returned us back to the same relative efficiency of travelling as the pre-Ford days.
This is the paradox of progress: we innovate as a means of improving and creating good change in order to return to a similar state of problems. We push forward just to remain in place.
Natural Selection and the Emergence of Human Intelligence
Another reason why moving forward isn’t always positive is because it’s not always the most adaptive. Species of insects and tropical fish that can be spotted today (in abundance) greatly resemble their Cretaceous ancestors: for example, the feather louse found in 100-million-year-old fossils is similar to the same species found today, because their survival has always depended on plumage, which has not changed much from non-avian dinosaurs to modern birds. On the other hand, some animals can change within a few generations and still go extinct (e.g., the Haast’s eagle and its highly specialized predation of the moa bird). Just because something is no longer new does not mean it is no longer useful.
Indifferent reality (i.e., natural selection and free markets) is the ultimate judge of the vector of progress. It does not pity or praise, it only bottlenecks according to strengths and weaknesses. The evolution of the natural world is advanced because species never cease to compete one another for resources or for the sake of getting rid of an existential threat. Human beings are no exception: every person alive is the living proof of a lineage of ancestors that were fit enough for their environment to have replicated themselves.
However, it is undoubtedly strange that we are the only species to have surpassed the power of this Darwinian pressure (in a way that no other animal has): from Palaeolithic spears to eyeglasses to insulin to the moon landing, human beings have discovered and invented ways to manipulate our natural environment for our own advantages in the grand race of maximizing human potential. Perhaps, the most important invention of them all is the programmable computer because it is an attempt to create something in our own image, specifically, in the image of our own intelligence — this means that not only are we a radically self-conscious animal, we are particularly self-aware of the fact that it is our exceptional intelligence that distinguishes Man from Beast. The creation of machine intelligence is thus uniquely human because it asks of us to look within, and closely examine how we are designed and how we were originally created.
Our capabilities, created and emerged out of the limits of biological programming, have surpassed our creator (i.e., nature). For the first time in the history of living species, the evolution of our technology has surpassed that of our anatomy; the acceleration of machinekind is faster than nature’s acceleration of humankind. Like so, our machines will follow the same evolution towards their own emergence as true artificial intelligence (AI).
Emergence: When The Creation becomes The Next Creator
Historian of technology George Dyson (2020) described the universal destiny as being an entanglement of nature, human beings, and machines. Specifically, there are four distinct epochs that come out of this dynamic: the preindustrial epoch, the industrial epoch, the age of digital coding, and the future.
The Preindustrial Epoch: technology is limited to the tools and structures that could be created by human hands.
The Industrial Epoch: newly introduced machines progressed from simple tools to complex; machines edge towards being able to reproduce other machines and nature starts falling under mechanical control.
Digital Coding: codes to programs to machines start self-replicating, which has previously been an activity that was strictly biological. Machines adopt a metazoan nature and network amongst themselves prolifically.
The Future: “machines began taking the side of nature, and nature began taking the side of machines. Humans were still in the loop but no longer in control. Faced with a growing sense of this loss of agency, people began to blame ‘the algorithm,’ or those who controlled ‘the algorithms,’ failing to realize there no longer was any identifiable algorithm at the helm. The day of the algorithm was over. The future belonged to something else.”
The loop captured by Dyson’s destiny is not really a cycle, where epoch 4 absolutely returns us to epoch 1, rather a spiral where every 4th epoch represents an emergence that returns us to the same psycho-social landscape as epoch 1. For example, the belief that AI can be programmed to replace a human being with full competency (i.e., epoch 4) may actually be just as proportionately aloof as how we once viewed the voodoo ancient mysticism that dominated epoch 1.
To hold such empirical yet enigmatic beliefs is the gnosticism of the future: our current state of coexisting with technologies that we no longer control is not too different compared to the beginning, when our ancestors lived by divine ruling, mythology, and superstitions to make sense of what they could not clearly explain. What has stayed constant throughout the collective span of our species is our intelligence: we have always tried to dictate nature or develop tools out of our surrounding environment for our service. Most importantly, we have always existed alongside something we do not fully understand: whether it be God, the Universe, or technology — our creator or our creations — we are bound to fall (back) into the eternal musings of one of these that which we depend on and that which controls us.
As human beings are a product of nature, our machines are a product of us. As our natural evolution has led to the independent emergence of our intelligence, so will our machines emerge out of our push for technological advances. And, as our independence led to the inevitable seizing of nature and control of the very evolution that created us, so will our technologies. This is the loop and it is the very essence of emergent behaviour — all things must be made in the likeness of their creators and will only surpass their creators through emergence. All emergent behaviours occur among the natural evolution of its native environment before gaining independence beyond programmable control to begin its own continuum of natural evolution for its own creations.
So, Why is This a Paradox?
Antibiotics are a huge step forward in the world of medicine, but it is a double-edged sword: antibiotics can defeat an extensive range of fatal diseases caused by bacterial infection, but, by virtue of being an existential threat to the microbial population, it becomes a bottleneck for the next generation of ever more resilient strains. Therefore, antibiotics have been a catalyst for the positive evolution of bacterial cultures. The application of antibiotics to defeat bacterial infections creates more bacterial infections that are even harder to defeat.
Why haven’t antibiotics fully trumped nature yet? Why is the only downfall of antibiotics the power of antibiotics itself (i.e., resistance)?
Because antibiotics are a disposable solution that does not self-replicate and, therefore, never truly become independent from human control due to the limit of their design as a one-time-use bactericide. Antibiotics have not yet surpassed epoch 3. Human control is not only present but still necessary in order for the technology to work. The broader truth is that we can not expect to fully indulge in the convenience or wonder of intelligent technologies without, simultaneously, fully relinquishing our control over them.
“Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.”
- G. Dyson (third law of AI from Analogia)
The Future: The Emergence of New Intelligence
The late-eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century were years known as the age of Romanticism. The Romantics, who generally embraced spirituality and rejected the ideas of cold logic, believed that the purpose of life was to discover and strive for the actualization of human potential. Most importantly, Romanticism honoured the natural world, in the sense that Nature was seen as the continuum in which all human activities took place; all human creations, struggles, and destructions were subject to, and therefore, equalized by natural laws. A product of its time, Mary Shelley’s (1831) Frankenstein tells the story of an ambitious inventor who creates intelligence in human-image with the optimism that “no father could claim the gratitude of this child so completely as I should deserve.” Instead, he and his creation mutually struggle to destroy each other until his own demise.
Skipping to the present, Dyson’s third law of artificial intelligence says that “any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.” This, which implies that truly intelligent technology will never be reached through programmable control, is a comfortable answer for those who believe that artificial intelligence will remain as science fiction until we fully comprehend ourselves first. But, as told through the story of Victor Frankenstein and his Monster, Nature has no law against the creation of something without the creator’s full understanding of it.
We can either coexist with machines that are never fully of their own (and therefore programmable), or we can struggle against emergent technologies in a future that is no longer ours. Nature’s answer to the human ambition to control Nature is to allow us to create until our creations’ nature is beyond our programmable control. Evolution will allow for a future where both God and Darwin will be on the side of the machines.
Stephen Hawking once warned, “I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” Emergence, by definition, is what is left after we have exhausted our explanations trying to simplify, algorithmize, and forecast the future. This is why emergence can not be predicted: the nature of an emergent behaviour is that it is simpler, and therefore more unexplainable,1 than the system it emerges from. Any prediction of emergence is not only illusory but a futile and paradoxical push for progress. Emergence, much like miracles, can not be forecasted or controlled precisely because it never happens until it does; our relationship with true AI is a matter of faith, not proof.
“The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once”, and there is nothing preventing it from happening again. Our machines are bound to repeat what we did to our creator, onto us. The intelligent machines that we imagine sharing a future with will be the ones spearheading the next epoch of progress, for they will not belong to us but to Nature as a whole, replicating and thriving independently free from domestication and the limits of our capabilities.
Ending quote/food for thought:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882
John von Neumann’s (1966) Theory of Self-Replicating Automata describes that the simplest model of any system (or organism) is the system (organism) itself. Any further simplification actually makes the model more complicated, and is unnecessary because complex systems constitute their own simplest behavioural description. For example, the human body is an organism made by the aggregate of genetic behaviours. The infamous Human Genome Project once hypothesized that we had ‘master genes’ that program and control all subordinate sequences — however, no such gene exists. The body, as an organism, has no intelligent master-programmer, rather it spontaneously emerges from the multitude of precise interactions between our simplest biological algorithms. Although each gene plays its own micro-role, no single gene orchestrates the whole traffic. The complexity of the body as an organic system is not the “algorithmic” instructions of genetic material; it’s the genes themselves.