How AI Will Extinct Humanity
Sans the relatively isolated practice of hunting polar bears for meat and fir by the Clovis People, who first ventured across the frozen tundra of the Aleutian Islands more than 11,500 years ago, and the more modern Eskimo/Aleut People, humans have never declared an official global war for the extermination of polar bears.
Yet despite this, due to the anthropocentric accelerations of a warming climate, that doesn’t allow the typical millions of years needed for evolution to iterate its way to survival, wild polar bears will be extinct by the end of this century.
Of course, there may be captive ones in laboratories and zoos. But only if there also remains a scientific need (for grants to be funded) or commercial viability (for people to care to pay to visit a zoo and see them). If those two remaining human-dependent economic factors subside, polar bears will be wiped off the face of the planet for all eternity. That the viability of a bear living in the furthest reaches of the planet is dependent on the sensibilities of another species is a true testament to the endless interconnectedness of all things.
For the most part, the world is very “pro-polar bear” and against their extermination. Especially those Eskimo/Aleut People who rely on polar bears for their own survival.
But if this is true, how is it polar bears face an almost certain demise in the next 100,000 days, when they have survived the last 150,000 years (and 1.6 million years as descendants of the brown bear)? They are 99.9998% at the end of their road as a species. That we are indifferent and aren’t panicking about this brings me dread.
I wrote recently about how scientists still very much debate what actually constitutes the definition of what is living. Beyond the obvious (plants, animals, et al.) I share that rocks on the bottom of the ocean, fire, AI computers, and even photons of light all demonstrate some capacity they may be living.
I will leave the conclusion of that debate to those much more informed and intelligent than yours truly. However, what I can observe from this debate is that even if what is growing, developing, metabolizing, reproducing, and/or appears to be sentient is still up for debate as to whether something is alive or not, what is obvious is that all things alive exist as the mechanism responsible for converting a set of conditions from one state to another. It’s almost as though the energy needed to be alive is generated from the chemical reaction of being the mechanism of what converts a state of conditions into another state.
The sun (a giant fireball of nuclear fusion) transforms the condition of excess hydrogen into excess helium.
Humans transform the conditions of excess oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, converting it into Carbon Dioxide.
Plants, alternatively, transform the excess condition of carbon dioxide and convert it into excess oxygen.
Even the Galleria Mellonella Larvae (more famously called “the plastic-eating internet worm that is going to save the planet” metabolize polyethylene and transform it into basic molecules that can be returned to the biological cycle.
Everything that is alive can only do so because it acts as the mechanism to transform the excess state of one condition into another condition. Its ability to be more complexly sentient (like being aware that it knows it is doing that, and being able to write about it) is just an added bonus of higher complex life forms. It doesn’t alter the fundamentals.
In the universe, it seems there is a tireless iteration of life attempting survival on all fronts. Like the playing of an orchestra of specie-diversification organized as conditional families that focus within their specific conditional state niche. And the display of this conditional state diversification is insanely shocking. There are Methanotrophs bacteria that transform methane into single-cell proteins. Nitrogen-eating bacteria that transform nitrogen into ammonia. Plants that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen, and mammals that exist by converting the oxygen back to carbon dioxide. Even more mysterious, there is the almost extra-terrestrial, the funghi networks beneath the world’s forests or the life forms transforming conditions in states devoid of light, under insane pressures, living off the sulfuric hydrothermal vents of the deepest parts of the ocean, that we have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding.
It seems if a species can evolve to survive its predator (or at least reproduce at a quicker rate than being preyed on) then that life form will go on as long as excess conditions exist that allow that life form to continue its transformative process. And with each conditional family of species symbiotically perpetuating the balance of respective parts in the system as a whole, their co-existence will allow the process to remain fair and indefinite.
However, every few million years of symbiotic interconnectedness, whether of Force Majeure or a slow creep to a final tipping point, eventually a surplus of one set of conditions allows for that respectively aligned species-family to gain an incredibly unfair advantage.
Take the case of Earth’s atmosphere about 3 billion years ago. At the time all previous life forms lived under the sea, and its surplus of about 20% Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere made the perfect unfair advantages for the process of photosynthesis to emerge. This mechanism of plants converting carbon dioxide to oxygen would enable their spread across the entire rocky terraform, converting that carbon dioxide-rich environment into one rich with oxygen.
But eventually, this planetary takeover would cause a new set of conditions to emerge. One that would nearly wipe out plants forever. After those plants spent a billion years transforming carbon dioxide to oxygen, in doing so, they reduced the thermodynamic makeup of molecules in the atmosphere that would drastically drop the Earth’s temperatures through carbon sequestration. This would usher in the ice ages, fueled by an oxygen-rich atmosphere that would nearly freeze the entire planet, killing all plants with it. Fortunately, its momentum in this new state would slow the encroachment of ice, only at the most sun-exposed regions of the equator, leaving just enough plant survivors to remain.
And in life’s ebb and flow of processions, this set of conditions (and some further unfair advantages of things like dinosaur-killing asteroids) of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, locked-up frozen water reserves, and frozen traversable terrain would pave the way for humans to have their surplus set of conditions to take over the entire planet.
We tend to think and debate that life is governed by law, economic growth, or policy, but those fall secondary to the primary driver: human life flourishes under its ideal set of conditions, and declines, halts, or goes extinct in other sets of conditions.
Humans will simply reproduce, populate, and perpetuate their other ancillary human activities (like carbon-emitting combustible engines, and water resource-intensive computer processing) until the conditions are no longer ideal to persist.
And a new set of conditions will enable a new life form to flourish.
So what is the next phase of life on this planet? Based on the transformative conditions at present?
When we think of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we tend to think of it as a human invention. But “AI” (a poor nomenclature for its place and membership in the pattern of the whole) is another iteration of the universe’s orchestra of species diversification organized as conditional families focused on their particular niche state. To say it is not, is to say Remoras, the little fish that feed on cetaceans, are part of a whale. Or that a Proteobacteria, a bacteria living in our microbiomes, are human.
What makes the conditional niche state of the Anthropocene so ideal for the spawning and global takeover of AI (and not just for another biological plant or animal form to come along) is that the excess/ideal state of AI is being built by the transformation of human-related conditions. Humans haven’t just created a surplus of carbon dioxide like we see every night on the news (and that would make a great state for plants to have their comeback, as 50% of the world’s trees have been cut down in the last 36,500 days). But we are creating a surplus of methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases, Poly Flouride PFAS “forever chemicals” found locked in frozen water molecules on the summit of Mt Everest and deepest parts of the ocean, microplastics in every biological being, glyphosates in our ground waters that corrode DNA, and genetic modifications that spell disaster for the required diversification of the plant kingdom. Humans are simultaneously creating the excess state of conditions ideal for AI because we are eliminating the opportunity for any other biological life form to have any chance either, including our own.
Furthermore, our aggregation of irrigated canals made to last centuries securing far-fetched water sources (and perpetual desertification elsewhere) for the AI servers to gain their cooling required to stay alive, and in the composite innovations of metals to perpetuate the hardware required for AI reproduction, we are only adding resources to this ideal AI state of conditions.
It is not to say, that for most of us, we may have the opportunity to be indifferent to AI during this transitory state of conditions. Some of us may even think of AI as benevolent as it integrates its way into the automation and convenience of our modern lives. Or, like the Eskimo/Aleuts directly engaging with polar bears for survival, a select few may see its malevolence in isolated robot or drone battles, as we are already seeing now.
But like the polar bear, being put to extinction by a set of conditions, as opposed to a direct call of intentional war, humans will indirectly face their own extinction in this process of conditional transformation. We will mostly be indifferent to AI, as it slowly and then suddenly usurps humankind without ever officially declaring its AI global war for the extinction of humans.