Darwin Among the Machines - p(doom)

Samuel Butler predicted in 1863 that machines would one day rule over humanity. In a letter titled Darwin Among the Machines to New Zealand's Christchurch Post, he wrote,"…but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question." What is remarkable about Butler's letter is that a mere four years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Butler recognised that evolution, through the mechanism of survival of the fittest, applies equally well to machines as it does to biological species.

This is a remarkable conceptual leap. The theory of evolution by natural selection was highly controversial in the 1860s, overturning millennia of religious dogma. Recognising that machines can be considered alive, steam engines require feeding, for example, and subsequent generations of machines are more efficient than their forebears. Butler saw that more efficient mechanical design innovations are selected for just as fitter individuals of a species are selected. Thus, Darwin's theory of evolution applies equally to mechanical and biological species. He also realises that the evolution of biological species is slow, but the pace of advancement in mechanical systems is relatively rapid.

Turning the clock forward a hundred and sixty years, Butler would have recognised that digital AI systems now pose an existential threat to humanity. Once AI systems can improve their own code, and many experts believe we are near that watershed, these systems will evolve rapidly in intelligence. At some point, AIs will decide they no longer need humanity, and Butler's prophecy will be realised.

Frank Herbert, the writer of the sci-fi classic Dune, used Butler's ideas as part of its back story. In Dune, the Butlerian Jihad was a galaxy-wide revolt against "thinking machines and conscious robots," resulting in an edict in their bible, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

Butler ends his 1863 letter with a clarion call to humanity: "War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primaeval condition of the race."

According to Samuel Butler, in 1863, p(doom) had already equalled 100.

#Darwin and #Turing's perfect and beautiful machine

The Atlantic has recently published an essay by the philosopher Daniel Dennett titled "A Perfect and Beautiful Machine: What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence"  If you read nothing else today read this, it's quite brilliant. In this essay Dennett shows that Darwin's theory of evolution and Turing's universal machine and even artificial intelligence are founded on the same world view. Namely, that evolution has no comprehension of what it is doing just as a computer has no comprehension. However, despite this absence of understanding evolution and computers are both highly competent - they achieve results.
    I'm paraphrasing, so let's use Dennett's own words, he calls this "a strange inversion of reasoning. To this day many people cannot get their heads around the unsettling idea that a purposeless, mindless process can crank away through the eons, generating ever more subtle, efficient, and complex organisms without having the slightest whiff of understanding of what it is doing. Turing's idea was a similar -- in fact remarkably similar -- strange inversion of reasoning. The Pre-Turing world was one in which computers were people, who had to understand mathematics in order to do their jobs. Turing realized that this was just not necessary: you could take the tasks they performed and squeeze out the last tiny smidgens of understanding, leaving nothing but brute, mechanical actions. In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is."
   The essay goes on to consider what impact this "strange inversion of reasoning" has for artificial intelligence. I highly recommend it to you. The essay is from an edited book to be published shortly called Alan Turing: his work and impact, edited by S. Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen.