Scanning electron micrograph of Tardigrada, or water bear. Image Credit: Rick Gillis and Roger J. Haro Department of Biology University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.
My practice of rising early and tending the fertile rows of content on Steemit (while the meds kick in) has revealed a weed I cannot pull, that must, at last, be allowed it's plot where it can grow to fruition. This is it's form and substance. @sgtreports points out the inevitability of catastrophe, and is not wrong.
My reply there begins this post, itself but the beginning of a series:
An interesting thing about complex systems, such as civilization, is that unexpected concatenations of seemingly unrelated effects occur. Sometimes this results in chaos, as entire systems are then subjected to unpredictable (to we mere humans) perturbations.
Whether you believe that there is some Dr. Evil somewhere pulling all the puppet strings, or that various reachers and graspers are desperately competing for the wealth of the world, this potential for things to suddenly gang aglay remains relevant. For generational cabals that routinely raise empires, milk them, and then birth another from the ashes of the prior they flog to death, this means their plans and secret knowledge can suddenly become useless.
As a young man in the 80s, I was utterly certain that the writing on the wall clearly predicted doom. In many ways I was right, and the world has progressed to the points of concatenation I foresaw. But something new has arisen, which only became apparent to me when I first saw a 3D printer, and heard of 'fab labs', in the late 90s/early 00s.
Transcendence.
I reckon that people will play with fire, like curious apes do, until they get burned. Were people alone going to play with this fire, the wreaking and wrecking of empire, arson would be the certain result. Things eventually get out of hand. This is entirely predictable, and what secret cabals rely on in their fortified bunkers, where they plan on sitting out the conflagration and await the fertile ashes.
What is not predictable is concatenation of new technology and the prophecies of madmen of ancient days, long dead and dust. The rise of the bots on Steemit is glaring evidence that human judgement is being replaced by AI.
Who can know what massively parallel autodidactic processors will learn and employ? Some folks of good intent are concerned, and Neuralink is nascent, born of this last verdant bloom of glorious business farmed in the fertile fields of silicon valley.
The knights and bishops of the world have been pushing the kings and pawns around the board in the long game of serial empire, always winning the game. But the queen is about to be introduced in the game, and none of the moves will make sense anymore to those that have consistently risen in the brackets to the height of the competition.
Various fields of scientific endeavor grow exponentially, despite the poisoning of propaganda designed to replace their crops of knowledge with weeds of ignorance, and continually transform the technology that then becomes the basis of our lives. Stem cells, viral bullets, and organ printing herald godlike genetive power when bioinformatics, epigenetics, and artificial wombs are considered concurrently.
It is not even possible to conceive of the ways in which AI will mutate Tardigrades, for example, to proliferate in environments that have remained eternally sterile.
There is life on Mars. We brought it there on accident, and it is certain to include Tardigrades, or Water Bears. Tardigrades are hardy to the point of utter disbelief, surviving vaccuum, hard radiation, and decades of dormancy while remaining viable. As a result, they are practically ineradicable, and NASA has conceded that they are unable to completely sanitize spacecraft.
The mysteries of how living things are formed from the ineffable complexity of incalculable chemical interactions is revealed to no individual researcher, but a collective intelligence, or AI, may well draw from the totality of what we have learned from tiny incremental experiments to holistically understand, and expand, the particulars of phenotype and behaviour potential of life itself.
While people are individuals, and our finite capabilities therefore segment our understanding, the vast plethora and variety of research and tools extant presently incorporate, at least, the beginnings of control of every facet of living systems. Mere hominids have crafted novel organisms from scratch, and what self aware hyperintelligent computers might bring forth from the totality of knowledge certainly include the utter eradication of disease, death, and extinction.
And this is but one field where that capacity of AI to agglomerate the sum of knowledge can be envisioned to bridge the gap between individuals and cause a qualitative leap of orders of magnitude in reach. In the next post in the series I will consider manufacturing and materials.
