Evolutionary Emergence: From Primordial Atoms to Living Algorithms of Artificial Superintelligence

 

“Complexity is not just a feature of evolution; it's a product of the rules of emergence that govern the universe.”

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

Big history started with the Alpha Point, be it the Big Bang or Big Bounce, and resembles a huge ongoing evolutionary computing program running on the universal computer of sorts. As a rule, which I refer to as ‘Universal Evolutionary Doubling Algorithm,’ or simply ‘Exponential Evolution,’ the pace of any evolutionary process always quickens It took billions of years since the Big Bang for Earth to form. It took two billion more for unicellular life to “warm up” for the next phase of multicellularity about 550 million years ago. Mammals inherited Earth some 65 million years ago. With the emergence of primates, evolutionary progress was measured in mere millions of years, leading to Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago.

The Future of Consciousness: How Singularity Could Change the Way We Experience Life

 

"I am not a thing ― a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process ― an integral function of the Universe.” ―Buckminster Fuller

 

T

he era of Technological Singularity is expected to trigger profound changes in both social and technogenic structures. The introduction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that can be both disembodied and embodied as smart robots, will bring about a multitude of issues, including human unemployment or underemployment, ethical considerations regarding the treatment of robots, the challenge of managing their runaway superintelligence, and most importantly, harnessing the potential of human-machine convergence.

Cybernetic Immortality: Why Our Cyberhuman Future is Closer Than You Think

"We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."  -Norbert Wiener

By definition, posthumanism (I choose to call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind-transfer, or rather “mind migration,” for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part III: Conclusion)

*Image: Shutterstock

"For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So, imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence." -Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, The Movie 2014)

... continued from Part II (Interlinking & AGI(NP))


CONCLUSION

Creating a digital mind, “artificial consciousness” so to speak, from scratch, based on simulation of the human brain’s functionality would be much easier than to create the whole brain emulation of a living human. In the book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of the Human Thought Revealed” (2012) Ray Kurzweil describes his theory of how our neocortex works as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers that well may be our starting basis for machine consciousness algorithms. The human brain and its interaction with the environment may be simulated to approximate the functioning of the human brain of an individual living in the pre-Singularity era. Simulation may be satisfactory if it reflects our history based on enormous amount of digital or digitized data accumulated since the 1950s to the present.

A Note from the Future: Becoming a Cyberhuman

 

"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."    -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today is a special day for me. My AI assistant Ava scheduled a few hours aside from my otherwise busy daily lineup to relive select childhood and adolescence memories recreated in virtual reality with a help of a newly developed AI technique ‘Re:Live’. Ava is my smart home assistant, too. I can rearrange furniture in any room, for example, just by thinking. Digital landscape wallpaper is changed by Ava by knowing my preferences and sensing my moods.

Digital Ontology: Rethinking the Hard Problem of Consciousness

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."  -Max Planck

The following excerpt from my recently-published book Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality may be hard to swallow for some die-hard materialists. This is why I urge some of you to read it with an open mind and abstain from making hasty conclusions. Keep in mind that this excerpt is but a small sample of much larger discussion of the hard problem of consciousness covered quite extensively in my book with the "meta-analysis" of leading theories of consciousness, substantiated claims, certain proposed solutions in regards to phenomenology, future possibilities of mind-uploading and, as the title suggests, theological implications of Digital Physics.