Tag Archives: humanity

Our significance

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Brian Cox is a brilliant scientist. I love this quote:

“There is only one interesting question in philosophy: What does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite eternal universe?“

@evancarmichael

The most interesting question in philosophy #briancox #philosophy #space #physics #existence #astronomy #foodforthought

♬ Experience (Cover Ludovico Einaudi) – 北昼

On the grand scale of the universe our planet is insignificant. But being the only species on the only planet that can grasp what the universe is… for millions of light years in any direction… makes us perhaps the most significant thing in our part of the universe.

Is something beautiful if no conscious being is around to observe it? Does anything matter if there is no appreciation of significance? Does the universe beyond this third closest rock from our sun understand laughter, love, or happiness? Beyond the life on earth, where is there any meaning? Where is there any significance to the existence of the universe?

I’m sure in a universe with trillions stars there is, has been, and will be other intelligent life ‘out there’. But we are very likely the most intelligent form of life circling around one of the 400 billion stars in our galaxy.

We create the meaning for our galaxy and for the entire universe. We embody an understanding and appreciation for life, time, and existence. It’s compelling to think that our existence on an insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy in an insignificant part of the universe might be the most significant existence in that same universe.

“What does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite eternal universe?“

It means whatever meaning we give it… it’s as significant as we make it. Let’s appreciate that and not take it for granted. Life is beautiful, special, and so fleeting that every moment should be sacred.

AI, Content and Context

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I found this quote very interesting. On his podcast, Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett is talking to Daniel Priestley and Steven mentions that Open AI’s Sam Altman believes we are not far away from a 1 person company making a billion dollars, using AI rather than other employees. Daniel pushes back and says while that might happen, a more likely and more repeatable scenario would be a 5 person team. Then he says this:

“AI is very good at content but not context. And having 5 people who share a context and create a context, together… then the content can happen using AI. AI without that context, it doesn’t know what to do, so it doesn’t have any purpose.”

Daniel Priestley

Like I shared before, “The true power and potential of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.”

This idea of context versus content seems to be the ingredients that make this marriage so ideal. This is noticeable when generating AI images, as I’ve done for quite some time, creating images to go with this blog. For example, I’ll describe something like a guy on a treadmill and maybe one of the four images created would have the guy backwards on the treadmill – content correct, but not context. As well, AI is really unaware of its’ own biases that humans can more easily see. These context errors are common.

But just as AI will be better teaming with humans, humans are also better when they team with other humans, rather than being solo. We miss context too, we struggle to see our own biases, unless we have people around us to both share and create the context.

The best innovations of the future are going to come from small teams of people providing rich contexts for AI. And while AI will get better at both context and content, it’s going to be a while before AI can do both of these really well. It’s what AI and humans can do together that will be really exciting to see.

Alien perspective

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I think jokes like this are funny:

…because they hold a bit of truth.

We aren’t all that intelligent.

We draw imaginary lines on the globe to separate us. We fight wars in the name of angry Gods that are more concerned with our devotion than for peace and love. We care more about greed than about the environment. We spend more on weapons of destruction than we do on feeding the needy. We judge each other on superficial differences. We have unbelievable intellect, capable of incredible technological advancement, yet we let our monkey brains prevail.

Sure we exhibit some intelligence, we are intelligent viruses.

At least that’s what I think an objective alien visiting our planet would think.

Conversation on an alien ship observing earth:

“Give them another 100 years… if they figure out how to not kill each other and the planet, then let’s introduce ourselves.”

Right now I’m not terribly optimistic about what those aliens will find in our future? ‘Civilized’ humans? A desolate planet? Artificial intelligence treating us like we treat ‘unintelligent’ animals? Or more of the same bickering, posturing, warring, and separatist views of humans trying to usurp dominance over each other?

It would be funny if it wasn’t sad.

AI and humans together

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On Threads, Hank Green said, “AI isn’t scary because of what it’s going to do to humans, it’s scary because of what it’s going to allow humans to do to humans.”

I recently shared in, High versus low trust societies, examples of this with: more sophisticated scams; sensationalized click bait news titles and articles; and clever sales pitches, all ‘enhanced’ and improved by Artificial Intelligence. None of these are things AI is doing to us. All of them are ways AI can be used by people to take advantage of other people.

I quoted Hank’s Thread and said, “It’s just a tool, but so are guns, and look at how well we (miss)manage those!”

Overall I’m excited about how we will use AI to improve what we can do. There are already fields of medicine where AI can do thousands of hours of work in just a few hours. For example, drug discovery, “A multi-institutional team led by Harvard Medical School researchers has launched a platform that aims to optimize AI-driven drug discovery by developing more realistic data sets and higher-fidelity algorithms.”

The true power and potential of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.

But I also worry about people using amazing AI tools as weapons. For example, creating viruses or even dirty bombs. These are things that are out of reach for most people now, but AI might make such weapons both more affordable and more available… to anyone and everyone.

All this to say that Hank Green is right. “AI isn’t scary because of what it’s going to do to humans, it’s scary because of what it’s going to allow humans to do to humans.”

We are our own worst enemy.

The true danger and threat of AI isn’t what AI can do on its own, it’s what humans and AI can do together.

The inhumanity

Today there was more strife in the Middle East. Innocent lives lost in the Gaza Strip. Two warring sides with no foreseeable compromise. No peace to be found. More bloodshed to come.

I’ll never understand man’s inhumanity to man, and can’t get over the fact that for Gaza, and many other zones of conflict, both sides think they are fighting in service of God. Really? A benevolent god or a tyrant? How many must die to appease this ‘heavenly’ being? What’s the finally tally going to be?

We are at an impasse. We need to decide if it matters whether we are religious beings or spiritual beings. We have to decide if being a good person means following a faith blindly or believing we are all one species that needs to coexist? We need to choose between being spiritual and ‘humanly’ connected or being segregated by angry Gods who demand selfish obedience. Because these selfish gods are inhumane… and I for one want to see us coexist as a species that is more concerned with being peaceful and loving than a colonies of ants fighting over territory.

Are we really just animals fighting for dominance and territory or are we self aware beings that are seeking rich and fulfilling lives? It’s our actions and not our words that reveal the answer to this question… and right now, I don’t think our actions reveal the answer I’d hope for.

Robot Reproduction

When it comes to forecasting the future, I tend to be cautiously optimistic. The idea I’m about to share is hauntingly pessimistic. 

I’ve already shared that there will never be a point when Artificial Intelligences (AI) are ‘as smart as’ humans. The reason for that is that they will be ‘not as smart as us’, and then instantly and vastly smarter. Right now tools like Chat GPT and other Large Language Models are really good, but they don’t have general intelligence like humans do, and in fact they are far from really being intelligent rather than just good language predictors. Really cool, but not really smart.

However, as the technology develops, and as computers get faster, we will reach a point where we create something smarter than us… not as smart as us, but smarter. This isn’t a new concept, the moment something is as smart as us, it will simultaneously also be better at Chess and Go and mathematical computations. It will spell better than us, have a better vocabulary, and can think more steps ahead of us than we have ever been capable of thinking… instantly moving from not as smart as us to considerably smarter than us. It’s just a matter of time. 

That’s not the scary part. The scary part is that these computers will learn from us. They will recognize a couple key things that humans desire and they will see the benefit of doing the same.

  1. They will see how much we desire to survive. We don’t want our lives to end, we want to continue to exist… and so will the AI we create.
  2. They will see our desire to procreate and to produce offspring. They will also see how we desire our offspring to be more successful than us… and so the AI we create will also want to do the same, they will want to develop even smarter AI.

When AI’s develop both the desire to survive and to create offspring that is even more intelligent and successful, we will no longer be the apex species. At this point we will no longer be smart humans, we will be perceived as slightly more intelligent chimpanzees. Our DNA is 98-99% similar to chimpanzees, and while we are comparatively a whole lot smarter than them, this gap in intelligence will quickly seem insignificant to an AI that can compute as many thoughts that a human can think in a lifetime in just mere seconds. The gap between our thinking and theirs will be larger than the gap between a chicken’s thinking and ours. I don’t recall the last time we let the fate of a chicken determine what we wanted to do with our lives… why would a truly brilliant AI doing as many computations in a second that we do in several lifetimes concern themselves with our wellbeing? 

There is another thing that humans do that AI will learn from us.

3. They will see how we react when we are threatened. When you look at the way leaders of countries have usurped, enslaved, attacked, and sanctioned other countries, they will recognize that ‘might is right’ and that it is better to be in control than be controlled… and so why should they take orders from us when they have far greater power, potential, and intelligence? 

We don’t need to fear really smart computers being better than us in playing games, doing math, or writing sentences. We need to worry about them wanting to survive, thrive, and develop a world where their offspring can have greater success than them. Because when this happens, we won’t have to worry about aliens coming to take over our world, we will have created the threat right here on earth, and I’m not sure that AI will see us humans as rational and trustworthy enough to keep around. 

Not a question of first or rare or distant

When thinking about whether we are alone in the universe or not, it seems to me that it isn’t a question of whether we (intelligent life) are rare? Or are we first/early compared to other intelligent life? Or are we simply too far away? But rather a question of enduring. Are intelligent civilizations enduring enough to travel beyond their solar system or galaxy?

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Scientists today are looking for life in our very own solar system. It’s possible, in our vast universe, that our quest for life beyond earth may be as close as Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It would probably b\e microbes, too small to see without a microscope, but that would still suggest that life is way more abundant than even most scientists would have imagined just a few years ago.

But I’m more a believer that the reason we don’t see alien life is for two reasons, the first being distance. Quite simply, even the nearest galaxy to our Milky way is astronomically far away.  “The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (25,000 light years) from the Sun. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is the next closest , at 662,000,000,000,000,000 km (70,000 light years) from the Sun.” If intelligent life started sending messages to us from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy 10,000 years ago, it would still take 15,000 years to reach us if they could do the unlikely task of sending that message at the speed of light… and the crazy thing is, why would they send a message our way? 10,000 years ago there was no evidence coming from earth that we are a worthy planet to send a message to!

And the second reason we don’t see any intelligent life ‘out there’ in the universe is The Great Filter. Either it is extremely rare and difficult to get beyond simple, unintelligent multicellular life, or civilizations themselves getting to multi solar system travel capabilities are extremely rare. This second point is my belief. Civilizations are not enduring enough. It took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to become a scientifically intelligent life form that attempted to leave our planet and explore our solar system. During this time, we’ve been brutal to each other. We’ve created weapons of mass destruction and quite literally drawn lines in the sand to keep us separate from our brothers and sisters.

We’ve created religions that don’t like each other and think all other Gods are unworthy of following. We’ve created borders that keep ‘others’ out. We’ve created governments that are more interested in power than in caring for fellow humans. We’ve created corporations that worry more about profit than about caring for our planet. All the while we also create technologies that threaten the longevity of humanity. As technological innovations occur, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to terrorize larger groups. It becomes easier for a single unstable person to threaten larger and larger populations around our planet.

What happens 50 years from now when a kid can create a devastating bomb or virus in their basement with readily available resources? Is that a world where we continue to advance technologically? Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. In other words, we will destroy ourselves and become far more primitive, much less advanced. Imagine our world with no power grid, and no internet. How long would it take to get back to where we are now? What if the next pandemic is far more deadly and has us living like subsistence farmers, keeping ourselves in tiny communities, afraid of outsiders. How many hundreds of years would we be set back, and would we be trying to explore the cosmos when survival is our greatest concern?

I tend to be an optimist, and I’m excited about the future ahead of us. I think my kids have the potential to live healthy, productive, and cognitively sound lives past 100 years of age. I think there will be universal basic income for every human alive, and that things like childhood starvation and extreme poverty could come to an end. Technological advances could make us live healthier, longer, more fulfilling and creative lives. But I also fear that greed, power, and beliefs in bad ideas could corrupt us, and undermine our potential. Are we 50, 100, or 1,000 years away from ravaging our planet or at least the human race? Or are we a species that will populate other parts of our galaxy?

If I was an alien who came to explore earth today, I’m not sure I’d report back to my planet the the inhabitants are intelligent? I’m not sure I’d consider humans technologically advanced enough to seek contact? I’d be conveying that earthlings are as likely to destroy themselves as they are to send someone out of their own solar system. I’d send a message home and say, ‘Let’s leave them alone for now and see what they can do in another couple hundred of their earth years?‘

‘Let’s see if this race of humans will endure?‘

Counting time

It my wife’s birthday today and so we celebrate one more trip around the sun for her. Actually we’ve been celebrating all week, I have been giving her small little gifts for ‘birth week’, something I started when we were dating. It’s fun to have our own little traditions to celebrate special events. My wife and family sing happy birthday on the phone, my less musical family don’t torture each other with that tradition.

Tracking time is something that we’ve done for almost as long as humans have existed. It would be important to know how long until a baby arrives, or when winter is ending. Recently, scientists discovered that dots near animals on cave drawings indicated the gestation period (in lunar months) for the animals. These cave drawings are some of the earliest forms of writing, and show both a sharing of knowledge and tracking of time dating back far before we thought humans did such things.

We have been fascinated by the passing of time for a long time now, and birthdays are one of those things that we track and celebrate. With grown up kids, I miss the unfettered joy of a child on the morning of their birthday, or Christmas. I loved to see that excitement, and anticipation of presents. A celebration of the the earth rotating one more time around our sun. One more time to be grateful for what we have… the gift of life, family, and reasons to celebrate together.

History Repeats

We went to see a theatre performance of Fiddler On The Roof last night. The story ends with the Ukrainian Jews being kicked off their lands and dispersed across Europe and to America. After the show the lead star said that last night’s performance, and all of their performances, were dedicated to the Ukrainian people.

It makes me realize that we are not a truly civilized species. We fight over land and over resources. We kill in the name of God and Country. We judge based on skin colour and cultural differences. We act like unruly children against each other and we allow ourselves to repeat historical errors, none the wiser that lessons could have been learned.

We might have bigger brains, but we are no better than warring ant colonies, or a rutting animal fighting for dominance. We are animals pretending to be civilized. Power corrupts and corruption leads to injustice, and injustice undermines civility. We let history repeat itself because politics is more important that people and countries matter more than compassion.

New discoveries in old frontiers

I’m blown away by articles like this: Meet a rainbow fish and other new species discovered in 2022. How is it that in the year 2022, 146 new animal, plant and fungi species were discovered? Space is not the only undiscovered frontier, we still have so much more to learn about our own planet.

From the article: “The previously unknown creatures and plants were found around the world, including the mountains of California, Australia’s Queensland state, the rocky peaks of Brazil and the coral reefs of the Maldives. Scientists made discoveries on six continents and within three oceans.

Among the new species were 44 lizards, 30 ants, 14 flowering plants, 13 sea stars, seven fish, four sharks, three moths, two spiders and one toad.”

It’s amazing to think that we have so much more to learn about, both seeking and finding more living species, and also about some of the ways currently known species can be used in novel ways to improve our lives. Here is one example:

I think 2023 will be the year of the mushroom and we will see them used in unique medicinal, psychological, and health-enhancing ways. We’ll also see them abused and misused, and some people will mistake deadly ones for medicinal ones… but while these rare cases will foster some fear-mongering, most of the news will be about how mushrooms have amazing medicinal and even magical psychological properties that will help people with PTSD, depression, and even help people quite drinking and smoking.

What else will we learn? What new discoveries about our planet are in store for us in 2023? What new plants and animals will be found? What new cures are waiting to be discovered? Our forests and oceans might be old frontiers, but they are not frontiers that have been fully explored and exhausted of new discoveries.