We’ve had a good run. We’ve out-competed everything. We’ve expanded everywhere. To feed and clothe and educate ourselves, to be the best that we could be (fragile and fraught as that best has proved) we’ve eaten, burned and processed everything. Being smart, we count the entire planet as our environment. And yes: maybe, just maybe, being smart will save us from extinction – the fate that has awaited, and does await, every other species on our planet. But don’t count on it.
What about our robots? They’re not tied to our rules, or to the rules of anything living. Maybe they will survive, even if we do not. This would be a sad thing for us; but, in the grand scheme of things, it might also be a positive thing. It may be that the universe is not particularly interested in life: that life is simply the stepping stone for something else. It may be that the universe is not particularly interested in our particular variety of intelligence, either. In fact I’d bet the farm it’s not.
In the final part of our exploration of machines and machine minds, it’s time to leave our own worries behind, and think about what the world has in store for these others we have made. These monsters. These cuckoos. These runaways. These kids of ours.
How might robots inherit the earth?
Well, they might vanquish us, that’s for certain. And malevolence, or some cold calculation that human beings are a problem that needs to be solved, need not have anything to do with it. Maybe we will go the way of Lennie’s puppy, stroked to death in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Being killed with kindness is the really quite serious threat hanging over the brilliantly unserious world of Brian Trent’s "Director X and the Thrilling Wonders of Outer Space" (2017).
There are other ways we could disappear. We could be subsumed. This is the possible future posed by the "technological singularity," an idea the writer Vernor Vinge first presented at a symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in March 1993. Underpinning Vinge’s paper is the conviction that we are not all that clever, and are already having to supplement our intelligence with mechanical aids. Were these aids to become clever themselves, so that they could build brighter versions of themselves, then, Vinge observes, these would be the last machines we would ever have to invent. Indeed, they might well be the last machines we would ever be given the chance to invent, as our robot overlords went about establishing their dominion.
So far, so far-fetched. But Vinge’s vision is subtler than I, for one, remembered. Re-reading him for this anthology, I came upon the following passage:
"When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. But… there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized for what it is by its developers."
Keep that in mind the next time you tweet a picture of your cat. The Singularity may already have happened. We may already be components of an overmind, content, like the bacteria powering the first eukaryotic cell, to sacrifice certain wants in return for a comfortable life. Vinge’s early-nineties description of the first post-singularity people, "very humanlike, yet with a onesidedness, a dedication that would put them in a mental hospital in our era," neatly describes virtually everyone I know who holds down an office job.
The more millennial strains of Vinge’s original Singularity promise more. Maybe this overmind will achieve dominion over reality at the atomic scale (a power fantasy predating Vinge by decades, and never so deliriously expressed as in A. E. van Vogt’s 1951 story "Fulfillment").
Even more likely, advances in technology will enable us to emulate the world through raw computation. This is, incidentally, Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem’s favoured solution to the puzzler posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi: namely, why the universe, which by rights should be full of life and intelligence, is so silent. Where is everybody?
Lem considered it likely that the universe was spewing up intelligent life all over the place, but that most of it blew itself up, while the rest disappeared into artificial universes of its own devising. Cory Doctorow explores a post-singularity future that’s both transforming the physical and constructing computational worlds in "I, Row-Boat" (2006), my favourite story in this collection, and the sort of principled, tolerant, decent robot future we should be rooting for.
DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES
Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler was born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1835. His father, a vicar, wanted Samuel to follow him into the Church. Samuel, racked with doubts, wanted to be an artist. The prospect so horrified his father, he split the difference and packed his son off to New Zealand to farm sheep. Reading Charles Darwin’s new-fangled theories about evolution inspired Butler to write the whimsical letter reproduced here, and this provided the seed for his first book-length literary work. Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) won him a reputation which he immediately wrecked with The Fair Haven (1873), picking for his satirical targets the four gospels of the New Testament. Adding wrinkles and puzzling addenda to Darwin’s theory of natural selection became Butler’s hobby horse, and it galloped him, book after book, into obscurity. A novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh, is about a young man living at odds with his society. Of its relative neglect, the playwright George Bernard Shaw declared, "Really the English do not deserve to have great men."
To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863.
SIR—
There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed it is matter for great congratulation on many grounds. It is unnecessary to mention these here, for they are sufficiently obvious; our present business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of the human race. If we revert to the earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has been developed, we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine the machinery of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What will be its upshot? To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution of these questions is the object of the present letter.
We have used the words "mechanical life," "the mechanical kingdom," "the mechanical world" and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race.