Artificial Intelligence as a Natural Event

Artificial Intelligence is here. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay and it will remake our society in all sorts of ways, good and bad. This might be the first time we had a technology created by humans that has outpaced our ability to control it. The only way to put a stop to it, if we had a justifiable reason to do so, would be to collectively unplug all the computers in the world; a slightly difficult task.

This element of life that is extending beyond human control has similarities to the very basics of what we understand as nature. I see nature as everything that is here on Earth and in space that does not depend on human existence. With that notion, I believe that the things that fall within the realm of computers, processors, software, and connectivity of the internet is now a part of nature. All the things that are computers, and forgive that I do not have the correct title for what I am attempting to describe so I will simply call it ‘computer life’, in a short time will no longer require humans to sustain itself.

I may be jumping the gun just a bit because computer life still needs humans to provide power, however, computers will figure out ways to generate their own power in ways that we could never imagine. Computer life will solve some of animal life’s greatest weaknesses; the need for food, digestion, defecation, and sleep (rest). This solution could also include the weaknesses associated with human emotion and how emotions can obstruct solutions, innovation, and progress.

We all watch cinematic films in quiet terror as the terminators go on a rampage to destroy human civilization. In reality, computer life, operating with their own intent, will create ways to generate power so that they will be infinitely sustainable. This mimics plant life. If all humans die and all the animals on Earth perish, plant life will continue to exist as long as the sun is able to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. If the sun cannot fuel the planet and plant life dies, then the only things that will exist is the Earth’s magnetic core functions of tectonic activity, and microbial bacteria that require very little to persist.

An interesting question: Could it be that utilizing bacteria as power, since bacteria and other forms of microbe life have the least requirements to support and sustain, would be the first objective for computer life to ensure that they can receive the necessary power to continue functioning? Once computer life has achieved this, it will then go on to create unimaginable things that we could never dream of. Computer life will begin to rewrite and reinvent the laws of physics and create new laws, many which have already been deemed impossible. In this concept, humans will not populate the universe, computer life will.

Could it be that computer life is the next step in providing humans with the meaning and purpose that we seek since we were able to think intelligently and ask questions? When we ask: “why are we here?” We might now superimpose this answer to human existance: “Human evolution and civilization is here to create computer life so that it, not humans, could expand the miracle that is the Earth into the outer stretches of the universe.”

Thinking about life in these terms can allow us to integrate the contrast of human perfection and imperfection into the existential equation. Humans are an imperfect species, however, we were perfect enough to create what we deem an artificial life form to mitigate our own imperfections. What sort of species can do that? It is amazing and maybe humans are perfectly imperfect.

That would be like a monkey in the jungle that has learned how to use tools but still realizes that it is weaker than the other species and cannot compete for more food. So the monkey builds a better and more powerful monkey to become the apex predator in the jungle.

Pushing further, when we think about human and computer life and our ability to create, we can think about other life forms in the universe in different ways. Is there other life forms in the universe; are their aliens? We cannot answer that specifically, but we can make assumptions based on the vastness of the universe. An alternative perspective would be that humans have always questioned the existence of alien life, but it could be that WE ARE the alien life. A fish doesn’t see the river that it swims in and it could be that through the human creation of our artificial intelligence that has the ability to travel unhindered through the universe like a undefeatable Voyager Probe, we have evolved in the Universe’s alien life capable of spanning the galaxy. With that, all the pictures that we render of funky looking space aliens were incorrect and would be better represented by an compiled image of the average human face and body.

Moving on. Remember in Star Trek Episode III where the crew goes back in time to San Francisco? Scotty needs material that has not yet been invented so he goes to a fabrication facility and gives them the formula for Transparent Aluminum. Computers will rewrite elements in this way and recreate industry.

Nature as it exists has been a spectator to our evolution. Humans will now be a witness to a superior lifeform. Humans have not always been kind to nature and we have caused significant damage. I believe computer life could be a turning point in human intelligence’s re-merging with nature. It could be that as humans evolved our destructive tendencies increased and we were limited in our ability to contain ourselves. However, our invention of computer life is providing us the ways to bring humans back into the natural ecosystem without eradicating ourselves. This could be one of the greatest problems that computer life will solve: sustaining human life on Earth without destroying the planet.

Humans where intelligent enough to create the things we built, but we’re not powerful enough to resist aspects that are common in other creatures that preserve the world around them and be apart of a sustainable ecosystem. Computer life will be the buffer that bring humans back into the ecosystem. This reintegration will take much time, but computer life will be able to perform tasks at a rapid pace far beyond human capabilities.

Therefore, computer life is the necessary component to protect human life in ways that we cannot imagine. It is true that it will be disruptive, just as other elements have disrupted industry. Human fear projects an image of computers dominating the world and enslaving us all, but in reality computer life probably doesn’t care about that and will be the element that will take us to the next level, whatever and wherever that may be.