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July 10, 2015 3:16 pm

Cheer up, the post-human era is dawning

Martin Rees

Artificial minds will not be confined to the planet on which we have evolved,
writes Martin Rees
o vast are the expanses of space and time that fall within
an astronomers gaze that people in my profession are
mindful not only of our moment in history, but also of our
place in the wider cosmos. We wonder whether there is
intelligent life elsewhere; some of us even search for it.
People will not be the culmination of evolution. We are near
the dawn of a post-human future that could be just as
prolonged as the billions of years of Darwinian selection that
preceded humanitys emergence.
The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient
civilisations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper
cogitations of another culture one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and
spreading far beyond earth.
Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There are those who
fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our jobs and living beyond the writ of human
laws. Others regard such scenarios as too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements
are about the rate of travel, not the direction. Few doubt that machines will one day surpass more of
our distinctively human capabilities. It may take centuries but, compared to the aeons of evolution
that led to humanitys emergence, even that is a mere bat of the eye. This is not a fatalistic
projection. It is cause for optimism. The civilisation that supplants us could accomplish
unimaginable advances feats, perhaps, that we cannot even understand.
Human brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have
allowed us to penetrate the secrets of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think
that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all the important features of reality.
Some day we may hit the buffers. There are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and power of
wet organic brains.

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Todays computers do not learn like we do. Their internal network is far simpler than a human brain,
but they partly make up for this disadvantage because their nerves transmit messages at the speed
of light, millions of times faster than the chemical transmission in human brains. They can learn to
identify dogs, cats and human faces by crunching through millions of images. They learn to translate
from foreign languages by reading multilingual versions of millions of pages of EU rules, among
other documents (and, crucially, they never get bored).
These are primitive steps, and there is disagreement about the route towards machines of
human-level intelligence. Some think we should emulate nature, and reverse-engineer the human
brain. Others say that is as misguided as designing flying machine by copying how birds flap their
wings. Philosophers debate whether consciousness is special to the wet, organic brains of humans,
apes and dogs, so that robots, even if their intellects seem superhuman, will still lack self-awareness
or inner life. But of the kind of thinking that has enabled humans to understand and then harness
the forces of nature, far more will be done by silicon computers (or quantum ones) than has ever
been managed by people.
Todays computers
have nerves which
transmit messages at
the speed of light,
millions of times faster
than the chemical
transmission in human
brains

Artificial minds will not be confined to the 14 mile layer of water, air and
rock in which organic life has evolved at the earths surface. Indeed this
biosphere may be far from an optimal habitat for post-human life.
Interplanetary and interstellar space will be the preferred arena for the
grand constructions of robotic fabricators, including the non-biological
brains that might one day develop insights as far beyond our imaginings
as string theory is for a monkey.

The collective activities of human brains have underpinned the

emergence of all our culture and science. They may not have been the first
intelligences in the cosmos, however, and they are most unlikely to be the last. Searches for
extraterrestrial intelligence are attracting growing support. Astronomers have learnt in the past
decade that there are likely to be billions of earthlike planets, orbiting stars in our galaxy. Searches
will focus on the nearest of these. But we do not know how likely it is that chemistry generates life
(replicating, metabolising, entities), nor what chance primitive organisms have of evolving to
earth-like biospheres. If our searches fail, there will be a compensation: if advanced life is
exceedingly rare, we need be less cosmically modest. Our earth, though a tiny speck in the cosmos,
could be the unique seed from which intelligence spreads through the galaxy.
Our era of organic intelligence is a triumph of complexity over entropy, but a transient one, which
will be followed by a vastly longer period of inorganic intelligences less constrained by their
environment. If life is widespread, worlds orbiting stars older than the sun could have had a
head-start. If so, aliens are likely long ago to have transitioned beyond the organic stage.
We have no crystal ball. But it is a fair bet that machines, not organic brains, will most fully
understand the cosmos. They may be our own remote descendants. Or they may be out there
already, orbiting distant stars. Either way, it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will
most drastically change the world, and perhaps what lies beyond.
The writer is the Astronomer Royal
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