مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

from the magnificent portfolio of evolution’s accomplishments so far, the assumption that the ‘human page’ could be its last one, as far as the growth of intelligence is concerned, is simply indefensible. It seems as naively anthropocentric as was the image of the flat Earth carried by elephants and turtles. Why would nature seize spawning forms, which are ever more curious, creative, and intelligent? Why would our own cognitive capacities remain the top evolutionary jackpot forever? The history of intelligence on Earth does not substantiate such a presumption, only our sense of self-importance does. Exposing it in our thinking and hypothesizing about what might come next, is therefore by no means an extravagancy. It is a responsibility of science.

Luckily, this responsibility is not being neglected. While there is no sign of a challenger emerging from within the biosphere, the keenest watch today is being kept elsewhere: on the intelligence which is called ‘artificial’. It seems now that we are starting to abandon yet another undue anthropocentric belief that the Artificial, which is passing through our own hands, is in a simple opposition to the Natural and, as such, is excluded from the workings of evolution. Why would the fact of ‘passing through’ our own hands qualify an outcome fundamentally differently than the fact of passing through the workings of chemical reactions? After all, everything in the universe, perhaps with an exception of the universe alone, comes to being through something else. Today, the view that the next grand stage in evolution will belong to the human-created Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a mere science fiction; it is a viable scientific hypothesis (e.g. Moravec, 2000; Chalmers, 2010; Shulman and Bostrom, 2012; Goertzel and Goertzel, 2015).

Another watch for the superhuman intelligence, albeit kept by a much smaller group of scholars so far, focuses not so much on a potential new entity, as on a potential new scale, at which the new intelligence is most likely to appear. The key assumption in this line of thinking is based on a realisation which leaves anthropocentrism even further behind: the new superintelligence does not have to be embodied in a form that would correspond to our own in any way. It may as well emerge as a system whose complexity, including sheer size, will render an individual human quite microscopic. While the idea does appear fantastic when applied to human beings, for nature such shifts between scales –called ‘metasystem transitions’ (Turchin, 1977; Heylighen, 1995)– ares nothing new. A metasystem transition has happened, for instance, when the intelligence of single celled organisms –the most intelligent forms on the planet at that time– got radically outmatched by the cognitive capacity of newly assembling multicellular creatures. The hypothesis that a similar process may be happening again, and this time – to us, has been most fully formulated in the theory of the Global Brain (Mayer-Kress and Barczys, 1995; Goertzel, 2001; Heylighen, 2008, 2012, 2015; Last, 2014). The theory does not foresee humans getting physically clustered into some giant organism, as no signs of such a process can be observed. Instead, it points to the ever-thickening, evercomplicating global network of communication, which we are all increasingly busy with contributing to and processing of. Patterns of that activity do appear familiar. They resemble patterns of activation of neurons in the brain (Heylighen, 2014a) and vice versa: the functioning of the brain proves to be well comparable to the functioning of modern society (Minsky, 1983). The theory concludes that, on the largest scale, all this activity seems like one gigantic brain in the making. In the Global Brain (GB) scenario the next stage of the evolution of intelligence belongs to a complex, adaptive, cognising network of interconnected agents: humans and technological systems (Heylighen, 2015). A thinking, computing, analysing and strategizing, problem-spotting and problem-solving organ of the planet Earth herself.