Will aliens be smarter than us
Miscellaneous / / January 06, 2022
The collective superintelligence that science fiction writers have written about is hardly possible.
In films, books, and video games, aliens often turn out to be representatives of a highly developed civilization and far exceed humans in their abilities. Will it really be so? It is not yet clear, says Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist and professor at Cambridge University.
In the book "A Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy. What terrestrial animals can tell about aliens - and about ourselves ”, the scientist analyzes our space neighbors using the theory of evolution. With the permission of Alpina Non-Fiction Publishing House, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from the sixth chapter.
We usually assume that aliens will certainly be smarter than us. Naturally, on any alien planet, we will find a huge variety of life, while some creatures will be more intelligent, others less. In addition to a species like us, technologically advanced and capable of communication, it will be possible there meet the whole spectrum of the animal world with different levels of cognitive abilities, up to an alien analogue jellyfish.
But we often, and not unreasonably, believe that those aliens with whom we can establish communication, will turn out to be more advanced in terms of technology development than we are. Our species mastered radio communication only a little over 100 years ago; we are at the very beginning of technological development, and therefore it is highly likely that the alien civilization we meet will be ahead of us in development.
It may be older or younger than ours, but if we find this civilization at a random moment, it history, then the likelihood that this will happen in the first 100 years after the invention of their radio is extremely small. In the face of civilizations that can exist for millions of years, our chances of being the coolest guys in The universe are negligible.
At the same time, the duration of the existence of a civilization does not guarantee a higher intellectual level of its representatives. They may be more technologically advanced, but does that mean they will be smarter?
Imagine that the human race will live for another million years: undoubtedly, our technology will go far ahead, but will this happen to our mental faculties? Does a species always evolve in the direction of ever higher intelligence over time - or can it reach a "ceiling" of mental abilities beyond which it can no longer rise?
Science fiction is clearly dominated by the belief that the aliens we meet will be superintelligent. But science fiction describes at least two different types of superintelligence: the one that is essentially a product of technological progress, and one that has developed in a species during biological evolution.
Speaking in the language of science fiction, there is a difference between a civilization that "only" has ultra-high-speed powerful starships, and one that has its evolutionary development has outgrown the need for such technologies and, possibly, acquired such superpowers as telepathy and telekinesis.
In the first case, one can imagine that, having reached a particularly high level of technological development, an alien (or even our own) civilization will be able to transfer all tasks that require intelligence to be solved on computers, and the minds of biological living organisms will be freed up for others classes.
Perhaps we will reflect on the secrets of the universe, philosophize, discover scientific truths and develop other intellectual hobbies. Or maybe just play Tetris and watch videos about cats in some kind of Internet; both we and aliens can always have a choice between superintelligence and supernatural.
In the first case, we would not only have more time for leisure (and scientists - for research), because technology would save us from the daily struggle for existence - they would also contribute to the growth of scientific knowledge thanks to larger and improved radio telescopes, faster computers, and all kinds of wonderful scanners and detectors such as TV series "Star Trek".
If we had a chance to meet ourselves, what we will become in 1000 years, we would consider these people from the future as a "highly developed" civilization.
However, our biological intelligence as a whole would remain the same. Yes, we would probably be smarter, but, in essence, we would remain the same species. Robert Sawyer's brilliant science fiction novel Calculating God explores how technologically advanced and biologically, a race of aliens completely unlike us visits Earth, where they mainly conduct philosophical discussions with the main character, human. Obviously, for all their technological progress, there is still more to these aliens. secrets The universe is unraveled.
But what about the second scenario, namely the possibility of the existence of an alien race with intellectual abilities, far exceeding ours and formed in the course of natural biological evolution? Can we come up with any plausible biological scenario according to which this could happen? And is there any need at all for natural selection to produce adaptations in the form of superintelligent abilities far superior to those with which we already do we have?
Terrestrial animals followed a path that is probably very typical: they needed to predict the properties of the world around them. Therefore, they have developed physiological and anatomical adaptations that allow them to predict changes in their environment. the world with the help of information received from the senses, and a certain apparatus for processing it, which we call brain.
Any alien species that embraces a more unpredictable environment will face more complex challenges and develop more complex, more efficient, flexible, and precise brains. If intelligent animals have social skills - which I find very likely - then they have speech will certainly develop in one form or another in order to transmit the thoughts that are born in their brains to other members of their groups. Following this logic, we can assume that such a process will eventually lead to the development of technology.
As soon as a species reaches the required level of technological development, it will be able to construct a "brain" more powerful than its own - a kind of analogue of artificial intelligence. This level of development is close to the one at which we are now or will find ourselves in the next 100-200 years.
From that moment on, the intellectual development of the individual and society can, of course, continue, but the evolutionary pressure of selection on the intellect will no longer exist in us as a biological species. Why get smarter when all tasks are completed computers?
The pressure of natural selection that could lead to the development of our superintelligence will simply disappear.
What about the emergence of an intelligent but non-social species? I doubt that technological development is possible without sociality; no individual, no matter how smart, is simply unable to independently design a starship or a computer (who will give him a wrench?).
If the environment continues to pose problems for this type, which are easier to solve with the help of more developed intelligence, the brain of such organisms can continue to grow, become more complex, improve. This path to the emergence of superintelligence looks at least possible, although unlikely.
Fred Hoyle's novel "Black Cloud" depicts just such a type of solitary intelligent creature, wandering through the Universe, moreover, endowed with abilities that go far beyond the capabilities of any humanoid species, even if the evolution of that species continued unimaginably for a long time.
Hoyle's character is completely biologically implausible. Continuous selection pressure on intelligence can only arise if representatives of this type are constantly faced with problems, for the solution of which it is necessary to become smarter and cleverer.
It is difficult to imagine an ecosystem in which limitless intelligence continues to work on practical solutions to the problems of everyday life. Sooner or later, the problems of existence that need to be solved will be exhausted. In fact, as is often the case with superintelligent aliens - heroes sci-fi works, the mind of the Black Cloud is more an end in itself, and not a means of increasing fitness in the process of evolution.
Evolution has no goal, it strives only for relative improvements in the already existing capabilities of the organism.
This means that the concept of the existence of superintelligent aliens who simply plow the expanses of the Universe, philosophizing for the sake of their own intellectual pleasure, with all its attractiveness, unfortunately, biologically unconvincing.
Thus, the likelihood of the appearance of a real biological superintelligence, which arose by evolution in as a result of the constant need to solve all the new complex problems thrown up by the environment, it seems dubious. Or the improvement of the brain will be replaced by technology development, or intellectual tasks of this type will eventually be exhausted.
However, there is another mechanism for the emergence of the true superintelligence in the course of evolution. According to this scenario, the consciousness of numerous individuals completely and almost instantly merges into a single thought process. Like a supercomputer consisting of many small computers working in parallel, such a colony of intelligent beings can indeed be perceived as a single superintelligent organism.
And in nature, of course, you can find many similar analogs. Many creatures live in colonies, swarms, or even form temporary clusters, which seem to have an independent intelligence that far exceeds the capabilities of individual individuals.
One of these most impressive examples is schools of fish. Each fish, choosing a direction, is guided by fairly simple rules, moving taking into account where they swim and at what distance from it its nearest neighbors are. But as soon as hundreds of such fish get together, the behavior of the school as a whole begins to seem reasonable.
A shark or dolphin tries to attack the center of the school, but the school, as if by magic, is divided, and the predator is left with nothing. The fact that a congregation of fish can exhibit such adaptive and seemingly intelligent behavior, while each individual is separate is not capable of this, serves as the simplest example of emergent superintelligence: the whole is always greater than the sum parts.
Another example of emergent intelligence can be found in a honey bee colony. When a new bee family needs to move out, scouts fly out of the hive to explore the places available for habitation. Each bee returns to the old hive and informs the sisters of the benefits of the new place she discovered. The swarm, ready to fly, faces two problems: numerous scouts may "recommend" different places, but each of them can "talk" with only a few bees, and not with the entire swarm.
Since it would be disastrous for the swarm to fly in different directions, some way to reach a consensus is required. But how to do that? Bees don't have a decision maker. Again, simple rules dictate complex behavior. If a scout bee recommends a place that is promising, from her point of view, she can convince many bees to follow her and also inspect the future housing. Each of these bees, upon returning, will give their own recommendations, and thus information about accessible places for resettlement is integrated into a system that can be called (in every sense) The "brain" of the swarm.
Only this brain is not a part of the body, but a collective consisting of individual individuals, each of which communicates with only a few neighbors (about the same as neurons in our brain connected to only a few neighboring neurons). Competing proposals vie for the attention of this collective brain, and eventually a tipping point comes, the swarm agrees and leaves the hive.
Although we perceive colonies as formations consisting of separate individuals, each of which has its own interests and its own thinking abilities, it is important not to forget that our body, like the body of every animal on the planet, is a product of a number of cooperative associations that arose under pressure circumstances.
When multicellular organisms first appeared on Earth, the cells of the growing colony also needed to interact with other individual cells. Now the cells of our body are so closely interconnected with each other that a person considers himself a single organism, and not a collective consisting of independent units.
Developing this analogy, it is quite possible to assume that a single superintelligent organism can develop as a result of unification of many intelligent organisms, related to each other so closely that they can no longer be considered by separate individuals.
Although the image of an alien organism composed of such super-cooperating quasi-species is popular in science fiction, the likelihood of its existence is extremely small.
Terrestrial counterparts, such as the colonial organism Physalia (Portuguese warship), with all the resemblance to a single organism still represent a colony of closely interconnected individual animals, which are called zooids.
The ship is primitive both in behavior and structure. The complexity of such swarms is limited primarily by how much information individuals can transmit to each other, and in the case of the zooids that make up the Portuguese boat, there is very little of it. Real communities of the "hive", like bees and ants, are much more complicated, and, accordingly, their communication is more difficult. But ants and bees from the same nest are so genetically close to each other, that from an evolutionary point of view, they are not, in the full sense, separate individuals.
A true swarm mind, like the fictional Borg race in Star Trek, would need extremely a complex and information-rich channel of communication between individuals - this is what they describe science fiction writers. But could such a system have arisen in the course of natural evolution? It seems much more likely that this will happen as a result of conscious use of technologies.
The English newspaper The Times admittedBest science books of the year 2020 / The Times A Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, the best science book of 2020. And it is no coincidence: there has never been such an interesting analysis of alien life.
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