Nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, Samuel Butler wrote: ‘It appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors … giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivance that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race.’
Humans are no more masters of machines than they are of fire or the wheel. The forms of artificial life and intelligence they are constructing today will elude human control just as naturally occurring forms of life have done. They may even replace their creators.
Natural life forms have no built-in evolutionary advantage over organisms that began their life as artefacts. Adrian Woolfson writes: ‘it is by no means certain that living things constructed from natural biological materials would be able to out-compete their synthetic and ahistorically designed, machine-based rivals’. Digital evolution – natural selection among virtual organisms in cyberspace – may already be at work. Soon telephone exchanges may be run by living software. But the new virtual environment is no more controllable than the natural world. According to Mark Ward, ‘once a system is handed over to living, breeding software there is no turning back’.
The fear that humans could be supplanted by machines is voiced by Bill Joy, one of the architects of microprocessors: ‘… now, with the prospect of human-level computers in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable.’ While condemning his actions, Joy echoes Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who wrote of his despair at humans being ‘reduced to the status of domestic animals’.
The replacement of humanity by its own artefacts is a curious prospect. But could the more highly evolved offspring of human artefacts be more destructive of other forms of life than humans themselves? Humans could soon find themselves in an impoverished environment different from any in which they have ever lived. Almost inevitably, they will seek to remodel themselves, the better to survive in the wasteland they have made. Benign bio-engineers may seek to remove the genes that carry biophilia – the primordial feeling for other living things that links humans with their evolutionary home.
Only a breed of ex-humans can thrive in the world that unchecked human expansion is creating. If humans were side-lined by machines and driven like today’s hunter-gatherers to the edges of the world, would that be a worse fate?