Sonntag, 3. Mai 2009

Physophy: Evolution continues dramatically with IT

Biological evolution meets IT evolution (the flat blue arrow from the right) in this figure:



A hard consequence of evolution is a major change in the vision of human history:

Look at the historical, clear picture as, e.g., claimed by the Abrahamitian religions:

First, a world is created with a hard and fixed hierarchy of species (the humans are kings and queens and can do with the lowers almost everthing they want - and they do or did),

second, the world runs for a certain time to separate the good from the bad, and

third, the world stops with extinction and nemesis and paradis for the selected.

With evolution, the world has been created in a big bang as a basis (if you like), and then a machinery for evolution has been generated - and with this machinery, there is no reason that evolution will stop (with us "original" humans as final state).

Apart from other (more conventional) driving forces for evolution, we are in an epoch where IT technologies explicitly intervene evolutionarily and accelerate evolution:


Hitting the individual or the population altogether are, for example:
  1. Understanding genetics and epigenetics (genetic engineering),

  2. Enhancing humans with neuro-devices and more (e.g. neural implantations),

  3. Virtual lifes with realistic minds merging to real (and competing with real life),

  4. Real virtuality with personal Robots (e.g. competing with real human partners),

  5. Social communities allowing collaboration,

  6. Mind sharing technologies starting to merge individuas and IT.

In the figure, the evolution in biology up to now ("in carbon") and the evolution in IT ("in silicon", at least for the time being) are joining and opening a spectrum of channels for evolution, from close to IT to close to flesh and blood (in the figure, the green area): It seems that we take all of them. Nobody knows the overall outcome - this is the singularity! And we are not sure that the resulting evolution will be guided (or "intelligent") - neither biology nor IT was "guided" although the latter was even made by humans.

As Ray Kurzweil states: "Life is Software" - and when we are able to change the software of life, improve (?) or add, we perform evolution. Given the many influences and influencers of the coming evolutions made by humans, it is probably again no "intelligent design" - it will be non-intelligent, I am afraid, but it will hopefully be successful whatever this means.

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