From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Tue Jul 21 1998 - 14:58:00 MDT
It's an attractive analogy that a posthuman will be to a human as a
human is to an insect. This suggests that any attempt to analyze or
understand the behavior of post-singularity intelligence is as hopeless
as it would be for an insect to understand human society. Since insects
clearly have essentially no understanding of humans, it would follow by
analogy that we can have no understanding of posthumans.
On reflection, though, it seems that it may be an oversimplification
to say that insects have no understanding of humans. The issue is
complicated by the fact that insects probably have no "understanding"
at all, as we use the term. They may not even be conscious, and may be
better thought of as nature's robots, of a similar level of complexity as
our own industrial machines. Since insects do not have understanding,
the analogy to humans does not work very well. If we want to say that
our facility for understanding will not carry over into the posthuman
era, we need to be able to say that insect's facility for <something>
would not work when applied to humans.
What we need to do is to translate the notion of "understanding" into
something that insects can do. That makes the analogy more precise and
improves the quality of the conclusions it suggests.
It seems to me that while insects do not have "understanding" as we do,
they do nevertheless have a relatively detailed model of the world which
they interact with. Even if they are robots, programmed by evolution and
driven by unthinking instinct, still their programming embodies a model
of the world. A butterfly makes its way to flowers, avoides predators,
knows when it is hungry or needs to rest. These decisions may be made
unconsciously like a robot, but they do represent a true model of itself
and of the world.
What we should ask, then, is whether insect's model of the world can
be successfully used to predict the behavior of humans, in the terms
captured by the model itself. Humans are part of the world that insects
must deal with. Are they able to successfully model human behavior at
the level they are able to model other aspects of the world, so that
they can thrive alongside humanity?
Obviously insects do not predict many aspects of human behavior. Still,
in terms of the level of detail that they attempt to capture, I'd say
they are reasonably effective. Butterflies avoid large animals, including
humans. Some percentage of human-butterfly interactions would involve
attempts by the humans to capture the butterflies, and so the butterflies'
avoidance instinct represents a success of their model. Similarly for
many other insects for whom the extent of their model of humans is as
"possible threat, to be avoided".
Other insects have historically thrived in close association with humans,
such as lice, fleas, ants, roaches, etc. Again, without attempting to
predict the full richness of human behavior, their models are successful
in expressing those aspects which they care about, so that they have been
able to survive, often to the detriment of the human race.
If we look at the analogy in this way, it suggests that we may expect
to be able to understand some aspects of posthuman behavior, without
coming anywhere close to truly understanding and appreciating the full
power of their thoughts. Their mental life may be far beyond anything we
can imagine, but we could still expect to draw some simple conclusions
about how they will behave, things which are at the level which we can
understand. Perhaps Robin's reasoning based on fundamental principles
of selection and evolution would fall into this category.
We may be as ants to the post singularity intelligences, but even so,
we may be able to successfully predict some aspects of their behavior,
just as ants are able to do with humans.
Hal
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