Science fiction is filled with unusual alien species. But apart from the occasional robot, biological life is running the show. But NASA scientist, Dr. Steven Dick, sees a future Universe that has evolved past biology. Where every intelligence is artificial. Consider the likelihood of a postbiological Universe.

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I recently saw a talk given by Seth Shostak of SETI, and he thinks the same thing, that it's more likely to find a "postbiological" society than a normal one. It was something that I had never heard of, and I think it's a pretty neat idea.

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Reading this story about post-biological entities which might transcend and may be wipe us in the future , i had these thoughts : First it is not the first time a read such things and nobody seems to object. Maybe people are too astonished to react or does not take this seriously ?
And is it only an American thing ? A puritan thing ?
(No more flesh , no more biological desires , pure intellectual drive .... )
And do you really believe an artificial intelligence can be build ? Because when we see the very poor results of decades of research it seems at most very far in the future.
May be too much questions , so please take your pick !

galacsi

Why wipe? Maybe they just outdo us in efficiency.

I've seen plenty of objections and arguments on the subject before this article. Some dating back to before I was born.
Let's not assume that we know how AI's or downloaded beings would feel or what their viewpoints would be. They might not be coldly logical; Maybe they'd be capable of hyper-emotions far more sublime and complex than we can concieve.

The article mentions 7.5 billion years of civilization as a baseline. Seems like long enough to me.

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In the developed world AI is part of our everyday lives. The search engines you use are AI, your local supermarket uses AI to buy products to stack its shelves, medical technicians use AI to diagnose what ails you. AI is and has been advancing at a rapid pace. Yeah, I know the speak/write programs still suck, but have patience. Rome wasn't burnt in a day.

Moravec argues that some machines already have emotions of a sort. He compares a person's reaction to (for example) the "fear" reaction of a robot that avoids stairs or other places where it might fall and damage itself. What he gets into are the reasons we have emotions, and why they are likely (in some form) to continue - "cold logic" isn't always the best survival strategy.

By the way, I'd point out that another way to develop AIs would be to grow them. There's a tendency to make a strong division between protein machines and other machines, but the division could fade over time, along with the division between natural and artificial.

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Seems to me (as an outsider to the industry) that we went down a wrong track or two in the 80's - focusing on logic and deduction and trying to construct higher reasoning from ever more convoluted stacks of syllogisms. But we're back on track now, IMO, with more and more interest in neural networks and learning programs, feedback, self-organizing behavior ect.

PS - I wonder where this "devoid of feeling, coldly logical" stuff comes from? It seems to be a near universal assumption. (Perhaps the same one that lead early AI researchers to attempt turning overgrown expert-systems into AIs).

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Two possible distinguishing points between biological and non-biological beings is the speed with which they think, and the size of the structures they use to think with. A non-biological thinking machine might be have neuron-equivalents a thousand times smaller than a biological neurone, and process information a thousand times faster. This does mean (every thing else being equal) that such a small, fast thinking machine would produce a million times as much waste heat per unit volume.
Of couse everything else isn't equal, but this does give an idea of the vast amounts of waste heat an AI might produce; how small it might be and how fast it might think compared to a biological brain.

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I agree, the transition is already happening, but it's very fluent and gradual.

In my opinion, the Terminator-like epic battle between humans on one side,
and AI robots which become conscious all of a sudden,
is a very unlikely scenario.