From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!markh Mon Jan  6 10:29:52 EST 1992
Article 2421 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Subject: Re: Penrose on Man vs. Machine
Message-ID: <1991Dec27.232421.24019@uwm.edu>
Keywords: analytic arguments, reflection principle, standard model
Sender: news@uwm.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
References: <1991Dec23.190337.6899@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec27.014138.3071@grayhawk.rent.com> <1991Dec27.203112.12957@galois.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Dec 1991 23:24:21 GMT
Lines: 26

In article <1991Dec27.203112.12957@galois.mit.edu> jbaez@banach.mit.edu (John C. Baez) writes:
>Hopefully no-one.  While create beings to outdo us may be the secret
>Faustian goal of AI, creating a boring race of automata to do our dirty
>work would be more "practical."

That's one of those "what are we even doing all this for in the first place?"
type questions.  My vision has always been that we are building the new
evolutionary forms that we will eventually place our future selves in.

Machines are tools, and machines are becoming increasingly intelligent.
Therefore our drive is toward having intelligent tools.  The logical
conclusion of this is in extending our own physical form and thereby usurping
control over all future evolution.

Oh, it'll hit you before you expect it.  It starts out with the little
things like artificial organs and prosthetics.  Then they start doing
things like adding microcontrollers to some of those prosthetics.  Then
gradually aritficial ganglia and neural implants, and before you know it
we'll all be part of a newly spawned artificial evolution process.

It's a least the second time in planetary history that one material and mode
of reproduction will come to replace and take over a more ancient and less
efficient mode.  After all, DNA didn't come into being all by its lonesome
either.

So humankind is facing a significant evolutionary threshold.


