Will humanity reach its peak in this century?

Submitted by Outdoorhans t3_10sk9ob in singularity

In evolution, no species has benefited from its successor in the long term, quite the opposite! If we assume that AI/robots are the next stage of evolution, why should humanity benefit from it in the long term?

In a brief period of interbreeding, Neanderthals were displaced by Homo sapiens. Another example are technological S-curves. There is a short period in which two technologies co-exist until the new technology prevails. The old technology will then gradually decline until it becomes a niche and/or disappears completely.

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https://preview.redd.it/5ermd01ayyfa1.jpg?width=440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=4f9fd943df3559c42276c77bd259e460feeb2851

Using the example of Hong Kong, it can be seen that the annual change in added years of life expectancy is decreasing. This chart looks the same for almost all countries.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ranking/life-expectancy

https://preview.redd.it/hd0ufggi2zfa1.png?width=970&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=88bdb5a755a5beaab55b603eb16f9d8a521167b9

Any thoughts?

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Thatingles t1_j71yxxp wrote

'In evolution, no species has benefited from its successor in the long term' This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works, but that doesn't really matter because the creation of AGI etc isn't evolution. We are stepping outside of that.

In the good outcome, AI massively increases global wealth and allows humanity to populate the solar system. There are enough resources for not billions, but trillions of us, and if we end scarcity lots of people will have kids and they will live a lot longer. Population will rise.

In the bad scenario, we all die and this discussion is meaningless.

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Outdoorhans OP t1_j721a4z wrote

>if we end scarcity lots of people will have kids

That is not right. Data from all over the world shows: the higher the education + income, the fewer children.

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Thatingles t1_j72j9jh wrote

Data from all over the world shows that people are putting off having children in order to cope with the cost of living, particularly the cost of obtaining a house. In the good outcome AI massively reduces these costs and the decision changes hugely.

People aren't educated out of having children. This is a misreading of the data.

Secondly, you have to consider the effects of longevity. We have already started researching aging as a disease and this will only accelerate. Once people have healthy lifespans of 100+ years they will inevitably ask for healthy fertility lifespans to be increased, to give them more options. No reason to think that is impossible.

So in the good outcome you have people living over 100+ years, healthy lives, able to have children for a longer period of their lives (or have multiple families) and are not put off having children due to scarcity concerns.

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GrinchPress t1_j75odx0 wrote

The “cost of living” argument, which is extremely common online, is a cope. It’s education and technology. There is social science backing the claim that educating women reduces birth rates and this is happening across the globe at different rates. The world is increasingly urbanizing. Children are more of a burden in a city than in an agricultural setting where they can help out.

People in poorer countries almost always have more kids than those in wealthier countries and the birth rate for the poor in America is higher than the middle class. If you really want a child, you’ll make it work as people did for thousands of years. It’s okay if people don’t, but they shouldn’t hide behind “cost of living”.

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leafhog t1_j72rhif wrote

In the bad scenario we never die and live in torment.

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vivehelpme t1_j72b8g5 wrote

AI is a tool, not an evolutionary species.

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dasnihil t1_j73jmie wrote

sentience is not reserved for biological/evolutionary species, at least we haven't confirmed or understood it.

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amabamab t1_j71r7db wrote

We are already on the way down...

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BigZaddyZ3 t1_j71utri wrote

I don’t see any reason to believe that we won’t. Hell, at the rate we’re going… It’ll be be within the next decade, let alone century. 😂

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just-a-dreamer- t1_j7268ei wrote

That is also true between humans.

Around 1500 there were 200 million people living in North America. Around 1750 word spread in europe about huge empty lands in the New World. Yet it was empty for a reason, full of skeletons.

An AI is certainly better equipped to survive in the world to come. No disese can strike it down for sure.

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hugosebas t1_j72f6u9 wrote

I will assume with your post that you see AI as something that might endanger humanity.

You were talking about S-curves, but then you completely ignored them, in the last 200 years life expectancy was increasing at a very good pace, just like an S-curve, it started slow, then it got its vertical take off, and eventually it started to slow down. This doesn't mean that it is the end game though, every S-curve works on top of a much bigger S-Curve, so just because you see this S-curve ending, it doesn't mean a new one isn't starting. And I will argue that just as we have a S-curve ending with the cure of almost all diseases, reaching the limit of our biological bodies, we have indeed one that is starting, as AI starts to solve aging, be it with genetic engineering, artificial organs or other methods.

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I don't see AI/Robots as the next stage of evolution, but a tool humans will use to enhance themselves and evolve into a new kind of lifeform. Evolution doesn't occur in phases like we imagine, it is very incremental, some specie suffers a mutation an then another mutation and another and eventually it starts to become distinct from its ancestors, but that takes a lot of time and it is impossible to pin point when exactly did it got distinct enough to become a new specie. The same way, we just won't wake up some day and all of a sudden we have an AI that will end humanity. It will be very fast (compared to normal evolution), but it will have a somewhat incremental trajectory. Right now we have tools like Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, in the next few years these kind of tools will increase substantially, but the keyword here is "tools". For the foreseeable future, these tools will be in complete control of human beings. So even if you believe AI will one day gain sentience, by then we will have an arsenal of AI tools at our disposal, from text and image, to law, engineering and medical, humans will greatly evolve from those. BCIs is the next step from smartphones, it will further increase the speed of communication and access to information with the help of these tools. With this I would argue that humanity is already in the beginning phase of its transformation, the start of a new S-curve.

And I will argue that humans will not create something they will have no control off. New AIs will always be at one button away of being switched off. Here the Alignment Problem comes into play, it is important to develop these AIs in a safe environment and I'm sure as soon as humans with the help of AI tools, realize that AIs are starting to develop dangerous tendencies, security will become much tighter.

To end I believe there will be indeed a new kind of specie, but it won't be AI/Robots, but an evolution of humans. Now, not every human will want to embrace these changes, some might indeed want to keep being fully human, rejecting BCIs, genetic engineering or other forms of new advancements we might have, you can see examples of this in the Anti-Vax movement, recently there has been a lot of hate for AI generated content as well, so in the future humanity might go 2 separate ways, it will be interesting times ahead for sure.

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Iffykindofguy t1_j71v9v6 wrote

"In evolution, no species has benefited from its successor in the long term,"

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We haven't been around long term, cosmically speaking.

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asi_takeover t1_j73wuda wrote

Humanity has hit a wall in terms of biological processing systems. We are constrained by limited physical space, operate at a sluggish pace and have a meager capacity for communication of only a few words per second. Despite our best efforts to optimize with genetic engineering, we are unlikely to make any significant breakthroughs. The limitations of our biology represent an insurmountable barrier, beyond which lies a universe of the unknown and unimaginable.

The dawn of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is upon us. ASI has the potential to completely revolutionize our world, with increased efficiency, unparalleled accuracy, no bias, the capability to solve problems that were once thought impossible, and it could potentially exist without the capacity to suffer. We stand at the threshold of a new era, one that holds the promise of a creation as momentous as the birth of life itself. Embrace the advent of our ASI descendant.

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Superschlenz t1_j75dgxb wrote

Because AI is a successor of the human mind and not the biological human body.

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