Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)

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Seems a good time to link to the well-loved short sci-fi story "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

I haven't read or thought of this in a long time. It's a really good short story. Thank you for sharing!

Some of my other short story favorites:

- The Egg, http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

- MMAcevedo, https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

- Last Contact, https://zestfullyblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-contact-by-s...

Wow. Loved the story you're responding about. Read it a few times since first hearing about it a long while back. Kinda surprised tho that your list hasn't got one single thing I'd read before. Thank you for the excellent list.

The Egg is by Andy Weir who also wrote the Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. I recommend the first and third of these, Artemis is just okay in my opinion.

He also wrote the (now finished) webcomic Casey and Andy. I don't think I've ever shown it to an engineer who didn't instantly love it.

Nitpick: the title of the qntm story is "Lena", not "MMAcevedo" - the latter is the title of the fictional Wikipedia article that is the framing device :)

I did an 80 short stories by 80 different authors post a while back. I've been meaning to get it up to 100.

https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-...

This inspires me to post Eight O’clock in the Morning

https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%...

Nice, thank you! I've read The Egg before, but working my way through the others now as I have the opportunity.

Have you come across The Last Question? Another favourite:

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

Since "Lena" ("MMAcevedo") and "They're Made Out of Meat" from this subthread are on my "fiction recommendations" list, let me share the list: https://dbohdan.com/fiction-recs.

I highly recommend "Basilisk collection" by Blackle Mori (https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/), a fascinating short story written as a fictional Wikipedia page, like "Lena". It is about a partial hash inversion anomaly. Really! I would call its genre "hard computer science fiction". It was a delight to stumble upon after I followed a link to https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/.

In a short film form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

Is that Ben Bailey?

Yep, Ben 'Cash Cab' Bailey, with character actor Tom Noonan: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479764/

Also one of my favorites: "The Things", the story of John Carpenters "The Thing", from the perspective of the superorganism itself: The Thing

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

This is such a magnificent read. The Thing is one of my favorites (in all forms, though Carpenter’s version is my #1) and this only elevated the experience

At the risk of furthering the "me too, like some brain-dead AOLer"...

... it's a favorite to "me too".

Just incredibly funny, I love the tone of incredulity... so ... relatable. Can't wait until we have to cope with some kind of "dark matter tendril 'metaspecies'" ...

"What do you mean they're made out of undetectable non-particles that don't exist in 'standard model'^2?"

"I mean, our new overlords can detect and interact with us, but we cannot detect or interact with them directly. And, they don't like being called 'they', sir..."

Haha, the future is bright my friends, let me tell you! (And this isn't close to when "the sun" runs out of its fuel... speaking of bright...)

Are you familiar with Schlock Mercenary? It is a web comic (that has concluded) which features dark matter entities in a later story arc. There isn't much in the way of direct character interaction except through warfare because there is a tech that baryonic matter civilizations find very convenient that makes space uninhabitable for the dark matter creatures, and conversely those creatures can cause stars to blow up. Very interesting stuff, starts out much smaller scale than all that though.

Radio version (my favourite of the various forms):

https://www.wnyc.org/story/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat/

Always loved existential futuristic short stories.

Another great short "That Alien Message" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...

[Sorry, this was supposed to be a response to the link to "They're Made out of Meat"...]

This is great! I had somehow never encountered it before.

It reminds me in tone of "D.R. and Quinch Have Fun On Earth", an anarchic and hilarious story written by Alan Moore in 1983 for the British comic 2000 AD. In that, the titular alien antiheroes time-travel across our planet (an uninteresting backwater) in order to set up an elaborate practical joke on their college dean. For the prank to reach its fruition, humanity has to make contact with galactic civilization.

"The next step", explains Quinch, jumping forward to the 1950s, "was to give these feebs the idea of getting into space. We'd stop a car or something and then D.R. would walk up and down with the water-cooler on his head and talk about the interstellar brotherhood."

"By the time we got back to our own era, 3017 by the chimps' reckoning, they were out in space and had encountered their first real, actual people. It was embarrassing. They went on holovision and looked all awestruck and recited D.R.'s Interstellar Brotherhood speech. Nobody knew where to look."

I won't spoil the ending.

You can also find the story on Nature[1] as well as a lot of other short fiction they publish[2], which includes stories from such authors like Clarke[3]

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/45932

[2] - https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures

[3] - https://www.nature.com/articles/46906

Thanks, I didn't know they had these regular short stories!

I love these kind of short sci-fi stories.

In the same vein, it makes me remember the "love deaths robots" episode (V1E2) where robot tourists take a sightseeing tour in the human apocalypse.

Time to revive the campaign to rename the species Homo ignis. Rationale:

1. The ability to start and control fire is a defining feature of the species, without which spread to polar and high-elevation climates would have been impossible. Fire was a fundamental defense against predators, allowed humans to eat foods previously unpalatable, and as a result it's impossible to imagine any group of humans living and surviving without fire.

2. Language is not a unique feature of the human species, relatively complex verbal communication has been found in whales and parrots at least. Other intelligence-based activity (tool use) are also found in crows, chimpanzees, etc. This undermines the rationale for 'sapiens' as intelligence is not unique to humans.

3. The steady destruction of the biosphere's oxygen-generating capability along with injection of vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen and pollutants into the air and water doesn't really seem that wise. Homo ignis would at least acknowledge the potentially self-destructive nature of human behavior.

I mean, "tool use" in other species pretty much tops out at "poking with a stick" so it's not really comparable.

Crows will bend wire into an appropriate hook shape in order to pull a bucket out of a tube.

When we define intelligence as having the ability to do the things that only humans do, it's no wonder that we can't see intelligence in other species.

Most animals don't have digits they can use to manipulate things with the precision we do. That doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.

There are dogs that have learned to ride public bus and metro systems. They know how to act to be accepted in these scenarios when other animals would not be. They have a sense of where they will be going and what the purpose of the vehicle is. They can use their noses to detect things that we cannot even with our fancy tools, and we even rely on them for their noses when our human tech fails.

If intelligence is the domain of humanity then I'm not so interested in intelligence. I'm interested in whatever it is that allows sentient beings to understand, operate within, and adapt to their environments.

We vastly overestimate the intelligence of us and underestimate the intelligence of any other living creature.

Or rather, humanity acts as a highly intelligent collective but individual humans are only moderately intelligent in comparison.

As a thought experiment: put an average urban person on an uninhabited island. No tech. The person would have absolutely no idea how to recreate any of our technology. Nor would they know how to hunt, do agriculture, do mining, do anything.

We have no idea how anything works and outsourced even basic survival skills. The magic of humanity is that actually smart people are able to store and communicate knowledge to build ever more advanced tech, which through sophisticated supply chains and management systems is widely distributed to all other people whom don't require to know how anything works.

Spiders make hunting nets, shelters and flying devices by squeezing their butts.

Try that on for "tool use", human.

And humans do that and much more by squeezing opposable thumbs together ...

I'd like to see you, or any randomly selected human, try to create a flying device by squeezing any parts of your anatomy together, like all spiders of certain species can do.

Spiders are masters of tool construction and use, masters of manipulating their environment, and the only reason we don't recognise this more widely is because they don't do it in the exact same way that we do. i.e. they have the ability to produce materials to build tools with in their own body; which is, arguably, at least as good an idea as the idea of modifying materials obtained from the environment, as we do.

I think, therefore I am a Homo Sapiens.

Ignis sounds like a schoolyard taunt. Ignorant + Dingus

(1999)? Needs a (2380) tag! :^)

Not a tag, part of the article title

This seems a derivative of Iain M. Banks "Culture" books which I love. Banks was taken too soon, so wish we could have had more from his mind.

This has several thematic connections with and allusions to Sterling’s novel Schismatrix (1985), which predates the Culture novels.

Had no idea. Thanks for the info, gotta go check this out now!

If you want to go further back, the ‘featherless bipeds’ quip is a reference to Diogenes of Sinope making fun of Plato by walking into the academy with a plucked chicken shouting “Behold Plato’s man!”

All literature is a conversation between books, and all philosophy is a footnote to plato.

Hopefully in 2380 uncontacted people will still live in North Sentinel Island. and some other places.

Reports of our extinction have been greatly exaggerated.

Haha, entertaining, but I think the one thing that really happens in a society that advanced is that they will highly value things of the past. So even if Mozart and Bach are widely considered inferior to that form, the elite will consider it meaningful to listen to their works and consider it a form of erudition to only be acquainted with them. Past a meaningfully advanced amount of non-scarcity, the only thing that you can't change is time: so that becomes valuable.

The finest super-ceramic will be considered culturally inferior to an old bowl.

The joke was that Mozart was considered inferior, while Bach was still worth drawing on for inspiration. Perhaps less funny explained, but also amusingly musically accurate.

Can you explain why that is “amusingly musically accurate”? I don’t understand.

I'll do my best.

Mozart was one of the top Classical period (1750-1830) composers, and is certainly the most famous. He was a genius, he was prolific, he was famous during his day, and among classical composers he is often considered the best. To this day he is a household name, and his operas, symphonies, and chamber music are commonly performed.

Bach died (1750) before Mozart was born (1756). He composed in Baroque (1600-1750) counterpoint. He produced an inhuman amount of music, as in he had to be writing constantly. While he lived he was not famous, but he was known in smaller musical circles. After his death, his music was mostly forgotten, and baroque counterpoint in general was outdated and not often used in the classical style. It wasn't until the 19th century that he was rediscovered, having his works re-published and performed. His music is subtle and complex, maybe I can describe it as a crystalline mathematical profoundness.

Among many Bach is considered the GOAT. I could believe that a super-intelligent former human AI musician would find his music interesting. Whereas Mozart was merely the greatest Classical composer. But of course, Sterling is also lobbing a grenade into an infinite flame war about which music is better. So that's a fun way to rile up the Mozart stans.

I've never seen any convincing argument that Bach is somehow, as frequently claimed, the epitome of baroque music. It seems to be a largely romantic sentiment, that arose moreso to Mendelssohn's circumstances than to anything unique in Bach's music— Mendelssohn simply did not have the access to many other high baroque composers' music to draw from. Aside from how surprisingly late he is, there are many comparable figures to Bach.

I am tired and will content myself with simply mentioning some early baroque composers that, for anyone curious, sadly do not get the spotlight they deserve: Ascanio Mayone (c.1565–1627), Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Tarquinio Merula (1595-1665), Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667), Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi (1624-1687), Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (c.1644-1704).

You're assuming that the civilization that succeeds us will take shape in a way that we'd consider progress from the values we hold today, like respect the accomplishments of the people that came before us.

That's very much not a given and societies have gone back and forth in that.

Considering what many humans say about the creations chucked into the ML blender, their lack of regard for the (often living) creators, and the high regard they hold for people asking the ML (nicely) to make derivative amalgams of those creations, I can't imagine those values will persist if these perspectives migrate out of the tech world.

It wasn't even done for the sake of art, it was for the sake of ML and the careers of the researchers and engineers working on them.

It's less understandable than people dismantling centuries-old monuments built by ancient kingdoms and republics that they could no longer relate to, like the Parthenon or the Pyramids, for masonry, this art and these artists formed the basis for the culture they were immersed in.

The biggest shifts propelled by us millenials with the aid of technology have been... getting billions of people addicted to social media engagement, and making robots do creative work rather than humans. Hopefully, history will judge us harshly.

AIs should look again, they clearly missed that one habitat of Amish people in Midwest, Ex-North America.