Hacker News Reader

Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

Could technology, defined as the elaborate (=intelligent) and large scale manipulation of non-biological environments be incompatible with the long term survival of biological life (i.e. it is an unstable evolutionary process)?

Its a difficult argument, as all of life manipulates its abiotic surroundings one way or another. Yet the antropocene is clearly at least one qualitative step up. We only have this one data point (our own) so make of that whatever you will. But it doesn't take an ultra-pessimist or doomist psychology to see that on the basis of our behavior the odds that technologically enhanced life self-destructs in short timescales are, indeed, non-zero.

If "intelligent" biology is an intrinsically unstable system (can't self-regulate because primal drives for reproduction, dominance etc highjack mechanisms that are too powerful for its own good) this would make the absence of technosignals self-evident.

View on HN

Some philosophers in the metaphysics of technology have also proposed this idea. The idea is that the arms race or prisoner's dilemma-type situations make the advance of technology unavoidable (technological determinism) and that its inexorable rise forward eventually has a high probability of extinguishing all life on a planet. (More precisely, determinism states that technological development is a strong force; it can be influenced but it is hard).

We already have climate change, advanced AI (that may eventually be able to produce more technology by itself), and a planet of organisms that are counter to growth. Deforestation happens because the long-term costs are not shouldered by the present generation.

In some way, I believe the end of times is near, but that humanity has TWO possibilities:

(A) The planet is destroyed via advanced technology and most humans die, only to repeat the same mistakes again, OR

(B) We reach a critical mass of enlightenment that consists of (1) a cautious approach to growth, (2) a moderation in the use of technology, and (3) a stable, healthy relationship with the biosphere.

The eventuality (B) is certainly possible if one by one, we start to adopt a philosophy that economic and technological growth isn't the right path and we slowly give up all this advanced stuff for a slower-paced life centered on local communities, local economies, and less efficiency in return for a more peaceful life.

I think there are more than 2 possibilities, and the worst of them is what Orwell called "a boot on a human face, forever". Catastrophe -- accidental or encouraged -- leads to consolidation, then history gets written to make the survivors be the good guys or victims of circumstances, and their victims objects worthy of persecution. I can already smell that in the air, there is nothing that can't be handled with the right narrative.

If all humans died at once, it would suck, but there is more where we came from, so to speak... but systems of control that nip any and all possible challengers to totality of their control in the bud would be so dead, even death would be creeped out.

Things will keep changing forever. I don't know why people are afraid of permanent oppression. We only know of around 10k years of society history, in a planet that has had intelligent apes for 100k years, complex ecosystems for 4b years. Even if we vanish in the next century, the overwhelming chances are that a) uncountable complex ecosystems exist right now; b) uncountable intelligent species exist right now; c) uncountable oppressive and uncountable liberal systems exist right now; d) uncountable intelligent species and complex ecosystems will vanish and emerge over the billions of years ahead.

We get too attached to what we see around us, while Hubble and JW have shown we are utterly insignificant in both time and space.

Countless of other things likely existing doesn't discount any of them. If, to just put it like that, people in all those other liberal and oppressive systems have nothing else to say than "meh, there are countless of other systems", what makes them so significant? I see the how it is and what we rationalize it as, I see the trends and I'm not impressed. That others might do worse or better is completely irrelevant to me, that's to their shame or credit.

There's only shame because there's pride. Feel ways about the world you know, it's like feeling good or bad about how the soap bubble you blow come out.

2 Points:

1. We do not have advanced AI. We have LLMs. They're not intelligent, not creative, and are never going to be. I'm with you on the other things, though.

2. The planet will not be destroyed by anything we do. H. sap. might go extinct along with many, many other species, but give the biospehere a couple of million years and it will all bounce back, sans humans.

I've been living/trialing the path you suggest in your last paragraph for 30 years. Sadly it's not gone viral. AMA. ;)

Well, by "advanced AI", I did not mean truly intelligent AI of course. I meant sufficiently advanced to disrupt society to an extent that will make it worse that it was without it. Advanced as in "advanced weapon", not "smart".

Yes, it is true that the planet won't be destroyed, that is a good point. Only we might, like you said. Though, if many other species go extinct, it is sort of like destruction in a way, even though it isn't total.

Feel free to reach out through the contact info in my profile if you want to collaborate.

The biosphere may well bounce back but it may take an absurdly long time to sequester carbon back into the ground.

The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air, so things didn't burn and having megatons of carbon rich organic material lying around wasn't likely to catch fire and jump back into the air.

Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air.

I'm not sure how long that'll take to change, or what impact that has on future life here on earth, but we've got 2 examples of earthish planets that don't support life right next door.

>> Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air.

Only an issue for the 1/3 of our planet that is dry. By volume/mass, most organic material eventually falls into the deep ocean, a place where fire isn't much of an issue.

Why would carbon need to go back into the ground? It’s really good for plant life in general and only bad for humans who want the earth to remain in the same state it was in 1700 indefinitely.

Our industrial revolution benefited immensely from large amounts of carbon buried in the ground where we could fairly easily get to it.

A follow-up species in a few million years might struggle to bootstrap theirs.

There will be no follow-up species besides those we evolve into and/or create. We're going to inherit the observable universe to ourselves. Even if we go through a couple of apocalypses on the road to it, it's really hard to imagine a scenario where ALL humans die, so it's much more economic to rebuild a civilization from remaining humans than evolve intelligence again.

That's a whole bunch of unearned certainty, but the same point applies to a post-apocalyptic resurgence of humanity; the second industrial revolution is going to be missing the readily accessible coal and oil that drove the first one along.

We're from different memeplexes, but both of our assumptions are equally unearned.

But if we're talking about a second industrial revolution it won't be like the first one, because:

- There will be more carbon in the air, hence more wood to chop and burn

- There will books lying around describing how to leapfrog many steps

I don't think it'd take 10000 years again to restore civilization the second time around.

Might take 500 million though.

Earth is highly unlikely to support intelligent life 500 million years from now. Multicellular life entirely won’t exist in 1 billion years.

I don't see anything wrong with humans wanting to control the climate to turn it back into the ice age that we're used to. I just wish we'd be honest about it instead of appealing to naturalistic fallacies.

> The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air

When cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) originally cleaned out Earth's CO2 atmosphere and produced O2, I don't know where the C went. To bedrock as calcium carbonates (CaCO3)?

But the carbon that humankind has released into atmosphere by burning coal and oil, was sequestered by plants during the Carboniferous+Permian periods (360 to 250 million years ago). These were large, vascular plants. Not too much different form plants today. And the atmospheric oxygen was already at about current levels.

But your idea might hold in a different context:

There is a theory that 360My ago plants invented lignin, to make their stems more rigid and woody. And then it took time before fungi were able to invent enzymes that are able to digest lignin. So maybe the the large burial of biomass carbon in Carboniferous could not happen again, with out modern fungi being able to decompose wood.

And there is another theory, that as Carboniferous+Permian periods were during an ice age, the low sea levels allowed for large areas of swampy lowland vegetation. Where vegetation sequestered carbon, and wet swampy soil allowed the carbon to get slowly buried, because microbes cannot as easily decompose biomass in wet, anaerobic conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation

Why would Gaia try to sequester carbon back into the ground? It’s useful to her (but not to us).

Or three, none of the above. Those philosophers are arguing from analogy based on one case - which the smarter ones know is philosophically faulty and really just speculation. The probability of calculating the extermination similarly can't be realistically assumed because this time it's based on zero cases, empirically.

But thinking like that doesn't get the likes of Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom millions in funding...

Excellent point, Ill never forget taking a history of armageddon narratives course in 2012 when the Mayan calendar was ending and how simple the social / economic function of end-of-the-world narratives seemed in historical context. Specifically in the context that they have been present for at least as long as weve had writing, which is to say as long as we've had class-stratified societies.

Domesday narratives put us in high-arousal states. We listen to authorities more unquestioningly, we think less critically, we buy more stuff.

Of course that's a slippery slope that can lead to climate denial and conspiracy theories but I like remembering to question who's getting research grants or selling zombie apocalypse gear...

Yeah so much of the philosophy of the future appears to me as science-fiction LARPing as philosophy. The annoying part is that they deny or overlook that, seemingly so enamoured with their own brilliance as they often are. And as you say, doom-mongering in the form of presenting what look like reasonable existential risks is just more amenable to funding. I could sit here imagining up existential risks all day long when all that can be said for the human race and its progress is “ seems to be going ok so far!”

It would be hard to get funding for an existential philosophy that said “everything is fine, and will just roll along and whatever will be will be”.

I feel scenario B is indeed possible: Sophisticated cultural overlays that modify our interaction and impacts on the biosphere are obviously within the nature of the system.

A key question is whether the feedback signals from the biosphere will be strong enough and will be internalized deeply enough to usher a sustainable era. One can only guess, since we haven't really experienced anything of this sort before.

But logically, if scenario B plays out and we enter a sustainable phase we would be sending out technosignatures. Hence if a similar process has repeated across the universe we should at some point see evidence of advanced life that "just made" it. The fact we don't may mean its not possible. But I would not read too much into this pessimistic conclusion because we may be missing important other dimensions regarding the nature of life and its co-evolution with technology.

We should strive to survive independently of what else might be happening in this mysterious Universe :-)

My guess is that we’ll muddle through somewhere halfway between A and B. Sustained enlightenment seems unlikely, unless we start genetic-engineering our brains to behave more constructively. (Messing with our brains that way is quite prone to go the destructive route, of course.)

C) a bio weapon to take out the caste driving kingdom formation and empire aggregation if it has clear target able bio markers?

I think we need asteroid mining for B to be a stable solution.

Why would you want less efficiency? If we had solar panels which power robots that grow food for everyone, you would want to destroy those solar panels and robots? Is it a 'sin' that humans wouldn't have to work?

It's an interesting question, but it's not a blanket statement I made. In some cases, efficiency might be good, but for example, it's often better to have local made products and locally-made foods.

Also, there is the problem that more efficient use of resources make resources more efficiently used. So, how to find the optima?

It's better to grow what grows best in the local environment. You can't grow everything everywhere. Everyone would be really limited in their choice of food if everything was local. Unless we're using some kind of greenhouses, which might eventually be a good idea. But it would require insane amounts of energy.

I'm not sure you know what efficiency means. From Wikipedia: "Efficiency is the often measurable ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste."

Being less efficient means that you're wasting resources, i.e. using more resources than necessary.

I don't think the problem is technological growth itself - the amount of humans on earth and the way incentives are misaligned in a way that wastes large parts of total "effort"/resources are much larger problems IMO.

A society where there was a system that reliable aligned incentives between (eg.) consumers and producers might already reduce resource consumption by an order of magnitude, and would remove most of the "arms race" mentality in risky developments like AI.

Whether we can create such a system in time is a big question though...

(as an aside, while neither socialism or capitalism do anything significant to solve this problem in their current forms, I don't expect either to be incompatible with such an alignment system)

On the opposite side, James Lovelock suggested that life controlling the planetary conditions, is a necessary property for long term survival of life.

For example: Too little oxygen, too much CO2 in the atmosphere: CO2 feeds more plants, oxygen below 16% makes wildfires difficult. So plants grow more. Too much oxygen enhances wildfires, and huge wildfires would burn off parts of plant cover. Atmospheric oxygen concentration would go back down. [1,2]

Lovelock's argument is, that on dead planets the environmental parameters vary in time, and in time they would randomly fluctuate outside of the zone where life is possible. But early life taking control of the planetary environment by establishing feedback mechanisms, is what the long term survival of life in that planed.

Of course, Lovelock doesn't specify intelligent life. Even microbial life could establish feedback mechanisms and maintain planetary homeostasis.

[1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Regulation_of_...

We could make something like the opposite argument too: without technology, biological life has no hope of surviving events like planetary collisions, gamma ray bursts, or home star fuel exhaustion, which are rare on human timescales but common (or even inevitable) in the long-run.

That is clearly true, but you would have to explain the absence of "technosignatures" - even more so if survival means interstellar spead of intelligent / technological life forms.

Evolution is a form of intelligence, and the oxygenation catastrophe was definitely a large-scale manipulation of the environment.

Anthropogenic changes are faster than evolution, but is that an important difference, or is what matters the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition?

And beyond us, the same question comes for any AI tasked with doing a thing whose side effects develop not necessarily to our advantage: which is faster, the harm or the improved ability to resolve problems?

> the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition?

yes, I too think this ratio is of vital importance (pun). I would not even call it "damage" (rather change) as this is quite anthropocentric and teleological.

But the acceleration induced when moving from cellular trial-and-error biological intelligence to human intelligence seems dramatic. Watching Oppenheimer reminded me of this "funny" moment when people calculated the odds of "igniting the atmosphere". While that is apparently not possible, igniting, e.g., the RNA is more plausible and I would not put it beyond what current societies are capable of.

“ He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”

- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

That’s one of my favorite literary quotes. From long before nuclear weapons, or climate change.

I think it’s entirely possible that technological civilization is unstable and self destructs. Certainly, at this point of our history, we can see what a fine line we walk. Had the twentieth century been but a little different at key moments, we could have already destroyed our civilization. As we speak there’s a land war in Europe from one great nuclear power, on the borders of the other. A third great nuclear power rises in Asia, as China is ramping up incredibly quickly - no doubt with a eye to deterrent over meddling in their aims on Taiwan. Their long term historical rivals in India, a rising economic power, will likely not sit idly by. They could be the fourth great nuclear power. That of course would force Pakistans hand to try to compete. Next door Iran desperately seeks the bomb to ensure they don’t get the freedom treatment from the West. Across the gulf lies their bitter rival Saudi Arabia, who warn they will have to pursue the bomb if Iran gets it. Meanwhile nuclear armed Israel has promised they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. And that’s not even 100 years yet since we developed that particular technology. Nor is it the only technology we have that threatens to be more than we can handle.

Without being a biologist my gut feeling is that our biggest immediate self-destruct risk is biological weapons like engineered viruses and the like.

Once you start tinkering with the stuff you are made off while you have not controlled primal behaviors that were conditioned during eras of near zero technological competence the writing is on the wall.

In a sense the nuclear era episode was a benign rehearsal granted to us by the Universe: Here is a black box (nuclear phenomena) that you can discover, use and self-destruct if you want, but it is quite hard to play with. Not so with genetic engineering.

Indeed, as a programmer, I deeply understand the power of being able to modify the source code. Doing that with the code of life is a great responsibility we’re not ready for.

What happens when it gets so easy and cheap that any malcontent group can engineer their own super virus? Will we have a defense for that?

There can only be one defense: no malcontent group (actually no group, period) will be allowed to pursue certain technology paths, no matter what (e.g irrespective of political, ethical, cultural or other differences and opinions). This is a faint echo of the biblical forbidden tree of knowledge (for those culturally familiar) - though the punishment for disobeying is not expulsion from paradise but self-destruction.

The difficulty of embedding such a cultural paradigm as a lived reality across our species is obvious. Yet it is logically unavoidable for survival on a finite planet where independent groups keep pursuing ever more powerful technologies to advance narrow interests.

You’re a bit off. The punishment for disobedience (which was the act of obtaining knowledge of good and evil) was death. Expulsion was not of paradise (which was the entire earth, now tainted and corrupt), but of access to eternal life. Your analogy may fit better than you thought.

Regardless of your feelings about religion, Genesis 3 is not long and foundational for a significant number of groups throughout Western and Middle-eastern history.

How does one control that? Fundamentally, technology is knowledge combined with tools.

You can’t control the knowledge, so the only thing left is control access to the tools.

How do you do that, on a global scale? There is precedent, but it’s not easy.

With nukes we’ve been fortunate that the tools are so expensive and difficult to obtain and create that only nation states can consider them. That could change if we find a cheap way to refine uranium or produce plutonium.

With biology it’s harder to control because the tools have numerous research and peaceful uses.

A lot of modern conflict seems to arise from resource constraints. That doesn't mean removing those constraints wouldn't lead to peace (maybe just different constraints), but it seems possible.

What if we somehow eventually figure out how to move our consciousness to computers? If possible, it would make our biological signals from earth of our current civilization only present for a blip on the radar and for all intents and purposes look like we were snuffed out.

I'm assuming SETI already looks for Dyson Spheres/Swarms and civilizations around black holes though, so perhaps you're right and nobody ever quite makes it to that stage.

From the point of view of physics, there is no fundamental difference between biological life (cell based) and digital life (computer based). You can easily imagine various scenarios in which computers wipe themselves out after taking over from us. Put another way, self-extinction is not something exclusive to biology.

> would make the absence of technosignals self-evident

The so called "grabby aliens" hypothesis suggests that after certain stages of advancement, live propagates at close to speed of light. So according to it we would see the technosignals just before contact/colonization/destruction.

This is one variant of "the great filter" theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

and this seems like a good summary:

> Some examples of possible resolutions [of the paradox] are that intelligent life is rarer than is thought, that assumptions about the general development or behavior of intelligent species are flawed, or, more radically, that current scientific understanding of the nature of the universe itself is quite incomplete.

My theory is that once a species has tech to make itself immortal, the drive to reproduce will be over. Thus you don’t see life everywhere, primitive life gets stuck in their own system.

If you you see the pace of acceleration of humans, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can get immortality type tech with in 500 years

The two futures of high tech civilizations are determined by who prevails: lifeforms may become "machinized" or machines may become enlighted with life. The first future is the doom of civilizations highly intelligent, but selfish and not gifted with intuition for this reason.

The anthropocene ain't got shit on the evolution of photosynthesis. The Earth's atmosphere went from near 0 to 20 percent O2. We're in the PPM region for carbon dioxide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com