The Panglossian view
Can we trust evolutionary development to take our species in broadly desirable directions? Starting from primitive, unconscious life, biological evolution has led to the development of ever more advanced organisms, including creatures that have minds, consciousness, language, and reason. More recently, cultural and technological development, which exhibit some parallels with biological evolution, have enabled our species to progress at a vastly accelerated pace, with enormous improvements occurring in the past few hundred years in human life-span, labor productivity, scientific knowledge, and social and political organization, which enable billions of people to enjoy unprecedented opportunities for enjoyment and personal development. On a historical as well as on a geological timescale, the big picture shows an overarching trend towards increasing levels of complexity, knowledge, consciousness, and coordinated goal-directed organization, a trend which, not to put too fine a point on it, we may label “progress”.[1]
What we shall call the Panglossian view maintains that this past record of success gives us good grounds for thinking that evolution (whether biological, memetic, or technological) will continue to lead in desirable directions. This Panglossian view, however, can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, because we have no reason to think that all this past progress was in any sense inevitable – much of it may, for all we know, have been due to luck. And second, because even if the past progress were to some extent inevitable, there is no guarantee that the melioristic trend will continue into the indefinite future.
The first objection derives some degree of support from the consideration that an observation selection effect is operating to filter the evidence we can have about the success of our own evolutionary development.[2] Suppose it was true that on 99.9% of all planets where life emerged, it went extinct before developing to the point where intelligent observers could begin to ponder their origin. If this were the case, what should we expect to observe? Answer: something similar to what we do in fact observe. Clearly, the hypothesis that the odds of intelligent life developing on a given planet are low does not predict that we should find ourselves on a planet where life went extinct at an early stage. Instead, it predicts that we should find ourselves on a planet where intelligent life evolved, even if such planets constitute a very small fraction of all planets where primitive life evolved. The long track record of life’s success in our evolutionary past, which one may naively take to support the hypothesis that life’s prospects are in general good and that there is something approaching inevitability to the rise of higher organisms from simple replicators, turns out, after reflecting on the overwhelming observation selection effect filtering the possible evidence we could have, not to offer any such support at all, because this is the very same evidence that we should expect to have if the optimistic hypothesis were false. A much more careful examination of the details of our evolutionary history would be needed to circumvent this selection effect. We will not undertake such an examination in the present paper.[3]
This paper will instead focus on the second objection to the Panglossian view. Even if the rise of intelligent life from simple replicators were a robust and nearly inevitable process, this would not give us strong grounds for thinking that the good trend will continue. One possibility, of course, is that a catastrophic event may cause the sudden extinction of the human species. Some existential risks arise from nature, e.g. impact hazards (meteors and asteroids), pandemics, astrophysical disasters, and supervolcano eruptions. But the greatest existential risks are anthropogenic and arise, more specifically, from present or anticipated future technological developments. Destructive uses of advanced molecular nanotechnology, designer pathogens, future nuclear arms races, high-energy physics experiments, and self-enhancing AI with an ill-conceived goal system are among the worrisome prospects that could cause the human world to end in a bang. Here, however, we shall explore a different set of existential risks in which the world would end more gradually, not with a bang but a whimper.[4] Let us therefore suppose that no sudden cataclysm puts an end to life. Let us also set aside scenarios in which evolution leads to the erosion of complexity. We shall explore how, even if evolutionary development continues unabated in the direction of greater complexity, things could nevertheless take a wrong turn leading to the disappearance of all the things we value.
This paper will not claim that this is what will happen. The aim, rather, is to undermine our confidence in the Panglossian view and to suggest that a more agnostic stance better reflects the available evidence. We will examine a couple of scenarios in which freewheeling evolutionary developments take us in undesirable directions, and we will argue that if the future evolutionary fitness landscape is such as to make these evolutionary courses the default (and we have no strong reason either for or against this assumption), then the only way we could avoid long-term existential disaster is by taking control of our own evolution. Doing this, it will further be argued, would require the development of a “singleton,” a world order in which at the highest level of organization there is only one independent decision-making power (which may be, but need not be, a world government).
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html
No comments:
Post a Comment