Words&Dirt

“The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless.”

––The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 79

“Starting from rudimentary replicators, evolution produced increasingly ‘advanced’ organisms, including creatures with minds, consciousness, language, and reason. More recently, cultural and technological processes, which bear some loose similarities to biological evolution, have enabled humans to develop at an accelerated pace. On a geological as well as historical timescale, the big picture seems to show an overarching trend toward increasing levels of complexity, knowledge, consciousness, and coordinated goal-directed organization: a trend which, not to put too fine a point on it, one might label ‘progress.’

The image of evolution as a process that reliably produces benign effects is difficult to reconcile with the enormous suffering that we see in both the human and the natural world. Those who cherish evolution’s achievements may do so more from an aesthetic than an ethical perspective. Yet the pertinent question is not what kind of future it would be fascinating to read about in a science fiction novel or to see depicted in a nature documentary, but what kind of future it would be good to live in: two very different matters.

Furthermore, we have no reason to think that whatever progress there has been was in any way inevitable. Much might have been luck. This objection derives support from the fact that an observation selection effect filters the evidence we can have about the success of our own evolutionary development. Suppose that on 99.9999% of all planets where life emerged it went extinct before developing to the point where intelligent observers could begin to ponder their origin. What should we expect to observe if that were the case? Arguably, we should expect to observe something like what we do in fact observe. The hypothesis that the odds of intelligent life evolving 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; rather, it may predict 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. Life’s long track record on Earth may therefore offer scant support to the claim that there was a high chance––let alone anything approaching inevitability––involved in the rise of higher organisms on our planet.

Thirdly, even if present conditions had been idyllic, and even if they could have been shown to have arisen ineluctably from some generic primordial state, there would still be no guarantee that the melioristic trend is set to continue into the indefinite future. This holds even if we disregard the possibility of a cataclysmic extinction event and indeed even if we assume that evolutionary developments will continue to produce systems of increasing complexity.”

––Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom, pg. 174-5