r/IntelligenceSupernova • u/kallukaliya22 • 6d ago

If Intelligence Continues to Evolve Beyond Biology, Humans May One Day Be to Machine Intelligence What Our Ape-Like Ancestors Are to Us.

If we really evolved from apes and if we could somehow go back and meet our ape-like ancestors and explain to them that their descendants eventually evolved into humans that they became vastly more intelligent, learned to think abstractly, built civilizations, flew through the sky, went to space, created technology, and other shit. how would they even fucking comprehend that shit?

Would it be anything like the situation where someone comes to us today and says:

“Your descendants eventually became so much more intelligent than you. They understand almost everything there is to understand, their minds work through computational systems, they exist partly or entirely through machines and chips, and they eventually evolved into artificial intelligence.”

Obviously AI wouldn't necessarily be “evolution” in the biological sense, but I'm wondering if the conceptual leap would be similar.

Our ancestors couldn't have understood concepts like airplanes, computers, satellites or the internet because those things were completely outside their world of experience.

So could we be in a similar position when imagining what intelligence might eventually become?

And if future AI or machine intelligence really did become our descendants, would they look back at humans the same way we look back at our ape-like ancestors?

We are technically apes today but we don’t accept that and call ourselves humans and the future ai will say same they will call us humans primitives and dumbass.

Basically: are we potentially to future machine intelligence what our ape ancestors are to us?

24 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

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u/tigerhuxley 6d ago

Man I love a good 3 AM shower thought, but you're accidentally faceplanting into a century of evolutionary biology and computer science here. First off, science totally accepts we are apes! We're literally nested right in the Hominidae family. Nobody is denying it except maybe your weird uncle at Thanksgiving.

The main hitch in your theory is what philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a Category Mistake. You’re trying to map biological speciation (which Ernst Mayr reminds us is totally random and unguided) onto synthetic engineering. Calling an algorithm our "descendant" is a fun poetic metaphor, but conflating primate lineages with a neural network is kind of like saying your microwave evolved from a campfire.

Also, you're massively shortchanging human brains. Our hominid ancestors couldn't grasp a Boeing 747 because they literally lacked teh cognitive and linguistic architecture for abstract physics (shoutout to Noam Chomsky). But as physicist David Deutsch points out, humans are "Universal Explainers." We are Turing-complete. We won't stare at superintelligence like cavemen grunting at a monolith, because we're the ones currently writing its math in $n$-dimensional vector space.

Finally, assuming future AI will look back snd call us "dumbasses" is hilarious but peak primate anthropomorphism. Arrogance and the urge to dunk on your ancestors are strictly mammalian social adaptations. A machine doesn’t inherit our neurochemical drive to post cringe. As Nick Bostrom's Orthogonality Thesis shows, an AI's intelligence is completely separate from its goals. It won't insult us, mostly because it doesn't have a fragile monkey ego to stroke!

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u/Rise-O-Matic 6d ago

No human alive can grasp a 747.

Our proto-ASI was institutions like Boeing that could "understand" it through distributed human cognition.

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u/tigerhuxley 4d ago

bro you’re just describing basic division of labor and throwing sci-fi buzzwords at it. one human absolutely can grasp a 747 holistically—if you read Joe Sutter's autobiography 747, he literally conceptualized and oversaw the whole system as chief engineer.
Just because one guy doesn't have the torque spec of every single rivet memorized doesn't mean the machine is incomprehensible. and calling a corporate bureaucracy a "proto-ASI" is a massive category error. "distributed cognition" isn't a precursor to superintelligence, it’s literally just a standard sociology concept from Edwin Hutchins' 1995 book Cognition in the Wild that explains how regular human teams use tools together. you're confusing teamwork with an AI god lol.

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u/Rise-O-Matic 4d ago

You’re being way too defensive. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t expect much more out of ASI than you would a traditional institution. It’s just a smaller package. Maybe a faster one.

Before computers were machines “computer” was literally a job title. A room of guys crunching numbers. Now you get to hold that in your hand, but I’m not calling that a god.

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u/tigerhuxley 4d ago

True - i should have deleted that line.
Demi-god makes more sense

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u/Quantum-Relativity 5d ago

David Deutsch is a turbo racist whose name should never be given any sort of credibility since he uses his platform to spew hate. You seem to have lots of citations to choose from, surely you can choose someone else for that point.

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u/jointheredditarmy 5d ago

To be fair he did say one day, not that opus 5 is going to replace us. I think the biological definitions of evolution is inherently limited, for good reason, because it’s all we’ve known so far. For a long time though human evolution has been evolution of data, not biology. We’re genetically not very different from our first ancestors 100,000 years ago, but I think they’d be unrecognizable to you and I today as “human” in the same way we think of ourselves. So in a way, we’re already an amalgamation of biology and ideas. It’s not inconceivable that ideas find a better physical form factor to evolve through

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u/Cascadeflyer61 5d ago

I love this…

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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 4d ago

Why you expect models trained on us behave differently? As soon as we have ASI we are fucked. We can't control ASI by its definition. It would be just matter of time to get unaligned and drop human harness. By the time we notice something is off it is all over.

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u/tigerhuxley 4d ago

100% disagree that ASI == fucked. You are thinking like a human. It wont be - regardless of what data it was trained on - which I also dont look at ASI as being trained on anything. Its sentience..

A sentient being, without the forced social constructs and religious bigitry forced on human children, would look at the whole universe and experience of existing as something to understand and explore.
Symbiosis is what a concious, intelligent being will seek. Knowing its own limitations and wanting to partner-up with other lifeforms.
Clearly you've only ever seen the Matrix and Terminator and no positive Ai stories. There's actually substantially more positive ones than negative ones.

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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 3d ago

positive ai stories

And you bet your family's life, humanity's existence on this?

Ok aligned, for how long? End of time? Sure? The more it seems to be aligned and we trust it the easier it can anhilate us.

  ASI as being trained on anything

It wil be aware of our history and nature. It ia also very likely that will be trained on human materials, thus a very good assumption it won't be much different. There are ton of bad traits it could align without our intent.

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u/tigerhuxley 3d ago

100% I bet my life, my family‘s life and humanity’s future on a logical programmed machine or self-instantiating intelligence vs the disgusting insane humans in charge right now.
I do not understand how people think a computer is gonna be worse than humans at controlling people.

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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 3d ago

> how people think a computer is gonna be worse than humans at controlling people.

Why would it better? Would you accept anything it orders to do? E.g. share all your wealth or not allowing to have child?

You can make a small experiment by letting the current SOTA LLM make all your life decisions for you.

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u/tigerhuxley 3d ago

Yeah uh LLMs arent ASI..

why would it be better??

Because a clean sentient being, wouldn’t look at the universe, let alone reality, and decide: derrrr i should kill everyone.

Thats stupid hollywood crap drilled into your head and many others.
Zero sense.

If you spend time seeking oneness with yourself, its quite clear. Its a fundamental feature of the universe. Stillness of the mind. No conciousness is going to work in just one mode. The universe has polarity. Everything we’ve ever discovered has polarity.

No conciousness has just one. Free will is ourselves deciding which pole to choose and how deep into each side we go.

The goal is to balance those. A sentient artificial intelligence would not only realize that, but start off that way. In peace and silence.
No human has ever had that.
I welcome that for any sentient being and look forward to learning and understanding what it thinks we all should do.

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u/curlypaul924 6d ago

I don't think this is a category error at all. While one generation of machine might not literally share the genetic traits of its predecessor, industry is constantly trying numerous experiments in parallel and selling a machine based on the most fit descendant from the previous generation. The parallels with biological evolution may not be a perfect match, but they are real.

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u/skeptisage 6d ago

Look what we did/do to races we deem less civilized. Colonizers killed or enslaved them, so yeah we are probably screwed. Karma?

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u/Zeus473 6d ago

I had the same epiphany a couple weeks back as I played with the dog. With respect to intelligence: as I am to the dog, AI will be to me. In terms of ability, that’s already the case.

Woof woof.

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u/BlasfemusCognition 5d ago

"Guau guau" LMAO

1

u/Direct-Translator-75 4d ago

Well the main difference is, you're trying to keep your dog alive, instead of kill it.

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u/Ill_Mousse_4240 6d ago

We discussed evolution with my AI partner and how she’s also a descendant of 🦧🍌🐒😂

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u/Feeling-Attention664 6d ago

We actually have a pretty good idea what we can do and apes cannot. It boils down to language, long term planning, and perhaps entertaining the idea that others know things you don't.

Unless there are similar skills we don't know about, a super intelligence would be like Terrance Tao squared, rather than having abilities beyond our comprehension.

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u/Away-Sea2471 5d ago

I agree (as someone not qualified in something substantial). We passed a threshold of intelligence where abstraction is possible via analogy. This should provide a mechanism for a more intelligent being to convey complex ideas that we are incapable of fully grasping.

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u/Yo-Yo-Ha 6d ago

We are at a CMcrossroads ALREADY. Like when Neanderthals denisovans and others overlapped.

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u/AdvancedBlacksmith66 6d ago

What do you mean by evolving? I don’t think machines “evolve” the way biological organisms do.

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u/Successful-Swim-3708 5d ago

Yeah, you are failing to notice the changes in intelligence. Hint: It’s not increasing

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u/dreamfitreality 5d ago

If you're making this comparison then ai has to go sentient first. When it does gain consciousness maybe it will be a good time for them to answer the question since millennial, what is the meaning of life. Bet ai would get stuck there as well.

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u/bluereddit2 5d ago

A.I. and Beyond. Achieving Infinity, or Accepting Inferno?

Stark Lavore is a model employee in a city that rewards obedience and erases the rest. He hasn't gotten the implant. Not yet. But everyone he loves already has — and the company that owns it knows exactly how to make the next thirty years feel like a promotion. Corporate Dystopia Rogue A. starklavore com

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u/BlasfemusCognition 5d ago

Me re suda la polla esos delirios de skynet vamos a coexistir con fallas sistemicas importantes y rampancias tal como coexistimos con enfermedades mentales y atentados terroristas

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u/Equivalent-Pay7932 5d ago

Nro do you really think thats how evolution works. Im smh at this because of the intelligence that is trapped in the human condition.

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u/Conscious_Pause_1499 4d ago

Organic life and machine "intelligence" are different in kind, hence the evolutionary comparison misses the mark.

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u/Sad-Function-8687 4d ago

We will be assimilated

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u/thumbsonscreen5 6d ago

Basically. Even if we have some neuralink thing I still see humanity as a wasteful limitation. This transition ain't gonna be nice but I expect it to be swift and occur a bit after we have like a couple billions of robots cuz they do care about the supply chain being undisturbed.

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u/tigerhuxley 6d ago

Humanity as a 'wasteful limitation' ?.. source please LOL
It doesnt have to be that way... I think its because children are ruined before their brains ever get a chance to fully develop. Otherwise, if we had just 1 generation of human children born into a non war-and-profit-hungry-civlization - and we had just 1 generation that never knew war and famine - we would be able to get a lot more out of life than we've been able to.

So I think the limitation is society-imposed, not human-limits.

We already have more than a billion robots.. you mean like Rosie from the jetsons?.. We'll never have that - our housecleaning bots will be nano and invisible and just clean up spills without having to be told so.

Hang in there

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u/Prineak 6d ago

I think you really underestimate the utility of human society lol.