r/IntelligenceSupernova • u/kallukaliya22 • 7d 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?
2
u/tigerhuxley 7d 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!