Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
May 6th, 2021
In Star Trek, the character Data is an artificial intelligence (AI) who would have radically remade his society if many cheap copies of him were allowed. AIs like Data would then do most all jobs, including running starships, which could be much cheaper and more rugged. AIs might (a) be immortal, (b) travel via comm lines instead of starships, (c) duplicate themselves indefinitely, (d) run their minds thousands of times faster than humans, and (e) double their economy every month (instead of our 20 years). But as viewers would rather see stories centered on humans, Star Trek writers arbitrarily declared that Data can’t be copied.
That’s excusable in fiction, but not for futurists, who should describe the future as it could or will be, not as would make a fun story. And that’s my complaint about Christopher Mason’s The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, wherein he “proposes a ten-phase, 500-year program that would engineer the genome so that humans can tolerate the extreme environments of outer space.” While Mason seems to see human-level AIs as arriving within this time period, their existence makes little difference to his scenario.
Mason’s timeline has enhancements to human vision in 2201, first Mars baby and first plants engineered for Mars in 2250, and humans enhanced for other planets in 2340. The first huge “generations” starship would leave Earth in 2450, taking many centuries to carry 80-year-lifespan living humans, and upon arrival a starship might need to wait many more centuries to create an atmosphere, or it might leave again if the planet seemed unsuitable.
Mason allows that maybe, possibly, embryos might be sent instead, and raised by AIs. Or DNA sequences might be transmitted to be assembled, and AIs might do as well as humans in a “guardian” role of making sure that life can spread through the universe.
But once there are fully general and capable AIs made efficiently in factories out of stuff dug up in mines, and powered by artificially-collected energy, why ever would human bodies remain at the center of civilization’s story for centuries thereafter? Especially once AIs develop nanotechnology, putting each atom just where they want it, and having access to far more kinds of atoms and arrangements than biological evolution ever managed.
Such AIs could travel on far smaller and faster starships, which could be launched much earlier. Humans who later traveled on generation ships might arrive centuries later at planets long since colonized by AIs, planets perhaps even disassembled by AIs. (I include brain emulations here in the category “AI”.)
Perhaps Mason will say that we must work to prevent this scenario, as it violates our moral duty to ensure that life doesn’t go extinct. But these AIs will quickly radiate into a vast diversity of active agents that are life, and a far more capable life than any seen so far. Ensuring that robust AIs exist and spread out does in fact ensure the permeance of life.
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