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SMILE: Progress and collapse

While we are accelerating towards a crash due to unsustainable consumption, there are still believers in progress. The singularity is near, we are told. Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension – summarised in the catchy formula SMI²LE – was LSD guru Timothy Leary's vision already in the early 1970's. General AI might reach a point where it becomes capable of improving itself and, at that point, we're done; the all-mighty AI will start making paper clips in enormous quantities and will be unstoppable, unless it comes up with something even worse. Already, automation and AI have seriously reshaped the labour market, increased wage gaps between skilled and unskilled workers, and is about to make some previous professions obsolete. Designers and illustrators might feel somewhat threatened by generative art, now that anyone can produce images from a text prompt. Contemporary artists hardly worry, for them generative art is just another opportunity to be explored.

A brief moment of reflexion should suffice to tear down the lofty ideas of inevitable triumphant progress. Longevity, let's say by several hundred years, has been one of the delusional dreams of the most rabid techno-utopians. If it were possible and practiced at large, the average age of the population would by much higher and children would be scarce. Grumpy bicentennials would have seen it all and they'd be so blasé about everything. A scientific paradigm dies only with its last defender, it's been said, and many other unhealthy ideas would likewise be kept in circulation far too long. Space migration may be the only domain where there would be any point in significantly longer life expectancy. However, the prospects for human space travel are limited by the adverse effects of intense solar radiation exposure. Leary, speaking of intelligence increase, thinks primarily of human intelligence aided by technology such as brain implants, as well as reprogramming or rewiring through psychedelic experiences.

Recently, I discussed colour perception with someone who speculated about the possibility of brain implants that might allow us to see new colours. Similarly, one may imagine all kinds of novel cognitive abilities. However, I think these expectations are wide off the mark. For colour, we have developed a three dimensional colour space, there are limitations already in the retinal colour processing. I don't think we could become tetracromates, like certain bird species, which would allow us to distinguish metamers, that is, colours of identical appearance (to us as tricromates) with differing spectral composition. Wearing sunglasses or inverting the colour space in gimp is probably as far as we'll get. Likewise, it seems overly optimistic that we could increase the speed of thought (beyond what a focused state of mind might achieve anyway) or that an additional sensory input would be more usable than distracting. I suspect the best we might hope to achieve would be to mimick the accomplishments of exceptional individuals, such as highly talented violinists, chess players, or polyglots, but even that seems very far-fetched.

Growing computational power has had profound effects on entertainment, surveillance, communication, finance, etc. Now, it often seems that humans are working for computers rather than the other way around. An intelligence explosion, that is, the exponential self-improvement of an AI, is a possibility that, a priori, cannot be ruled out (Nick Bostrom has layed out a few credible scenarios). An all-powerful AI still would need an energy input and material resources of hardware replacement as parts wear out. Presumably, it would cajole humans to provide it with all resources needed, assuming the AI possess traits of self-preservation. On the other hand, an EMP could wipe out our electronic devices, and that would be the end of that. Already as it is, crypto mining and streaming servers take up energy resources without any semblance of intelligence, artificial or not, resources that could otherwise find better use.

The fallacious belief in eternal growth may be a consequence of our habituation to the easy access to fossil fuels, which has driven the economic growth and the rapid exploitation of natural resources. But, as collapsologists warn us, exponential growth is not possible in a finite world. The future cannot be predicted to follow a linear or exponential extrapolation of current trends. Uncertainty concerning the future is for certain, everything else is speculation. Nevertheless, collapse scholars like to remind us of the fate of every advanced civilisation: they may have reached significant levels of complexity, but they all collapsed at some point. As Ugo Bardi often points out, the collapse usually happens much faster than the slow build-up to peak complexity. A collapsed civilisation is followed by decreased life expectancy, perhaps famine, wars, pandemics, and population decrease. Some collapses have been blamed on the expoitation of natural resources over their carrying capacity. Deforestation results from increased farming and mining. As the population plummets after a collapse, forests and other over-exploited ecosystems get an opportunity to gradually recover. There may be a rebound after a period, with the cycle of growth recommencing even more vigourously because previously invented technologies are still available. With the current multi-level crisis, a long deep dive can be expected and, if we're lucky, enough of Gaia survives to allow for a comeback.

References

• Bardi, U. (2020). Before the Collapse. Springer.
• Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence. Oxford University Press.
• Leary, T. (1988). Neuropolitique. Falcon Press.