AI AND THE NEXT STEP IN EVOLUTION

I started reading “Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence”, while I was also reading “The big nine”. “The big nine” is a book about the evolution of AI. Which dovetails perfectly with this book, which is about the evolution of humanity. According to James Lovelock, they coincide.

Energy is information

We alone, among the billions of species that have benefited from the flood of energy from the Sun, are the ones who evolved with the ability to transmute the flood of photons into bits of information gathered in a way that empowers evolution. We are now entering the phase in which we and our cyborg successors convert sunlight directly into information.

The future is cyborgs

He thinks the future will not be humans, but what he chooses to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed. These will soon become thousands then millions of times more intelligent than us.

AlphaGo

Here is the overlap with “The big nine”. AlphaGo. AlphaGo used two systems — machine-learning and tree-searching — which combined human input with the machine’s ability to teach itself. AlphaGo searched a mere 80,000 positions per second when playing chess; the best conventional program, Stockfish, searched…