kpurens—nice post. I agree that it’s worth remembering some lessons learned from paleobiology that were not at all obvious until the last couple of centuries of scientific research on extinctions.
It’s also worth noting that, even among bipedal, highly social human-ish species, which have included maybe a dozen or so species over the last several million years, we are the last bipedal hominid standing. We out-competed, displaced, and extinguished every other species of highly social ape with a brain size above about 400 ccs that has evolved since we split from the chimp/bonobo lineage about 7 million years ago. (Yes, some human populations managed to poach some useful genes from Neanderthals before we drove them extinct too, but Neanderthals aren’t exactly thriving as autonomous life-forms. We just carry their ghosts around in our chromosomes, so to speak.)
So, in terms of AI risk, we like to imagine that this 7-million-year legacy of human competitive success will continue. But odds are, we’ll end up suffering the same fate as Ardipithecus or Paranthropus or Homo habilis, if advanced AI becomes ecologically competitive with us.
Human cultural evolution has replaced gene evolution of the main way humans are advancing themselves, and you certainly point at the trend that ties them together.
One reason I didn’t dig into the anthropology record is that it is so fragmented, and I am not an expert in it—very little cross-communication between the fields, excepting in a few sub-disciplines such as taphonomy.
kpurens—nice post. I agree that it’s worth remembering some lessons learned from paleobiology that were not at all obvious until the last couple of centuries of scientific research on extinctions.
It’s also worth noting that, even among bipedal, highly social human-ish species, which have included maybe a dozen or so species over the last several million years, we are the last bipedal hominid standing. We out-competed, displaced, and extinguished every other species of highly social ape with a brain size above about 400 ccs that has evolved since we split from the chimp/bonobo lineage about 7 million years ago. (Yes, some human populations managed to poach some useful genes from Neanderthals before we drove them extinct too, but Neanderthals aren’t exactly thriving as autonomous life-forms. We just carry their ghosts around in our chromosomes, so to speak.)
So, in terms of AI risk, we like to imagine that this 7-million-year legacy of human competitive success will continue. But odds are, we’ll end up suffering the same fate as Ardipithecus or Paranthropus or Homo habilis, if advanced AI becomes ecologically competitive with us.
Really great point about a curious trend!
Human cultural evolution has replaced gene evolution of the main way humans are advancing themselves, and you certainly point at the trend that ties them together.
One reason I didn’t dig into the anthropology record is that it is so fragmented, and I am not an expert in it—very little cross-communication between the fields, excepting in a few sub-disciplines such as taphonomy.