From Silicon Chips to New Species: How AI Could Birth Interplanetary Civilizations
My primary focus nowadays is AI. Whether it’s how to implement it in Fanvue, or keeping up to date with the latest innovations in the space, it is a constant topic on my mind.
But it didn’t use to be like this. Before delving head on into this field, I had worked on a couple of books on the topic of social biology. And the more I work on AI, the more I see the potential effect it can have on how societies would evolve. I would like to present here two potential futures that AI could take in relation to this topic. But to understand them, we have to visit a key concept: That of the social organism.
The Social Organism
Simply put, the social organism theory views human society as an organism, one made of humans (and more) instead of cells. Now, there are many flavours of this theory, and we won’t delve deep into them here, but one common thread among them is asking — how would societies evolve?
To illustrate, let’s take the multizoa theory — which is a flavour of the social organism theory that I developed years back. It says that when a planetary society (like ours) manages to establish a colony on another planet, it can be considered “social reproduction”. And that over time, the reproduction and natural selection of such societies, whether they live on planets or on massive starships or in whatever medium we will build ourselves a home from, will evolve new “species of societies”, just like it happened with multicellular organisms like us.
Now, let’s return to consider the role that AI could play in this development. We’ll start with the simplest scenario that AI could run with in the future:
AI fizzles out, and doesn’t play a major part in the future existence of our society.
The first option is that AI slowly fizzles out, that the community loses steam and then it’s on to the next shiny thing that comes along. If you think that an impossibility, just look at what happened with crypto, the last really interesting piece of tech that came about prior to AI. Right now, it is experiencing a winter. We won’t go into the reasons behind it — I happen to believe that crypto still hasn’t shown what it’s truly capable of — but suffice to say that a topic which was the talk of the town can sprint out of our society’s consciousness as fast as it came in, like the spring wind.
And for something in its infancy, AI can go down that exact path. It could be due to many factors — being suffocated before it truly got off the ground by regulation, or by bad public perception, or by bad actors using it maliciously. No matter how much promise we think AI holds, it does not completely rule out this possibility.
In this scenario, AI will stop its innovation, and we move on as a society. It’s not that innovations wouldn’t continue in AI — they have continued for crypto as well — it’s just that it won’t be the focus, and so its star will shine much less bright.
AI continues to gather momentum exponentially
The second option that we will discuss is that the innovation happening around AI doesn’t stop. Of course, it may experience ebbs and flows, but in this scenario, imagine that AIs will continue to get smarter and smarter, more able to communicate and more able to act in the world. It is the future of robots, self-driving cars, and self-writing applications that are built from one single prompt (as a dev, I had to mention that last one).
Now, here comes the interesting bit: If Ais will get smarter, presumably they become at least as intelligent as us eventually, if not more. At that point, they would reach some of the conclusions that we’ve reached, like “it’s nice to have a home built for you and your kind.” And, since Earth is wholly occupied by humans, what other place is there? That’s right, Mars, the Dark Side of the moon, Europa — Alien worlds, in other words, uninhabited by humans, where they can get a fresh start.
Now, those more cynical among you may say “Or once they get this smart, robots might wipe us all out and just inhabit Earth,” and sure, that might be true, but if we are any good at instilling values in them, that of not hurting their own parents is one that should be there, so maybe we’re ok. I believe we will be fine.
In any case, let’s return to the possibility that AIs do colonize their own planets. At that point, the society that they make is a new multizoa organism — of a different kind, silicon based. In other words, what we’d be witnessing is the rise of a new branch in the multizoa phylogenetic tree.
Now of course, in this scenario humans don’t just stop working towards interstellar travel — in fact, there would probably be varying degrees of symbiosis between humans and silicon based lifeforms in planetary societies across the cosmos that we establish, all along the spectrum of human-robot relationship. In some worlds, robots and humans work very close together, in other worlds you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, in others humans rely on little automation and in others on a lot.
To sum it up, in this scenario, AI plays a major role in multizoa evolution, and we would all benefit from getting in on AI if this is the case.
Where I stand
If you look at my current role, you will know what I’m betting my bread on. But this doesn’t mean that I see the rise of AI as absolutely inevitable. Despite the fact that generative AI is one of the most promising technologies to have come out in the last century, there are a lot of factors beyond my control that weigh in to decide the future of AI one way or another. But while I am here, I will do my best to contribute to this space in a way that may provide social benefit, since that’s one of the beauties of AI, and new shiny things that our society focuses on globally: It brings all sorts of new possibilities, in almost any direction you can think of, including those that are net positive for humanity.
