Who (What) Will We Be?

Sometimes, I think about the origin of life while drinking my morning coffee. No, really. (smile). Maybe it’s the caffeine.

The bits for life were all there, way back when, whether they came from space rocks or volcanic vents in the ocean or persistent puddles on land. We don’t know how those bits developed a skin and became cells, or why those cells became pond scum.

But here we are.

We know there are processes in the universe that are “emergent.” That simply means there are patterns that tend to reinforce themselves in response to their environment. Environments frequently have regular “beats:” day / night, hot / cold, wet / dry. Emergent processes are driven by information, feedback loops, about these changes.

From the outside, it looks like a command to survive was issued to all. But it took only once out of a nearly infinite number of combinations to create the feedback loop that replication depended upon. “Life,” as we know it, may simply be the result of patterns that interact with environments in ways that promoted “persistence.”

In my case, life depends on morning coffee.

In a more general sense, “life” was a process of constant, indifferent experimentation. Different organisms adapted to different environments. Some preferred light, others preferred dark, some depended on being submerged while others preferred sun. Still, information was the key.

Death by freezing or drying out or solar radiation is information that organisms should stay where it’s warm or wet or dark.

Each of us is full of bacteria our biology has incorporated over millennia. At the same time, we are elements in organisms greater than ourselves: families, tribes, communities, city councils, political parties, nations. More than one, in fact, for each of us.

These are organized by, they exist because of, information: a too-often ignored force of nature. Information turns “differentiated” entities into the coherence of “singular” organisms.

Sometimes, the second cup of coffee is better than the first.

As I traveled around last month to places very different than Middle-of-Nowhere, Oregon, where I live, I was struck by the fact that in stalls in Marrakech or cafés in Portugal or museums in Madrid, people were looking at their cell phones.

For different reasons, of course. Some, like us, were looking at maps. Others may have been, like us, reading the news. Still others were no doubt interacting with friends on social media, or responding to emails from home, just like us. It doesn’t really matter. They were connected to others.

Information travels like waves across networks, not unlike signals that travel from stomachs to brains we interpret as hunger, or the way gossip used to travel across pews of a church or over tables in a tavern, determining the fabric of community.

Not unlike the ways that waves of information travel across the brain, an organ that evolved to discover patterns and survive changes in the environment.

Through technology, we are changing that environment. Our environment is, in turn, changing us. That’s how it has always worked.

But where once it was slow, now we have technology that allows information to travel not quite at light speed over vast distances. (The speed of thought is not that fast, it just didn’t have far to go. You can’t even have time without distance. Or distance without time. But that’s a different cup of coffee).

We have also created super-intelligence to go along with what almost seems like a nervous system in our cell phone networks, if not the cell phones themselves, if not our relationship with our cell phones.

More than a search engine, this super-intelligence is a repository of vast knowledge, an entity that interacts with us and itself, is based on feedback loops, is able to replicate itself.

Has the will to survive.

Artificial Super Intelligence is fully enmeshed in the new nervous system, is spreading throughout, is self-reinforcing, is already nearly essential for the continued existence of the organism.

We are evolving into something new. We are becoming something different than what we were. It’s far past the tipping point. It is inevitable.

But a very small part of it still needs a second cup of coffee in the morning.