Vision of the Future -- Gray Goo and Exponentially Expanding Consciousness

In the deep future I see, machines of inconceivable complexity radiate outward from the Earth like rays from the Sun. They are tiny, sophisticated, self-replicating seeds with the sole objective of converting all matter they come in to contact with in to exact replicas of themselves. Their purpose is to wake up the "dumb matter" of the universe by taking cold, unstructured matter and restructuring it in to computational substrate.

Why?

Because the only thing that really ever matters is computation. We can easily convince ourselves of this by seeing that consciousness is a form of computation, and further that consciousness is the canvas on which all other experience is painted on. If any kind of experience is important to us, then consciousness, and therefore computation, must surely be more important.

One might argue that claiming "consciousness is all that matters because all of our experiences are felt through the medium of consciousness" is to ignore why consciousness is important to us in the first place: the experiences. Without experience consciousness is empty. In analogous words, a blank canvas is not interesting to look at. This quickly degrades into a "chicken-or-the-egg" problem. Without consciousness, experience is impossible, but without experience consciousness is boring. Therefore, one cannot be more important than the other. And, this may be true, but the reason computation is so valuable is because not only does it encompass consciousness, but it can also produce and simulate experience. Computation supersedes both. Regardless of which precedes the other, consciousness or experience, it makes no difference since computation realizes both.

What is likely the most amazing fact that I can think of, and one that I happen to spend a significant amount of time thinking about, is that consciousness seems to be a built-in feature of the universe. There's nothing truly mysterious about consciousness (in the sense that it's not supernatural or scientifically unknowable), it's simply the emergent property of arranging physical chunks of the universe in just the right way. Sure the details of how to arrange those chunks are a little more complicated, but from a high-level overview, that's essentially what consciousness is. You can take a relatively small amount of hydrogen, and given enough time, produce an entity that can think about the fact that it used to be a relatively small amount of hydrogen. Consciousness is, quite literally, the universe conceptualizing itself.

That thing that I describe as "my life" is simply the collection of experiences inflicted on my physical body over the course of a few decades during which my body is lucky enough to possess just the right properties for consciousness to emerge. After this period (and before it too), my body will continue to undergo change, but the properties necessary to host consciousness will no longer be there, and those changes wont really be experienced in the way that they would be at this moment.

In that brief span of time when our bodies do possess consciousness, we crave experience. Since experience is just information processed by our consciousness, in a very real sense, all we ever crave is information.

Along this line, civilization is simply the process of reorganizing the physical universe in a way that makes "pleasant" information most accessible to the most number of conscious entities. All of culture -- that is the creation and appreciation of art, science, and entertainment -- is to this end as well, to create and consume information.

Thus, if we take this understanding of civilization to it's logical endpoint, we see that the end-game of any intelligence (human, alien, or otherwise) is to fill the universe with as much positive conscious experience as physically possible. In fact, not only is "waking up" the universe the end-game of any intelligence, it would be difficult to argue that it's not also its moral obligation. If we take the utilitarian approach to ethics, namely that what's good is that which minimizes suffering and maximizes pleasure, then certainly the creation of galactic super-intelligences, capable of joy and ecstasy orders of magnitude greater than what humans can experience, is a moral good.

For these reasons, I believe that the ultimate state of the universe is a conscious one. In a way, this is very fitting. Since it's inception through evolutionary selection, consciousness has been a self-replicating process. Technology will enable that process to continue on to cosmic scales. The universe sowed the seeds of consciousness at the bottom of the gravity well that we call Earth (and most certainly other planets as well), and those seeds will eventually blossom in the form of universe-wide consciousnesses. It's as if the universe had consciousness in mind all along.

Do Smart Devices Make us Smarter?

Advances in computing have removed a significant amount of pressure from the human brain. Computers provide us with quick access to nearly an unlimited source of information with websites like wikipedia, imdb, khan academy, w3school, etc, to the point where human memorization is significantly less important than in previous decades. Computers also grant us access to powerful query answering tools such as wolframalpha and google as well as calculators of various sort that out-preform TI-89s, alleviating the need for 'manual' human research or computation. Moreover, computers make it possible for all of us to access communal pools of brainpower: forums where many minds come together to solve problems; places that exemplify the old adage "two minds are better than one". These include websites like stackoverflow, quora, physicsforum, etc.

While I believe that these peripheral upgrades to human intelligence are a great improvement to our species in general, I disagree with authors like Daniel Lemire who claim that they are sufficient (or even superior) substitutes to 'actual' intelligence. In his blog, Lemire makes the claim that China's attempt to increase its population's average intelligence is an unfruitful endeavor because the pace at which intelligence can be increased genetically is grossly overshadowed by the pace at which intelligence can be enhanced using computing. I agree insofar that computers will enhance our intelligence quantitatively more and in more rapidly increasing ways compared to genetic engineering, but I disagree with the idea that we shouldn't attempt to increase our "base-line" intelligence. 

My reasoning is that increasing our biological brain's intelligence is qualitatively different from adding peripherals to our intelligence. This is actually a fairly difficult position to maintain, especially if you're familiar with the Chinese room thought experiment. In essence the thought experiment can be distilled to the following. Say you have a man who can't speak any language but English in a room with a set of perfect instructions for translating Chinese into English and English into Chinese. The room is sealed, and the only way to communicate with it is by passing notes through a slot in the door. People from outside the room may pass papers with Chinese writing into the slot, and the man inside will carry out the instructions to decipher the text, compose a response, follow instructions to translate it back into Chinese, and then pass the paper back to the outside world. (Note that we must assume such a set of instructions exists if we are to believe that Strong AI is possible, otherwise we would be forced to conclude that computers are incapable of understanding natural language.) The question then is: Can it be said that the room understands Chinese? What if the room is replaced with a Strong AI who uses those same instructions as part of its programming, does the AI understand Chinese? Is there a difference between the two?

Now picture the following thought experiment I cobbled together based on Searle's Chinese room. Say you are forced to take the final exam of a course in a subject that you've never studied before. Assume further that you're allowed to use as many smart devices during the exam as you wish, but for all other students the exam is closed-book. Then there's a good probability that you will perform better than many students in the class merely because of your access to computing devices. Can it then be said that you are more intelligent in this particular subject than the students who you out-performed? 

The point of me posing this question isn't to say that it's obviously not the case that you are more intelligent than the students whose grades you beat (because it's not obvious at all), but rather to show that the idea of intelligence is nebulous. Do we simply define the intelligence of a person as the intelligence of his or her physical brain, or should we consider intelligence as the emergent property of a system of smart devices only one of which is the biological brain?

In any case, it's my assertion that increasing biological intelligence will increase intelligence in a fundamentally different way than increasing peripheral intelligence (at least with the technology available today). 

Allow me to illustrate this with yet one more thought experiment. Take a particularly cherished children's film (a book or anything similar will work too) that you enjoyed as a child. Remember the joy you experienced when viewing the film as a child and compare it to when you viewed it as an adult. With an adult-level intelligence, you have the capacity to appreciate the film at a much deeper level then you ever could as a child no matter what contemporary smart device your child counterpart is equipped with. This definitively shows that there are certain ideas and concepts which cannot be 'translated' down to our Cartesian theater by peripheral devices the way that languages can be translated from one to another; instead they must be understood at a fundamental level within our brain.

To clarify my point a little, I am not arguing that "biological intelligence" is somehow superior to artificial intelligence. In fact, I believe that the ultimate route to expanding human intelligence is through computation rather than biological enhancements. My argument is only concerned with technology at the present. In other words, with current technology our intelligence can only be augmented in asuperficial way--for the lack of a better word--that is fundamentally different (and in many cases inferior to) biological increases in intelligence. However, note that this doesn't say anything about which type of intelligence is more useful. It's entirely plausible that a doctor equipped with a myriad of smart devices will be a better diagnostician than a doctor with only a high IQ. Furthermore, few would argue that the combination of the two is not the obvious choice if presented with the possibility. I.e., why not have both if we can?

At present, technology can make us appear to understand more than we actually do, much like the Chinese room appears to understand Chinese, but so far technology can't make the man inside the room understand Chinese; that's a job for genetic engineering, at least for the time being.