Futuristic Evolution by AI The Darwin Connection – Discovery Institute

Photo credit: Jason Leung via Unsplash.

The Conversationis a news site where academics including scientists write about their work and voice their opinions about science and society. Recently, Emma Hart, Chair in Natural Computation, Edinburgh Napier University, explained that Were teaching robots to evolve autonomously so they can adapt to life alone on distant planets. She launches from artificial intelligence (AI) as it is now and then looks far into the future, when robots may become autonomous, capable of their own replication and evolution. We will teach them how to evolve, she says.

Its not an original concept. Movies and novels have worked this meme for years, describing sometimes dystopian futures of our robot descendants turning on their creators. Hart has an optimistic view of robotic evolution. She sees human designers training their creations in the art of oversight, such that they would be able to handle all the contingencies a robot starship colonizing distant planets might encounter.

Our work represents the latest progress towards the kind of autonomous robot ecosystems that could help build humanitys future homes, far away from Earth andfar away from human oversight.[Emphasis added.]

Oversightis a key word to follow in her story, as she conjures up visions of robotic ecosystems with training grounds for baby robots, areas for mature ones, and a recycling plant to keep everything green.

What provides the inspiration and motivation for Harts confidence in the future of autonomous, reproducing AI? The challenges of planning for all the contingencies that our AI machines will face seem daunting. Enter Darwin:

An impossible brainteaser for humans,nature has already solved this problem. Darwinian evolution has resulted in millions of species that are perfectly adaptedto their environment. Although biological evolution takes millions of years,artificial evolution modelling evolutionary processes inside a computer can take place in hours,or even minutes. Computer scientists have been harnessing its power for decades, resulting in gas nozzles to satellite antennas that are ideally suited to their function, for instance.

In short, evolution did it, and evolution will do it. Confusion between artificial selection and natural selection lives on. To Hart, they are one and the same. One just takes longer, thats all (millions of years instead of hours or minutes). She never explains how humans evolved oversight. Maybe a lucky mutation in an ape brain happened millions of years ago. But now that we have it, it will persist, she is sure. Humans must subtract themselves from evolution so that the robots can carry on the valuable trait of oversight.

But current artificial evolution of moving, physical objectsstill requires a great deal of human oversight, requiring a tight feedback loop between robot and human. If artificial evolution is to design a useful robot for exoplanetary exploration,well need to remove the human from the loop.In essence,evolved robot designs must manufacture, assemble and test themselves autonomously untethered from human oversight.

That wordoversightjust flew by two times. Robot designers will need to confer that ability on the robots. They wont be able to conquer exoplanetary systems without it. But wait; didnt life on Earth manage to conquer all the ecosystems of our planet without that trait? Darwinism, by definition, is undirected; where did it get oversight?

If something seems amiss in Harts story, it is a thread holding the whole sweater together. It is belief in thecreative power of natural selectionto do anything and everything. Pull on this thread and the whole garment unravels; more precisely, it disintegrates. There never was a sweater. It was all an illusion. A realistic ecosystem in Michael Behes view would show organisms getting by with broken traits, not inventing new ones.

Take the evolution of oversight. Hart assumes thatoversightlike the kind that AI designers employ in their carefully thought-out plans to design robot cities is, itself, a product of natural selection. Maybe the trait we call oversight started with a random mutation to theFOXP2gene or something, giving a dominant hominid male the ability to organize his population to think and plan together. Looking forward from that mutation, nothing in Darwinism would connect it to foresight, logic, or thought. Looking backward from now, Hart would have to conclude that nothing in her evolution of oversight connects with truth or logic, either. There are only behaviors that might have been rewarded with survival. For her to assume a connection, she would have to reach into a different worldview and borrow concepts of truth and morality. She cannot conjure those up from Darwinian principles, which are purposeless and unguided.

Harts futuristic vision of humans passing on our capacity for oversight to machines depends on the fallacy that mental traits like thoughts, logic, and foresight can be explained by natural selection. At this stage in human evolution in 2021, she must assume, our thoughts and design principles are real: they are based on truth (i.e., that what we perceive connects to external reality) and morality (i.e., that it is morally good to share matters of truth and embrace integrity for its own sake). Taking that for granted, she leaps ahead into the future and envisions our progeny human robot ecosystems evolving in a Darwinian way, taking advantage of the creative power of natural selection. Its a convenient myth, because well never live to see it happen.

As well as being rendered in our simulator,child robots produced via our hybrid evolution are also 3D-printed and introduced into a real-world, creche-like environment.The mostsuccessfulindividuals within thisphysical training centremake their genetic code available for reproduction and for the improvement of future generations, whileless fit robots can simply be hoisted away and recycledinto new ones as part ofan ongoing evolutionary cycle.

Natural selection will, she believes, pick up where it left off in the evolution of oversight.

Looking forward, thelong-term visionisto develop the technologysufficiently to enable the evolution of entire autonomous robotic ecosystems that live and work for long periods in challenging and dynamic environmentswithout the need for direct human oversight.

In this radical new paradigm, robots areconceived and born, rather than designedand manufactured. Such robots will fundamentally change the concept of machines, showcasinga new breedthat can change their form and behaviour over time just like us.

For someone too nave to understand that bad things can happen in such scenarios, we suggest that Hart readThat Hideous Strengthand follow it up with C. S. Lewiss argument from reason (The Magicians Twin, Chapter 8). Her team is apparently having fun designing very simplistic body plans and brains with her 3-D printer. The real disappointment will come when AI teams of the future find out that machines have no desire or power to keep doing what their programmers told them to do. Perhaps they will go off in unexpected directions, like the brooms in TheSorcerers Apprentice sequence inFantasia, destroying things left and right and eliminating their own traits if they continue operating at all. Without foresight and mind, nothing requiring oversight will happen. Entropy will rule, as it must.

For more on this theme, listen to Robert J. Marks of Discovery Institutes Bradley Center onID the Future.

Read the rest here:
Futuristic Evolution by AI The Darwin Connection - Discovery Institute