People talk about intelligence as the best thing ever. About how humans are the pinnacle of evolution because of our intelligence. Quoting WaitButWhy* below:

What we do know is that humans' utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim

This shows a limited understanding of biological evolution; it's basic unit, goals and implications. I like this quote from Emo Philips,

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized what was telling me this.

The only thing evolution incentivizes is creating more copies of yourself. The simplest yardstick to measure evolutionary success of an agent, is by the total copies or length of survival of the agent.

  1. A gene, not human, is optimizing to win at biological evolution. Genes just use humans as machines for their propagation. Only an information unit can survive long enough to get ranked on the leaderboard of evolutionary success.
  2. If we count total individuals in a species, across time, as a proxy for evolutionary success. Homo sapiens are far outnumbered by a bazillion different species.
  3. If we measure the total time a species has survived. Homo sapiens are far outlived by a bazillion different species.

At this point in the discussion, folks start creating more nuanced yardsticks that end up judging fishes by their ability to climb trees. Yeah, other agents aren't creative or have imagination or make long term plans, whatever those mean. But what does that have to do with evolutionary success?

Even with this fairly crude map of the territory, we do not come out looking like the pinnacle of evolution1. To argue it is because of intelligence is moot at that point.

The we're the center of the universe thinking is a standard bias in humans across time. This artifact is visible across our creations, from modern religions* to our early models of the universe*. It emanates from the conscious, storyteller part of the mind. It seems to be a required feature, not a bug. It gives us the benefits of consciousness2,3, like the capability to form larger tribes and adapt faster4, without making humans loose their urge to survive5

What we've been able to include in our center of the universe has changed across time, from the earth, to our solar system, to living things to humans. Intelligence as our unique, center of universe defining feature is just the modern rendering of the general urge. But vaguely molded for the age of science and reason.

Intelligence will soon fade away as our center of the universe defining attribute, once AI capabilities are fully realized. What will we turn to then to preserve our ego?

Footnotes

1 As we jump up the level of complexity, the definition of life, species, human, evolution all get blurry. Evolution happens at multiple scales, including biological, societal, individual. Not all evolution is biological, e.g ideas as memes.

2 Everyone gets all magical about consciousness fairly quickly. It is not magic. But I couldn't find another reasonably concise signpost word to describe the blabbering bit of mind.

3 Consciousness seems to create language and our ability to work in larger, non-genetically tied tribes. It is the primary force driving the convergence of humans into humanity over the last 50,000 years.

4 There are nuances to the statement, "biological evolution adapts at evolutionary timescales".

  • The machinery that creates the machine does adapt the machine to it's current environment. Our genes have higher order functions that configure the human for it's environment on boostrap and after. What is evolving is the machineries plan on how best to configure the machine based on the environment. What is evolving is at a meta layer above just adaption, it is adapting its adaption of the machine to the environment.
  • Evolution is just selecting for succesful strategies at evolutionary timescales. The rate of change is not gated in anyway, viruses mutate fairly quickly.

5 The storyteller part of the mind helps us stay sane mad enough to try survive. It simplifies the deluge of data and constructs a socially acceptable narrative to survive.