http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/dont-...e-us-with-them
Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them
Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve.
BY STEPHEN HSU
In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts predicted that computers would gain human-level ability around the year 2050, and superhuman ability less than 30 years after.
But there is hope. By 2050, there will be another rapidly evolving and advancing intelligence besides that of machines: our own. The cost to sequence a human genome has fallen below $1,000, and powerful methods have been developed to unravel the genetic architecture of complex traits such as human cognitive ability. Technologies already exist which allow genomic selection of embryos during in vitro fertilization—an embryo’s DNA can be sequenced from a single extracted cell. Recent advances such as CRISPR allow highly targeted editing of genomes, and will eventually find their uses in human reproduction.
These two threads—smarter people and smarter machines—will inevitably intersect. Just as machines will be much smarter in 2050, we can expect that the humans who design, build, and program them will also be smarter.
It is easy to forget that the computer revolution was led by a handful of geniuses: individuals with truly unusual cognitive ability. Alan Turing and John von Neumann
Today, we need geniuses like von Neumann and Turing more than ever before. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence. In a 1983 interview, Noam Chomsky was asked whether genetic barriers to further progress have become obvious in some areas of art and science.
He answered: "You could give an argument that something like this has happened in quite a few fields ... I think it has happened in physics and mathematics, for example"
perhaps we will experience a positive feedback loop: Better human minds invent better machine learning methods, which in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds.
The feedback loop between algorithms and genomes will result in a rich and complex world, with myriad types of intelligences at play:
the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silico) and some strangely familiar (hybrids).
It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.
Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies: Some have estimated that 10-30 percent of modern gross domestic product is based on quantum mechanics.
New gods will arise, as mysterious and familiar as the old.