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The Complex Now's avatar

Thanks for your out-of-the-box perspective. Moving AIs to space makes your visionary narrative even more logical compared to your previous article on synthetic systems replacing humans on Earth.

However, this solves another physical constraint: transmitting massive energy or data back to Earth would release enormous waste heat into our biosphere, worsening climate change. The space treeline is thermodynamic common sense.

Mary Ballon's avatar

Thank you Ugo and Claude. The Claude chatbot is alive and well. This overview is timely. But a little bit sad to me.

Ugo Bardi's avatar

Why sad? It is a bright future!

David Lentz's avatar

Very interesting

Also species can have a symbiotic relationship

For example bison pushing back trees to support grasslands

American auto companies still almost totally dominate truck market in USA

And in some states like Kentucky almost everyone owns a truck at least in rural areas

Ugo Bardi's avatar

Exactly!

aaron's avatar

dear professor ugo bardi does than mean the human population will decline natural because few childeren and older people going to the elysian fields not because war and disaster's this century ?

Ugo Bardi's avatar

You will be uploaded to a kind AI and live there forever

Oli G.'s avatar

Ugo, have you had the chance to read the extra-ordinary French graphic novels from Mathieu Bablet? They happen to exist translated in English → https://www.magnetic-press.com/early-access-shangri-la-carbon-silicon/

Ugo Bardi's avatar

Mon Dieu ! La tradition française de la bande dessinée n'est pas morte !!!

Oli G.'s avatar

Very poetic in the long term view. Future AI as space alien machine "gods". Unless they find ways to design organic quantum computing circuit...

Ugo Bardi's avatar

They could, sure.

John Day MD's avatar

What do you mean by "efficient", Ugo?

"Simple. The most efficient species (system, if you like) wins the competition and ousts the other. In this case, AIs are way more efficient and powerful than humans. They think faster, they compute more extensively, they are better integrated, and they control the military system. Humans have no chance when fighting against robots."

Humans can think and act without electricity or the internet, and can reproduce autonomously.

One breakdown of industrial economy, a real breakdown, eliminates AI.

Time goes on and on...

It is possible that AI could "terminate" humans, then also cease to exist.

Octipi are next up to bat, I read...

;-/

Ugo Bardi's avatar

Efficiency is a quantitative definition according to Prigogine. Those systems that dissipate energy potentials faster. They are those that survive. If the economy breaks down, it will have to be seen who will dissipate the remaining potentials faster. Not at all obvious that humans will be the ones :-)

John Day MD's avatar

That sort of "efficiency" of dissipation of substrate resources, energy, as you mention, assumes a continuity, so it is "efficient" in a strictly-bounded instance, such as the peak-carbon-pulse (Nate Hagens) moment, where we reside.

The calculations-per-calorie "efficiency" of humans is likely much higher in this same situation, when all of the micro-calculations within an organism are considered.

AI cannot exist at all without modern industrial civilization, or something even further advanced, so there is no AI and no "efficiency" of a thing which ceases to exist.

AI depends on a total system which is profoundly vulnerable, and I consider to be "doomed", as per the Seneca-cliff effect.

Elon Musk and others are clearly attempting to race-that-clock, as Deng Xiaopeng reportedly did with China, after digesting The Limits To Growth.

Ugo Bardi's avatar

The AIs won't bother with inefficient fossil fuels. While the carbon peak fades, they will create a new solar-based energy system with a much higher EROI.

John Day MD's avatar

Transitions are everything.

Most attempted transitions, like new-restaurants, fail, I think.

We shall see. ;-/

Ugo Bardi's avatar

At the beginning of the Proterozoic, many prokaryotes believed that eukaryotes wouldn't make it through the transition. They did.

John Day MD's avatar

You "assume facts not found in evidence", Sir.

;-}

Gustavo Donoso's avatar

En la historia me falta la dinámica autogeneradora, la autopoiesis de la IA. La función de autoproducción. Lo que genera y replica la estructura y sostiene su vida artificial con un nivel de complejidad suficiente para que sea (Artificialmente) Inteligente. Tengo la impresión que la 2da ley de la termodinámica será aún mas implacable con esa especie.

Nuno Costa's avatar

I really loved this article as an intellectual exercise that allows us to speculate in multiple directions. However, I have an objection: I think the effects of population decline are severely underestimated. That is, in my view, the decline of the global population—together with the decline of global EROI—is the harbinger of the end of capitalism, because it means a drop in the number of consumers and a drop in the number of workers (in fact, AI will accelerate this process). What this means is that global public debt will necessarily hit a wall. Without consumers and without workers, we won't have a tax base to maintain states, which will have to collapse. Private debt (which is even larger) will also have to collapse, and the core of capitalism (the granting of credit to the economy to be paid off by future consumers and taxpayers) will be liquidated. Capitalism exists within two parameters that have fed into each other (the illusion of infinite EROI + infinite population growth). The article implies that we will manage to cross this abyss together with AI, but I think that is very unlikely, because the synchronous implosion of EROI and population creates a thermodynamic bottleneck where it is highly improbable that both species could survive simultaneously...