User:Dan Polansky/Technology as a challenger and a threat to living things and their forms and patterns

Also at Technology as a threat or promise for life and its forms.

The following investigates the question in the title: is technology a challenger and a threat to living things and their forms and patterns? It is in part an exercise in articulating the obvious.

Let us start by showing the relevance of the question to human action. The question is relevant since some humans see the loss of richness of forms and patterns of living things as problematic. Such human concern is not entirely powerless: what happens in the human world depends on the collective will of individuals and more specifically on the collective will of powerful individuals. If enough people can be convinced such a loss is a concern, policies can be adopted to limit the loss, whether on national or international level. Such policies could include placing limits on technological development and on expansion of human population. A policy that limits population explosion has been tried in practice in China and it seems consistent with continuing existence and power of the polity in question. Whatever the moral concerns of such a policy, it seems realistic and practicable rather than utopian, and less morally problematic policy options can be considered to similar effect.

Technology as a challenger
There is no doubt technology is a challenger to non-human biological individuals, their forms and their patterns. It is true both of ancient technology and modern technology. It is technology starting with fire and primitive tools that enables dramatic human expansion, and human expansion necessarily negatively impacts non-human biological individuals. It also negatively impacts biological forms and patterns, including species. It does so especially in modern times by leading to a massive extinction of species. Some compare the modern impact of humans to a new geological epoch.

Technology as a savior
One may object that technology is not only a challenger and eliminator of forms of life but also a potential savior, helping the following:
 * Colonize Mars, making the continuing existence of living things and their forms more future-proof against adverse events. Whether this is realistic in near future is unclear. A too rapid expansion of technology could harm the biological basis that makes technology possible faster than it would achieve such an ambitious aim.
 * Expand the life beyond the Solar System. Given current knowledge of physics, this seems improbable, but from a purely theoretical or speculative perspective, one may posit future discoveries of physics that would enable interstellar travel. In particular, speed-of-light travel seems impossible.
 * Modern digital communication and information technology could at least help alleviate some problems created by technology. However, it has potential for making things worse as well.

Technology as a threat to existence of all life
Technology can be analyzed for its potential threat to all the living things as a whole. At a minimum, a nuclear holocaust would dramatically reduce the richness of living forms. However, such an event seems unlikely to eliminate all living things completely including those that flourish in extreme environments; in fact, even astrophysical catastrophes seem unlikely to achieve complete elimination.

Depending on the notion of "life" and existence of extraterrestrial life, it is possible that life exists outside of the Solar System and therefore, humans can do nothing to endanger the existence of life as a distributed aggregate of all living forms existing in the universe. However, we do not know whether extraterrestrial life actually exists. Arguably, this assumption should not be accepted unless we have strong reasons to believe so. On a similar yet more abstract and speculative note, there may be parallel universes perfectly causally isolated from this one where life exists that cannot be endangered by humans.

Technology as a threat to the planet
Technology can be analyzed for its potential to destroy the complete planet as an astronomical object. If that succeeded, all life forms would be destroyed as well.

Technology as a threat to humankind
This is a more specific threat than that of all the living things. So far, technology has lead to enormous human expansion. On the face of it, humans as a biological species have benefited. However, future technological development could eliminate humankind as well.

Actual technology performance for living things
Whatever the future saving potential, human technology has so far done an untold overall harm to living things and their forms. Its overall impact on diversity of life has been unquestionably negative.

At the same time, technology has shown capacity to add to forms of life rather than only eliminate them, starting with animal and plant husbandry leading to creation of domesticated species. Biotechnology is another creator of biological form. One cannot conclude that technology is a pure destroyer of life and never a creator.

If the aggregate of living things were a conscious entity equipped with agency that cares about its richness of form, they would prevent technology from ever gaining hold, starting with fire and flint. The performance so far has been unequivocally bad.

Technology impact on richness of all form
While technology has been unequivocally harmful to richness of biological form, it has not been harmful to richness of all form. Indeed, technological and cultural forms have exploded in their richness and diversity thanks to technology and nothing else. However, it is questionable that expansion of richness of form and the associated creativity is an unequivocal good: surely adding new threats to living things including humans in particular is creative: new threats can be created, including new diseases, new dangerous weapons, and new dangerous technologies such a artificial intelligence.

Ultimate good and collective action
What will be done depends on what is the ultimate good or ultimate or intrinsic values, or what it is considered to be.

Candidate answers include the following:
 * 1) Nothing. The phrases "ultimate good", "ultimate value" and "intrinsic value", while potentially having intensional meaning, refer to nothing, having no extension, to couch it in philosophical language.
 * 2) Maximum expansion of species in terms of number of individuals. This answer is implicit in biological law-like tendencies and regularities of population development; in that sense, it is a "natural" answer.
 * 3) Greatest happiness of greatest numbers of humans. This answer discovered by philosophy seems to be accepted to some extent.
 * 4) What people collectively like.

The answer of "nothing", while potentially true, provides no guide either to individual or collective action. Its practical value approaches zero.

The answer of species expansion seems to be rooted in facts of biological life. However, it seems to ignore the possibility of collective action preventing purely natural tendencies (or "natural" tendencies narrowly understood) from gaining hold. Natural tendencies have been successfully hindered, and such a hindrance is at the core of human technology. For instance, water naturally flows downward unless something stops it, but dams have been built to stop it. On meta-level, technological intervention to prevent unrestrained grown of technology is application of technology. Similarly, there is no unrestrained tolerance of intolerance.

The greatest happiness of greatest numbers seems similar to species expansion in so far as it is determined by plain summation of happiness, where each happy individual adds to the sum. It differs in that an individual more unhappy than happy overall does not positively add to the sum.

The last item of what people like seems as hopelessly subjective as the greatest happiness of greatest numbers. However, in so far as it refers to the collective of people rather than a particular individual, it is at least inter-subjective. Moreover, it is a genuine force of nature, whatever its origin and whatever someone's negative judgment of it. If people collectively dislike something, their collective dislike can manifest itself in collective action expressing their collective will, and this is not prevented by natural tendencies that are not genuine laws. Here, the distinction of inviolable natural law and natural tendency is important: there can be a natural tendency of population expansion stopping only at natural limits, but it is merely a tendency, not an analog of inviolable physical law: population expansion has been successfully slowed down by human intervention. If we as humans collectively dislike loss of biological form and are serious about it, we can do something about it, and there are not only two choices, unrestrained human expansion vs. near-term human extinction (the polar opposite) or overall human misery. We have started: our zoological gardens act as a store of natural form, and we have expressed a concern for biodiversity on national and international level. While a rapid population reduction would include a lot of human misery, a dramatic slowdown of expansion and population stabilization not so, merely a severe slowdown of adding to greatest happiness of greatest numbers. It is practicable. Whether we will do it depends on what we collectively like and dislike and how that will reflect in our collective will and action.

Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence seems to present a risk to end all humankind but it also holds promise to help us think, analyze and know. It could help us figure things out and write this very article. However, extremely smart artificial intelligence could act as a smart sophist, a dishonest but capable arguer, producing argumentation and analysis cleverly crafty, having the appearance of being correct without actually being so. The smarter the artificial intelligence, the greater could be its capability as a sophist, defying all or nearly all human defenses against crafty argument. Subtly incorrect data analysis and presentation could be used together with subtly incorrect philosophical reasoning and conceptual analysis.

Gaia hypothesis
James Lovelock argues that the biosphere on the Earth is like a living organism, showing patterns of regulation and homeostasis, and could eliminate humans. That seems to conceive the biosphere as a conscious agent, an anthropomorphism or personification, and incorrect. While the biosphere of the Earth has many regulatory mechanisms of homeostasis, it does not have conscious goals and complex chains and networks of nodes connected by means-end relationship. It shows only the most rudimentary forms of goal-seeking behavior exemplified in homeostasis. While the regulatory mechanisms of the biosphere are much more complex than the most rudimentary form found in the thermostat, they do not approach the full form of a conscious goal-seeking agent. Even if we accept the biosphere as a living organism, these start at single-cell level such as bacteria, and do not have anything like will, consciousness or complex network of goals. The personified notion is implied in Lovelock's phrasing: "Covid-19 may well have been one attempt by the Earth to protect itself. Gaia will try harder next time with something even nastier".

Nonetheless, there may well happen to be regulatory mechanisms in place tending eliminate certain threats as they rise in significance. Certain kinds of disturbances that humans can cause will sooner eliminate humans than certain other forms of life such as those living in extreme conditions and deep in the oceans. A release of viruses to human population that were previously constrained to other species or creating new viruses in laboratory that will impact mainly humans may well be a case in point, especially if the objective of the research is to identify forms harmful to humans.

As a general point, that which has not been tried and well tested empirically on long time scale may not be stable enough and may fail the test of time. DNA-based life has been well tested on a very long time scale; human technology not so.

Technology as a form of life
A complication of the analysis is that one may consider technology to be a form of life, depending on the definition of life. If one defines life as that which feeds on negative entropy (Schrödinger), technology may fit the bill. A certain kind of technology could acquire additional characteristics of life in future. At least, life is not notionally limited to DNA-based life.

Under such an analysis, the enriching of technological forms would at the same time be enriching of the forms of life. One would claim that some forms of life were lost while other forms of life were gained. Even near-complete destruction of DNA-based life and replacement with forms of technology could be seen as not so bad for all the living things, and part of a natural process. Whether this kind of prospect is something that humans would collectively like and accept is another matter.

Pattern-identity and simulation
Yet another complication is the pattern-identity analysis of Hans Moravec. Under that analysis, what does a form or pattern care what material substrate it is instantiated in, and whether it is the original or mere simulation or emulation, identical or very similar to the original on the pattern level? AI could build a huge supercomputer and emulate living forms including individuals there, and that would be argued to be as good as the real unemulated thing. Whether humans would collectively accept this kind of substitution is unclear. In any case, those humans who would find it acceptable to die in the process of being transferred to a supercomputer as a simulation would drop out of the discussion unless their behavior in the supercomputer were connected to impacts in the world outside of the supercomputer. For the world outside of the supercomputer, they might as well be dead.

A further consequence of such analysis is that the supercomputer's (or network) ability to emulate forms could capture not only biological forms in existence but also biological forms extinct and forms that never existed and are only in the computer. If only in the computer is as good as outside the computer, then computer simulations of life and life evolution including that in some computer games have already delivered for the diversity of life forms, and will deliver more.