Living Machines
But this may only be a stopgap
measure on the road to developing completely synthetic sentience. Machine intelligence - fully equal (and
quickly superior) to human intelligence in its ability to reason, to create, to
amuse - is a frequent staple of science fiction as well as being a popular
prognostication of technology futurists.
There seems little reason to believe that it will not be realized. Silicon life, in the form of machine
intelligence, would be free not only from the frailties and brief lifetimes of
biology, but of greater import would not be constrained to the undirected and
slow change of Darwinian evolution. A
machine intent upon, say, increasing its memory, could do so by simply building
and inserting more circuitry. It could
improve itself by design, evolving in a Lemarckian, rather than a Darwinian
manner. This would, of course, quickly
result in vastly improved machinery.
I do not consider this scenario
unlikely. Many technologically advanced
cultures will disperse, thereby ensuring their survival. Survival will then give these societies the
time to engineer synthetic intelligence, capable of rapid and directed
self-evolution. Biological intelligence
may indeed be rare. It may be
“unlikely.” But even if this scenario
has played out only rarely in the ten billion years of galactic history, it
would have widespread consequences.
Those consequences arise because such advanced intelligences could
spread out.
The classic Drake Equation, as
we have noted, assumes that the extraterrestrials will remain in the solar
system of their origin. This is not
unreasonable, assuming that the aliens are mortal beings with lifetimes short compared
to the time needed to bridge the distances between the stars. Interstellar
travel for biological beings is problematic (despite the suggestions of
Hollywood) given the high speed necessary to achieve a tolerably short trip. But such restraints will not apply to
machine intelligence. Even at
non-relativistic speeds (~1% the speed of light), such sentience could spread
throughout the galaxy within a few tens of millions of years. This is, of course, a thousand times less
than the age of the galaxy, so there has been plenty of time for it to have
occurred. Intelligence could have
rapidly dispersed.
Contributed by: Dr. Seth Shostak
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