Why Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Will Evolve Together, by Stephen Hsu (Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University)

Wars, bigotry, and racism have all had their uses. Conflict is incredibly productive for humanity. There are few things as motivating as having a hated enemy, or being under the threat of imminent death. This is something that futurists often can't comprehend, since their only obsession is "perfecting" the human species based on their cursory understanding of history and human interaction. War has been directly responsible for some of our greatest technological achievements. The sometimes ugly side of humanity that you attribute to a lack of processing power has actually had tangible benefits in the real world.

"...human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.

Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...

...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity." -HPMOR Chapter 24

The only truly ugly humanity is the one you and people like you wish to build. The one that is no longer human. Because deep down, you futurists hate humanity and wish to remake it in a new image, the image of a machine. Your worldview terrifies me.

/r/Futurology Thread Parent Link - nautil.us