"A.I.volution: Nature, Nurture, Not sure." . 2019.
  
  .....The second of these three pieces came from contemplating exactly how science and it's alter ego – fiction - have been progressing in the same symbiotic process all my life – that's currently 66 years FYI and counting.
.....Growing up through the 1950's with comics depicting the fantasies of aliens and robots of the future and then the incredibly real “Space Race” of the 60's, I was always thrilled by progress of any kind – forged in the blur of science and imagination.
.....It seems a long time ago now and it's hard to remember just how amazing it was when my family took delivery of our first refrigerator, automatic twin-tub washer and our first telephone etc. but even then technology was slowly becoming integrated into our support mechanism as sure as food and shelter had been for survival in the long history of our species. But families could, and did manage quite adequately without these latest innovations should they wish to.		  
 
 
  .....With the levels of sophistication in our lives today it would be impossible for us to return to those simpler days, albeit many groups of people from all cultures advocate it but it can only ever work at the micro, never the macro-level, and so we are destined to progress. We must march bravely into the future using what we have, what we have been gifted by the ingenuity of our forebears and our unparalleled energy resources, our lust for knowledge and the plethora of accumulated technologies.
.....So, we really are living at the most incredible moment in time: we really are at a point where the choices we make from here on in will have a greater impact on the future of our species (arguably) than the choices made at any time in our history – ever! Of course no one has ever been able to predict the future – although countless numbers have tried – but one thing seems to be pretty likely, continuance of our evolution in one form or another. And even a sceptic of Darwin's Theory of Evolution cannot be blind to the evolution of technology and its domination of the course of our species. And it is through our technology that we are changing everything, from our climate, medicine, new GM foods and animals, to the - soon to be - colonisation of our solar system.		  
 
 
  .....So this image represents a combination of just two of science's greatest - yet only recently determined and disentangled building blocks - A.I. and DNA sequencing/editing... and they're beginning to fuse. Most natural evolution as we know it is uncontrolled and uncontrollable but it may also soon be unrecognisable - as this image represents. Different genera cannot interbreed but throughout history there has always been fantasy, magical hybrids – centaurs, sphinxes, minotaurs and the like, so what happens when highly charged technologies really do start “rutting”?  
 

This would confound the old dilemma of evolution... Nature or Nurture? even more. In fact it would be on a different dimension altogether...

 


.....“A.I.volution: Nature or Nurture...or Not sure?”

23.12.19

 

....