This June, 2020, NASA announced that intelligent computer systems will be installed on space probes to direct the search for life on distant planets and moons, starting with the 2022/23 ESA ExoMars mission, before moving beyond to moons such as Jupiter’s Europa, and of Saturn’s Enceladus and Titan.
“Imagination is everything,” observed Albert Einstein. “It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
In Space Odyssey 2001, HAL 9000, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, consigned the crew commander to his death by refusing to open the pod bay doors. Leaping forward to today, with life hopefully transcending Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction, NASA has announced a visionary step: that intelligent computer systems will be installed on space probes to direct the search for life on distant planets and moons, starting with the 2022/23 ESA ExoMars mission, before moving beyond to moons such as Jupiter’s Europa, and of Saturn’s Enceladus and Titan.
Science-fiction author Vernor Vinge once said that mankind’s last great invention will be the first self-replicating machine. Now, AI scientists working in Google Brain division are testing how machine learning algorithms can be created from scratch, then evolve naturally, based on simple math, according to Google’s AutoML team who suggest the software could potentially be updated to “automatically discover” completely unknown algorithms while also reducing human bias during the data input process. The software, known as AutoML-Zero, resembles the process of evolution, with code improving every generation with little human interaction.
Before we get to today’s big story –a spooky headline says we’re entering a new age, “The Novacene”, I want to share some thoughts. The story says that we are in the final era of human life on Earth.—that we homo sapiens are an evolutionary transition phase from biology to machine life. That the mutation in the brain of a single human being some 200,000 years ago that turned primates into a super-intelligent species that would conquer the world was a genetic accident that will lead to a new hyper-intelligent species, a new evolutionary epoch.
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