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Saturday, October 14, 2017

Will Human Innovation Save Us From Future Extinction? 10-15





Does the human ability to innovate suggest an immunity to total extinction?

Yes and no. Currently, innovation reduces our chance of extinction in some ways, and increases it in others. But if we innovate cleverly, we could become just about immune to extinction.


The species that survive mass extinctions tend to share three characteristics.They're widespread. This means local disasters don't wipe out the entire species, and some small areas, called refugia, tend to be unaffected by global disasters. If you're widespread, it's more likely that you have a population that happens to live in a refugium. 

They're ecological generalists. They can cope with widely varying physical conditions, and they're not fussy about food.

They're r-selected. This means that they breed fast and have short generation times, which allows them to rapidly grow their populations and adapt genetically to new conditions.

Innovation gives humans the ability to be widespread ecological generalists. With technology, we can live in more diverse conditions and places than any other species. And while we can't (currently) grow our populations rapidly like an r-selected species, innovation does allow us to adapt quickly at the cultural level.

Technology also increases our connections to one another and connectivity is a two-edged sword. Many species consist of a network of small, local populations, each of which is somewhat isolated from the others. We call this a metapopulation. The local populations often go extinct, but they are later re-seeded by others, so the metapopulation as a whole survives. 

Humans used to be a metapopulation, but thanks to innovation, we're now globally connected. Archaeologists believe that many past civilizations, such as the Easter Islanders, fell because of unsustainable ecological and cultural innovations. The impact of these disasters was limited because these civilizations were small and disconnected from other such civilizations.

These days, a useful innovation can spread around the world in weeks. So can a lethal one. With many of the technologies and chemicals we're currently inventing, we can't be certain about their long-term effects; human biology is complex enough that we often can't be absolutely certain something won't kill us in a decade until we've waited a decade to see. We try to be careful and test things before they're released, and the probability that any particular invention could kill us all is tiny, but since we're constantly innovating, it's a real possibility.

Pandemics pose the same problem for a well-connected species. There are certain possibilities where species extinction is really hard to avoid; fortunately, they're also very unlikely, but we are definitely not immune from this.

The most likely cause of our extinction, in my opinion, is innovation in machine learning/AI. This could destroy the planet, but even if it doesn't, humans will be ultimately redundant to the dominant systems. They might keep us alive in a zoo somewhere, but I doubt it. A happier scenario (to me at least) is transhumanism, where humans become extinct in a sense because we've managed to liberate ourselves from biology.

So how could innovation prevent our extinction? We seed the galaxy with independently evolving human populations to create a new metapopulation. These local populations would hopefully be sufficiently isolated that some would survive an innovation or disaster that wipes out the rest. They would, of course, evolve in response to local conditions, perhaps creating several new species. So you could say this is still extinction, but it's as close as we'll come to persistence in our ever-changing universe. 

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