Is creationism so far fetched from science?

Did God create man? Maybe. Did man create robots. Definitely.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on natural selection- “The gradual process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment”.

While there still rages a debate over creationism, Darwin’s theory has been widely accepted by humans all over, and is taught in most schools of today.

The dominant species
One common trait of every living form is that it tries to propagate its genes and ensure the survival of its kin. This could come at the cost of another life form due to scarcity of resources and in many a case, a life form will have to stamp its authority as a dominant life form. There are a number of factors that lead to a species assuming the role of a dominant species.

1. Numbers (bacteria)

2. Physical domination- design (strength/ size/ inbuilt weapons/ speed)

3. Intelligence

We can debate the definition of a dominant species. Humans mostly consider themselves the dominant life form in this planet, which is mostly attributed to intelligence, as we know it.

We are different from robots, we feel…. nonsense
We often attribute instinct and intuition to being biological phenomenon. Myers Briggs personality assessment tests are widely used to define personality traits qualifies people into two buckets- ‘thinkers’ (make rational judgements based on logical steps) and ‘feelers’ (make decisions based on gut/ heart/ intuition). What is the difference?

Our brain is the least understood organ of our body. That does not mean it will never be understood. We are entering a decade which is going to be dedicated to the research of the brain. We see the importance of intelligence, we want to understand it. Our brain, at the end of the day, can be defined by neural activity. In so many ways, it resembles a computer unit, we have an inbuilt hard disc, a cpu, memory and an input/ output mechanism. Our basic instincts are the pre-programmed OS that comes with our genetic pool, and we install more instincts through our life experiences.

We are not exactly certain how this complex machine works, or how these instincts are programmed in, but if we break it down, it comes to logic. Even a ‘feeling’ can be broken down into a series of inputs, processing and responses. We need to reverse engineer the brain to figure this out, it is only a matter of time before this intelligence can be programmed into robots.

Artificial Intelligence, creationism redefined

Intelligence of a human is a consequence of evolution and knowledge that is inferred,augmented and transferred from one generation to the next. Now we are at a stage at which we recognize the power of collective intelligence as a species. The power of the internet is hard to understate. We are developing bots that are capable of making decisions by themselves, learn from mistakes, and correct them just like ourselves. We have also built bots that recognize their weaknesses and can build a superior bot. In other words, they can reproduce.

While the bible holds that God created everything that we see today in the universe, scientists has often walked in to kill the party and disprove many a theory stated in the religious texts. Now, we are at a new face of evolution. We recognize that more advances have been made from collective intelligence than from just having cognitive intelligence. The internet and travel has changed the world.

The theory of evolution based on artificial intelligence? Natural selection no more.

What is the difference between natural and artificial? It can probably be boiled down to human intervention. If some thing happened as a consequence of human action, it is considered artificial. If we look at the history of evolution as per Darwin’s theory of natural selection, we look at biological life forms by default. We recognize that more often than not, intelligence dominates and has naturally prevailed over other factors and mammals are some of the most successful lifeforms on the planet at the moment. We also see that evolution is speeding up as a consequence of randomness. While it took millions of years for a single cell bacteria to evolve into a multi cell life form, today a new species is discovered everyday. We can argue that barring the occasional setback where the evolutionary process is pushed back a bit(eg dinosaur extinction), evolution is exponential.

We are a consequence of natural selection but we are at a juncture where we are churning out robots at an incredibly fast pace. The speed at which technology has rapidly developed is in the last 30 years is exponential and it does not seem to slow down any time soon. The speed at which bots are becoming more intelligent everyday form collective intelligence, it feels like it is just a matter of time before they can dominate in all forms of intelligence.

Theoretically, a robot could learn and recreate, become more intelligent and can reproduce, not in the traditional biological sense that we are familiar with, but by the process of propagation through self-engineering. Intelligence is often associated with a sense of identity. How different would they be from the lifeforms that we are familiar with? They are evolving under human control at the moment.

The future, defined in bytes

Creationism is not far fetched after all. I am not talking about a God. I am talking about humans building intelligent robots. We are Gods and we don’t know it. What the future holds is always a guess, but we constantly make bets and intelligent guesses. It has been the job of the most intelligent being on the planet to make the largest advances in science, be it space exploration or splitting the atom. This job will naturally be taken up by some intelligent computer that is more evolved than the human brain in the future.

What will happen to humans?

This scenario has time and again been recreated in sci-fi movies. In most cases it is depicted as the end of the human race. While this is a possibility, this is not really probable. There might be a power struggle at first to establish dominance where the bots, being superior in intelligence, have the upper hand. Unless humans recognize this danger early and probably do what we did to the neanderthals- outnumber and kill, there is a high chance that robots will soon dominate.

However if you notice most intelligent species, they respect intelligence and form a bond with other living beings. Just as we love dogs and dolphins today, robots will love humans one day.