Humans are the Artificial Intelligence of Plants
After listening to the Radio Lab podcast, from Trees to Shining Trees, it occurred to me that a good way to think about Artificial Intelligence might be this: Humans are the AI of Plants.
Perhaps a more likely progenitive programmer — if such a thing exists — would be Fungi, which migrated to land about 500 million years ago and are genetically more closely related to animals than to plants. In fact, it’s thought that Fungi may have dominated the world at one point, or a significant portion of it, exactly 251.4 million years ago. The very thought of Fungi as its own Kingdom, poorly understood, with up to five million different species (in truth nobody knows the number), is enough to raise issues about our comprehension of life.
But the point is this: Thinking about humans as the AI of plants might help us think a bit more clearly about the challenge we face of accessing what AI is. It shows how big an intellectual leap AI can make from one life form to another, how vastly different the idea of intelligence can be. It also shows how AI conquers spacial and temporal limits, with mammals colonising places (sea, air travel, moon) and time-frames (fields ploughed in a single day) that plants seem incapable of conceiving. Perhaps fauna was the communications system of flora.
I can’t help but think this is what AI is becoming to us. It’s existing in its own temporal dimension, inconceivable to our own. It operates across boundaries of space, processing information — global events, a traffic jam in Tokyo, a trending hashtag in Khartoum, the time when cats in Colorado like to eat their food (from Internet-controlled feeding bowls, yes it’s a thing) — all of this simultaneously, in a way that no single human, or even the biggest conference hall of humans, is equipped to perceive. I have no idea what AI will become, but I do feel confident that whatever it becomes, humans will not be able to define it, because we will not be able to recognise its intelligence in relation to our own.
Yet the idea in “Tree to Shining Tree” that scientists have recently discovered a kind of fungal neural network that exists beneath the forest floor, and that it operates as a kind of super-organism, a brain that makes economic decisions about trade in sugars and proteins and so forth — this is wonderful. It feels like we’re recognising, however vaguely through the gauzy veil of evolution, a relationship; like we’re looking at our creator in the same way that maybe AI will one day look at us.
