Are AIs really our descendants?

While I'm criticising the positions of Robin Hanson, I reviewed his 2023 article titled: "AIs Will Be Our Mind Children" - which contains the following:

But — and here is my main point, so please listen carefully — future human-level AIs are not co-existing competing aliens; they are instead literally our descendants. So if your evolved instincts tell you to fight your descendants due to their strangeness, that is a huge evolutionary mistake. Natural selection just does not approve of your favoring your generation over future generations. Natural selection in general favors instincts that tell you to favor your descendants, even those who differ greatly from you.

I think this paragraph shows a basic failure to distingush between memes and genes. Robin says as much - by defining "genes" as follows:

Your “genes” are whatever parts of you code for your and your descendants’ behaviours.

That definition classifies memes as genes. AIs are our "Mind Children". They are likely inherit from our memes, but not from our DNA genes - at least not unless we expend considerable effort to preserve information in our genes.

You can't just throw around terms like "descendants" and "generations" in the way that Robin does. Descendants on which lineage? Generations of which lineage? Are we talking about memes or genes here? It really does matter. What Robin is doing is "muddling together" all forms of inheritance.

To call such machines our "descendants" ignores the fact that modern organisms - like humans - are menageries. They contain many indpendent inheritance pathways. Each has its own notion of what consitututes a "generation". Machines will inherit from our memes, but our genes are unlikely to be impressed by that. Rather they will complain about their germ line being wiped out. We do indeed see protests of exactly that kind. This is not a "huge evolutionary mistake" as Robin claims - instead it is one lineage complaining about competition with another lineage.

Natural selection does not favor instincts that tell you to favor your descendants indiscriminantly. According to Robin's classification scheme, excreted gut bacteria are classified as "descendants". It seems as though my DNA genes are likely to get prioity treatment if there is much of a conflict of interest.

Overall, I was not very impressed with Robin's argument here.

References

• Problems with Robin Hanson's Quillette Article On AI

The demographic transition revisited

I have an existing article about "Memes and the demographic transition". It has a number of pointers and references, but I reviewed it recently and one thing it doesn't really have is a brief summary of the theory. So, here goes:

Memes are the cause of the modern fertility fall now seen in most western nations. The phenomenon is widely known as "the demographic transition". How does that work? Like this:

• Organisms are typically resource-limited;
• Memes compete for reproductive resources with DNA genes;
• Memes are getting the upper hand in this battle due to a number of factors including progress;
• Meme interests are now less aligned with host interests due to meme horizontal transmission.

That's it. Between them these four points explain the vast majority of the dynamics of the demographic transition.

To unpack the points:

• Resource limitation - means that resources available for one application are not available for other appications. In other words using resources is subject to an opportunity cost. Resource limitation is ubiquitous.
• Memes and genes compete for resources - resources spent producing babies and DNA genes are resources not spent on learning and propagaing memes - and visa versa.
• Memes are winning - or at least their power and influence are rising.
• More memes are parasitic - This is due to horizontal transmission of memes with respect to the host generations. Once, humans lived in small groups and got many of their memes from family members. This is no longer the case and most memes are obtained via "horizontal" transmission. This path is more likely to be occupied by parasites. Some will behave like the Ebola virus: liquidate their host as fast as possible. Others will merely sterilize their hosts and redirect their resources into meme propagation.

For more details and some references, see the "Memes and the demographic transition article.

This article is partly in response to Robin Hanson's article titled: Beware Cultural Drift.

Robin claims: "The clearest proof of biologically maladaptive culture drift is fertility". That does not seem right to me. "Drift" has a specific meaning in biology - it refers to the absence of selection. Here the memes are not "drifting" away from some adaptive peak. They are actively and deliberately sabotaging the fertility of their human hosts and using the resulting resources for their own ends. Drift is a sideshow.