Wednesday 3 January 2018

Intelligent Design Of Inorganic Life?

"Now humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design, and to extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic."
-Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2017), Chapter 2, pp. 85-86.

Yes, we have read Poul Anderson's Genesis.

Is Harari premature with his second prediction? And is inorganic life a contradiction? Not if the post-organic entities are conscious, intelligent, mobile, dynamic and self-reproducing. But this would make them more and other than digital computers which are all that we have at present.

I say repeatedly that anything Asimov did Anderson did better but Asimov's main contribution was robotics. Asimov said somewhere - maybe in the original hardback The Rest Of The Robots? - that:

his first robot novel showed a human society where robots were unwelcome;
his second robot novel showed a human society smothered by robots;
the trilogy would have been completed by a novel showing a third society with human-robotic harmony;
however, he stopped sf writing in favor of science writing.

Later, Asimov continued the robot novels not as suggested but by integrating them into his future history. Anderson could have followed his Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy and Genesis with a novel showing human-AI coexistence and cooperation.

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