maximum entroppy and trans_homo sapiens

[Richard Rohwer]

This isn't really a connectionist subject, but perhaps it has enough
amusement value to merit posting... 

Elan Moritz writes:
>  Homo trans-sapiens is the [postulated] next step in
>  evolution of homo sapiens.  There is no reason to expect or

My view is that the fate of humanity is either anihilation or obsolesence
(or both).  There are lots of obvious possibilities for reaching 
these fates, and I do not wish to review the menu.  Instead I would
like to mention an amusing (if uncompelling) doomsday-is-imminent
argument based on the Anthropic principle -- the idea that the universe
appears as it does to folks like us because folks like us cannot survive 
in a substantially different universe, and therefore such universes go
unnoticed.  Suppose the human population grows exponentially until
it is anihilated.  A randomly selected person in this population
(considered over all time) is most likely to live at a time when the
population is large, which also happens to be a time near doomsday.
So in the spirit of the Maximum Entropy Principle, one asserts
that we are probably typical people, and therefore doomsday looms.
(There's a wee problem with this argument... It applied equally well
at any time in history.)

Scott Fahlman makes the point that:
> The very matrix of culture and machines that
> give rise to your "trans-sapiens" has pretty much eliminated the selective
> pressure that has driven evolution for the last couple of billion years --

Ah, but do selective pressures live on in the machines we build...?
Those machines will survive which make the most effective use of their
human (and other) resources...  I presume this idea constitutes a
standard theme in sci-fi.

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