Intelligently Manipulated Evolution (IME)

IME is not a meme for the fundamentalists, it refers to a faint hope that we (humanity) could actually improve with time.

Lots of self-regarded visionaries have urged us to merge with our cybernetic friends, thereby acquiring more and better intelligence. I’d say that’s a fine idea, but it would provide more and different intelligence, which might not play nice with the human kind. The new hybrid species may just give up in despair — I suspect one reason we don’t (when we don’t) is that we’re too dumb to see the handwriting on the wall that is in bold italics for the computers.

IIRC, neuroscientists claim that the most puissant module in the human CPU is whatever lobe is responsible for Social Intelligence — the maddeningly complex double-guessing and strategizing that humans use to manipulate each other. In a sense one can attribute a big chunk of human savvy to the advance of our socialization from family to tribe to nation. We are, in one sense, already a “hive mind”.

One interesting thing about a collective intelligence is that it is relatively easily manipulated. One need only consider the ancient art of Advertising to understand this: the most effective way to get millions of women to buy Dove soap was to run ads apologizing for and denouncing Procter & Gamble’s former ad strategy of making women feel inadequate relative to “perfect” beauty.

The advent of ubiquitous smartphones and the social networks that inhabit them made it even easier, as we have seen recently.

Here’s where “evolution” kicks in: an important part of human intelligence is Social Intelligence, and this capacity has evolved because it provided a survival/propagation advantage for those who developed it. Since Social Intelligence is only statistically limited by individual humans’ hardware, in principle it can be “nudged” toward greater understanding of its world by simply emplacing replication advantages for desired behaviours and social rejection for undesired ones. A managed economy of “memes”, as it were.

I’m pretty sure this has been recognized by many perspicacious government agencies, not to mention billionaire industries and darknet hackers. Some of their goals are obvious, but what if there’s an even subtler scheme afoot: to save us from ourselves by making us collectively smarter?

And what chance does that scheme have against the boneheaded spontaneity of the other bickering parts of our individual intelligences — especially those wired directly into our endocrine network?

One thing’s very likely: as more people become explicitly aware of the constant deluge of manipulation, and develop mental guards against same, the manipulators will begin to turn the task over to AGIs, and around it will go…. I think we may be about to witness the birth of yet another level of intelligence — one that more smoothly integrates the chops of the individual with the wisdom of the collective.