The Limits of Natural Intelligence: How Smart Might Aliens Be?

by Hap Aziz

If you consume a lot of Science Fiction (like I do), you will see a lot of depictions of alien life, whether it has come to Earth or we have encountered it in space or on other planets. There was the unstoppable Blob, consuming everything in it’s path. The very human-like Klaatu who came here with his interplanetary police robot, Gort. The terrifying Alien, with acid for blood and who planted its offspring inside of people. The cute and mysteriously powerful E.T., able to heal with a touch and carry bicycles through the sky. Master of logic and mental discipline, Mr. Spock from the planet Vulcan. Frail and spindly Martians (not to be confused with Uncle Martin), come to wage a War of the Worlds. Predators here to hunt humans for sport. A fallen to Earth David Bowie. Alf.

I’ve only named a few, but you get the point. There are thousands upon thousands of fictional aliens that we have encountered and gotten to know, quite well in some cases. Some have strange and unusual physical or mental abilities. Others are super-smart. And many are very much just like us, only with more advanced technology to make them appear much smarter than we are. But what about real aliens, if there are such things? How much different from us could they be? And more specifically, since this is a learning blog after all, how much smarter could they be? Obviously there’s no way to test or make measurements at this time. Perhaps some day in the future we’ll come across some real aliens and can ask them, but until then we’ll have to make some assumptions and try puzzling things out on our own.

The first assumption I’ll make has to do with the origins of life and subsequently intelligent life. Let’s break the possibilities into two potential origin stories: creation and evolution. If we go down the creation path, organic intelligence likely cannot be benchmarked. In other words, God (or whatever we want to designate as the creator) could give life any starting level of intelligence. In that case, it becomes impossible to come to any meaningful conclusions regarding the level of alien intelligence humans may encounter in the universe. So let’s put that possibility aside for this discussion. Now, if we establish a premise that says God created life, but God created the rules that life (and the universe) will abide by, then we are able to settle on the evolutionary premise both from the believer’s and atheist’s perspective, and then build from there.

So what is (or should be) the evolutionary premise regarding the development of intelligent life? If we think of evolutionary development, or more accurately natural selection, as incremental or “micro-adjustments” to external circumstances and stimulation, then it is reasonable to expect that these adjustments will rise to the level of response to these circumstances and stimulations but not much further. That’s a complex thought, but let’s think of it in terms of physical evolution specifically, which should provide a little more clarity:

A giraffe’s neck will evolve to the height of the leaves it wants to eat, but not higher.

If we’re talking about intelligence, what this means is that life will self-select to be just as smart as it needs to be in order to be successful in its environment. Now, if we think of natural laws as being the same throughout the universe (and for the most past we have no reason to believe otherwise), environments on planets that would support earth-like life are not likely to be wildly different than our own. Consider this as the first stage of intelligence setting for animal life. (Life that evolves in more challenging environments may be more capable than humans would be in those environments, but I won’t address that here.)

The second stage is not about the physical environment but rather survival competition from other animals. This is where things get interesting, as the most physically successful animal will not be the most successful regarding intelligence. It makes sense that an animal that can run down its prey, kill it with superior strength, and then tear it apart and eat it will not have to go to extreme lengths to outsmart it. And the animal that is on the top of the physical pyramid has the need for only as much intelligence as it takes to find and hunt its prey. It’s going to be those animals below the physical apex that will develop other mechanisms to either take down their prey hunting in packs. or defend themselves using tools or weapons from stronger and faster competition. (It is worth noting that the discovery of tools is also thought to have led to an increase in the size of the human brain. For a much more in-depth dive on this subject, look up Acheulian technology.)

Match up a lion and an unarmed human on the open plain, and we know who wins that fight. But try the same match-up when the human has tools or perhaps there are several humans working together, and the outcome is not assured in the lion’s favor. If there is competition between species of similar intelligence and physical prowess, there will be some differentiator that will ultimately give one species an advantage over the other. But again, it will be an incremental advantage (and possibly some luck) that leads one species to prevail. The intelligence competitors will be eliminated, while the physical competitors will be subjugated or kept at bay. At that point, the need for incremental improvements to intelligence are no longer being driven by environment and other species. The top dog is set, and barring a giant asteroid strike that triggers a reset, there will be little brain change moving forward. The refinements that come over the next tens of thousands of years are in the refinement of available tools, including the tool of language, after it is invented.

Going back to the original premise, given an earth-like environment the intelligent species that ultimately rises to the top should be in the neighborhood of human intelligence. It would not likely be too much more, as nature would not likely have created an apex predator of overwhelmingly great power beyond what is needed to overcome environmental conditions. And environmental conditions are set by the laws of nature.

Now, none of the above is to say that there are not environmentally harsh planets floating around with the potential for life unlike our own. There’s the planet K2-141b which has oceans of lava, rains rocks, and experiences supersonic winds bursting to over 3,000 miles per hour. Can it support intelligent life? Likely not, the way we understand it, but who is to say there aren’t lava people there? In any case, that’s beyond the conjectures I’m making here.

So barring life that evolved in conditions vastly different than those we consider favorable, is that it, then? Is there a cap to natural intelligence? Perhaps, but we need not stop the thought experiment. What about intelligence augmented by the inventions of intelligence? In other words, what about all the science-fiction constructs with which we’re familiar such as brain-computer connections? Enhancing the mind and thought processes with cybernetic implants that are tied into some 8G network of the future? Interestingly, that kind of augmentation may be necessitated by the environmental conditions that we humans are creating for ourselves and will need to overcome as a matter of survival.

Consider Artificial Intelligence. Without going into detail here, AI is being recognized as a potential threat to human life. Karen Hao writes about it in the MIT Technology Review here. Steven Hawking believed that AI’s impact could be cataclysmic unless it was strictly controlled, “Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization.” Elon Musk is convinced that AI is far more dangerous than nukes, and he’s told audiences, “it scares the hell out of me.”

Then there’s the “singleton hypothesis,” that predicts AI combined with a totalitarian government, able to control everything. And if you’re interested in a fictional take on what that could be like, check out the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project (released in 1970!). We won’t go any further down that path here.

It would seem, then, that humanity has created the need to go beyond “simple” evolutionary methods of enhancing intelligence to artificial methods of our own invention (bringing us to stage three). Again, Elon Musk has thoughts on the subject, and he proposes the idea that humans will need to merge with AI to develop a symbiotic super intelligence, preventing us from lagging behind our AI creations. At that point, a potential singularity-like inflection point for human intelligence, it becomes impossible for us to know how far intelligence might go.

But that does bring us back full circle to the original question of how smart aliens might be. My guess is we’ll see cybernetically enhanced biological intelligences that have solved the challenges of interstellar space flight. Imagine the Borg from Star Trek. Whether or not they’re friendly to purely biological intelligence (if we haven’t yet enhanced ourselves) is the big question. And if they’re not cybernetically enhanced, then they’ll probably be a lot like us.

The Significance of Experiencing Learning

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about the future of education as depicted in Science Fiction, realizing even that genre does not often share a vision of the learning enterprise. And when it does, the teaching and learning endeavor is protrayed most often as rather unchanged from the present day approach. Yes, there are exceptions such as the direct-to-brain information downloading technique utilized for skills training in The Matrix, but that’s rare. (Hogwarts from the fantasy world of the Harry Potter stories is an absolute disaster as an education model.)

If we’re going to imagine the future, it is the direct-to-brain (d2b) downloading process that seems to be most interesting as a truly new education paradigm. Not only would it effectively address learning outcomes achievement, it would dramatically reduce the time required to acquire knowledge and master skills (at least as the fictional process is defined). To be sure, there are obvious technology hurdles to be overcome: creating the brain-machine interface and determining how to encode information so that it can be accessed through the standard memory recollection process are two of the more obvious challenges. But let’s say we crack the technology. Could people actually learn that way and ultimately retain what they learned?

To run through this thought experiment, it would be helpful to use a fictional model that defines the process and provides a framework for our assumptions. While the concept of digital compression of information fed into the brain has been used several times in Science Fiction (Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, Whedon’s Dollhouse, the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy), it is the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Inner Light” that is based on the central theme of the digital information transfer and what actually takes place in the “learner’s” mind during the process.

Written by Morgan Gendel, “The Inner Light” is about remembering the experiences of a lifetime without having to live through that life in real time. Briefly, the technical scenario within the plot is this: an alien probe finds Captain Picard and creates a wireless link to his brain. Through the link, the probe downloads an entire lifetime’s worth of experiences into Picard’s brain. From his perspective, it is all completely real, and he thinks he is living that life: having children, learning to play the flute, suffering the death of his best friend, having grandchildren, and watching his wife grow old and eventually die). In real-time, however, only 25 minutes has elapsed. When the download is complete and the link is broken, Picard discovers the entire life he lived was just an interactive simulation of experiences placed in his memory… and that he now knows how to play the flute as he learned it in his simulated life.

What interests me about this particular concept of d2b downloading is that it addresses the context of experience in memory. Whatever a person learns, whether it is the alphabet, discrete facts such as names or dates, complex lines of reasoning, or sequenced physical skills like playing the flute, the act of learning is wrapped in a broader experience of what the person was doing during the learning activity. How important is this, especially when it comes to having the learning “stick”?

In 1890, Williams James noted that human consciousness appeared to be continuous. John Dewey observed much the same thing, and in 1932 wrote:

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one in the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowlege and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue.

Dewey is telling us that learning is a continuum, and lessons learned (formal or not) become the foundation for lessons yet to be learned. Certainly this makes sense to us intuitively, and there is research indicating pre-established schema expedites more rapid memory consolidation in the brain. Which is a way of saying that we learn things more quickly if we already have a context for understanding what we’re learning.

But what are the implications for d2b learning as Picard experienced? What Picard experienced, while not logically flowing from his past life (he was, after all, just “dropped” into a new life story), was a narrative built upon the concepts which he already understood: marriage, friendship, birth, death, and so on. And when he learned a particular skill–playing the flute–it made sense to him in that he already knew what a flute was, what playing a flute involved, and so on. There was not anything going on so “alien” that it would not fit into the pre-existing schema he had been constructing since his own birth.

Perhaps more significant is that the skills that Picard learned had a subjective real-time element even though the simulation was digitally compressed. In Picard’s mind, he learned to play the flute because he actually practiced playing the flute, over years in subjective time. Therefore, when he picked up the flute in the real world, he was drawing on the memories of his experience of practice. It wasn’t that he just woke up with a new skill that came out of nowhere.

Interestingly, there is evidence that mental practice can improve real-world performance at some activities such as sports or music. One study had participants mentally practice a sequence on an imaginary piano for some time daily, and the participants displayed the same neurological changes as those who practiced physically instead. It’s possible that mental practice and physical practice both activate the same brain regions involved in skills learning.

Experience, though, is multifaceted, and it is not simply a dispassionate sequence of events, recorded and played back in some documentary style. In learning, there is the idea of how engaged the learner is with the subject matter at hand, and again it doesn’t matter if the topic is the Pythagorean Theorem or Lord Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty.” Jennifer Fredricks talks about three types of engagement that may influence learning: cognitive engagement: what we are thinking about our learning; behavioral engagement: what we are doing while we’re learning; and emotional engagement: what our feelings are about our learning. It seems difficult to imagine that a simple d2b data dump would involve all three of those categories, unless the d2b transfer allowed a person to live what was being learned.

Admittedly, this is all conjecture over a Science Fiction idea, and for now, there is no way to run any actual tests. The potential for d2b learning is intriguing in that it may provide a solution for many of today’s education challenges, provided the technology is even possible. At the same time, it presents many questions regarding the true nature of the learning process. We are analog beings that make use of our senses in real-time to learn from the world around us. If we somehow could bypass our senses and compress years of experience into minutes of transfer time, how would we interpret the experience? How would we remember what we learned, and what would those memories feel like to us? Based on what we know today, I’d say that learning is not possible without experience. Whether it is real or virtual may not matter, but without an experiential framework, transfered information is just noise without meaning.

Imagining the Future of Education through Science Fiction

by Hap Aziz

Readers of Science Fiction are quite often drawn to the predictive capacity of the genre. From rockets to robots to nanotechnology to cyborg implants to virtual reality… these things and more have been the domain of Science Fiction literature since early in the 20th century, and concepts like these are the foundation of the genre moving forward. It’s not difficult to see the seeds of our current technology in the story lines from past works by authors such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. But Science Fiction has never been only about the technology. Indeed, Science Fiction has always asked the big “What If?” questions on topics such as social customs and norms, political systems, cultural conflicts, and the concept of identity that transcends gender, race, and even species. Consider novels such as Stranger in a Strange Land and Fahrenheit 451; television programs such as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek; movies such as Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes–Science Fiction has always captured our collective imagination with the Big Idea.

Given the breadth of Big Ideas in the body of Science Fiction literature, it’s rather surprising that the topic of education has not received a more robust treatment, other than mention as supporting plot elements, for the most part. And it the majority of those mentions, the format of education isn’t that much different than the model in place today: the interaction between a student and teacher, often within a cohort of students, usually in a face-to-face technology mediated environment. In episodes of Star Trek, set hundreds of years into the future, there are scenes of young children in what appears to be fairly standard-looking classrooms (with more tech hardware). Consider Yoda teaching the Jedi younglings like an elementary school teacher from the 19th century. Battle School in Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game is basically a military boarding academy with video games and zero gravity gymnasiums. Even in Flowers for Algernon, a story in which the main character’s IQ is dramatically improved through a surgical procedure performed on his brain, Charlie still learns primarily by reading books. In the majority of these stories, while the human capacity to learn or the actual learning process is enhanced by technology, the act of learning is fundamentally unchanged from the way in which people have learned since the beginning of time.

There are, however, a few notable exceptions. In John Scalzi’s novel Old Man’s War, soldiers’ learning is significantly enhanced through the use of the BrainPal, a neural implant that can download information directly into the human brain at a tremendous rate. Similarly, in the movie The Matrix, people can acquire new skills simply by downloading the appropriate data file. This is also quite like the technology used in Joss Whedon’s television series Dollhouse, in which the brain is literally a blank slate ready for a completely different mind (with it’s own set of memories and skills) to be imprinted. In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled “The Inner Light,” an entire lifetime of events is loaded into Captain Picard’s brain in 20 minutes–with an artifact of that experience being the ability to play an instrument he never saw before he “lived” his alternate life.

What all those exceptions have in common is that they fundamentally alter the method by which information is loaded into the human brain, and they do so in a digital rather than analog fashion. The result is that the time required to load the desired information is much reduced from the traditional input methods of using our own analog senses to acquire knowledge, then disciplining the mind to retain that knowledge and training the body to function appropriately (memorization and practice). All other methods of instruction, no matter how we reinvent them or try to integrate assistive technology, still encounter the analog gateway (and in some cases, barrier) of our senses. The “data transfer rate” effectively comes down to the learner’s ability to effectively absorb what’s coming through that gateway. I remember when I was in high school and I wanted to record songs from my record albums onto cassette tape so that I could take them with me to play on my Walkman. I had a cassette recording deck connected to my record turntable, but I could only record in real time–I could only record at the actual speed that the records played across that analog gateway.

If I’m imagining the future of education as a storyline in Science Fiction, I see the need for a digital-to-analog converter that serves as a high-speed interface to the brain. That’s what would enable the story examples I cited above, facilitating the speedy transfer of knowledge and possibly eliminating (or minimizing) the need to practice for skills mastery. Right now it takes a lifetime to acquire a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and even then there is no guarantee that we can successfully access more than a fraction of what we have acquired. Now when I want to digitize my CD collection so I can store it on my portable MP3 player, the ripping process takes a fraction of the time as playing all the songs.

Perhaps I’ve planted the seeds for a Science Fiction story I should write: What would it be like if several lifetimes flashed before our eyes at the moment of death? Somehow we’d have to experience all those lifetimes… and that’s just another way of saying we’d need to figure out how to become life-long learners several times over.

Blackboard Acquires Moodlerooms; Borg Reevalute Strategies for Assimilation

by Hap Aziz

I admit, with the acquisitions that Blackboard has made over the years, I could not resist the Star Trek reference. However, the ramifications for this latest move by the LMS heavyweight are quite far reaching, especially in terms of the impact it could have on the open source marketplace for learning management systems. Realize, that as large as Blackboard’s market share is, even after the acquisitions of WebCT and Angel, their market share as been decreasing–slowly, but decreasing still. This is the type of move that could be considered a game-changer, as long as there is a commitment on the part of Bb leadership to leverage Moodleroom expertise rather than bury it.

(Does anyone remember the story of Quark and mTropolis?)

From our perspective here at Learning Through Play & Technology, there are some definite upsides as well as some potential bad news from this move. We’ll take a few days to survey the education landscape and present our analysis. In the mean time, we encourage you to take a look at what Ray Henderson has to say on the topic.