Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [17]
What about the related matter of whether we are capable of creating intelligences smarter than ourselves? Computers routinely do mathematics that no unaided human can manage, outperform world champions in checkers and grand masters in chess, speak and understand English and other languages, write presentable short stories and musical compositions, learn from their mistakes, and competently pilot ships, airplanes, and spacecraft. Their abilities steadily improve. They’re getting smaller, faster, and cheaper. Each year, the tide of scientific advance laps a little further ashore on the island of human intellectual uniqueness with its embattled castaways. If, at so early a stage in our technological evolution, we have been able to go so far in creating intelligence out of silicon and metal, what will be possible in the following decades and centuries? What happens when smart machines are able to manufacture smarter machines?
PERHAPS THE CLEAREST INDICATION that the search for an unmerited privileged position for humans will never be wholly abandoned is what in physics and astronomy is called the Anthropic Principle. It would be better named the Anthropocentric Principle. It comes in various forms. The “Weak” Anthropic Principle merely notes that if the laws of Nature and the physical constants—such as the speed of light, the electrical charge of the electron, the Newtonian gravitational constant, or Planck’s quantum mechanical constant—had been different, the course of events leading to the origin of humans would never have transpired. Under other laws and constants, atoms would not hold together, stars would evolve too quickly to leave sufficient time for life to evolve on nearby planets, the chemical elements of which life is made would never have been generated, and so on. Different laws, no humans.
There is no controversy about the Weak Anthropic Principle: Change the laws and constants of Nature, if you could, and a very different universe may emerge—in many cases, a universe incompatible with life.* The mere fact that we exist implies (but does not impose) constraints on the laws of Nature. By contrast, the various “Strong” Anthropic Principles go much further; some of their advocates come close to deducing that the laws of Nature and the values of the physical constants were established (don’t ask how or by Whom) so that humans would eventually come to be. Almost all of the other possible universes, they say, are inhospitable. In this way, the ancient conceit that the Universe was made for us is resuscitated.
To me it echoes Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, convinced that this world, with all its imperfections, is the best possible. It sounds like playing my first hand of bridge, winning, knowing that there are 54 billion billion billion (5.4 × 1028) possible other hands that I was equally likely to have been dealt … and then foolishly concluding that a god of bridge exists and favors me, a god who arranged the cards and the shuffle with my victory foreordained from The Beginning. We do not know how many other winning hands there are in the cosmic deck, how many other kinds of universes, laws of Nature, and physical constants that could also lead to life and intelligence and perhaps even delusions of self-importance. Since we know next to nothing about how the Universe was made—or even if it was made—it’s difficult to pursue these notions productively.
Voltaire asked “Why is there anything?” Einstein’s formulation