Member-only story
Evolution, AI, And The Extermination Of Human Intelligence
Darwin’s theory of natural selection showed that he had faith that species would ever evolve upward to greater complexity. But the barnacle baffled him, as they seem to go in reverse complexity.
Nature placed pleasure as a reward for activities that help survival, like feeding and procreation. If the process is bridged and an organism gets a more direct route to reward —evading all the toils that survival requires — there will be trouble; the bridged route will win over the more laborious one and the drive for survival will be replaced by pleasure-seeking. This happened to the barnacle.
There’s fear that this is what technology is doing to man, and AI is doing it to our intelligence —the one thing that puts human above other animals.
Reward Hacking
What we know about the barnacle was penned down by an acquaintance of Darwin, Ray Lankester. He published Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism in 1880, where he gave an evolutionary look at parasitism.
His major argument was that parasites tend to lose sensory and locomotive organs from piggybacking on their host. The sacculina, now known as “crab hacker barnacle,” is an example.
The barnacle is a parasite that live off crabs. They shoot their filament-roots…
