The chemical building blocks for life would have formed shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. In whatever form, it is likely that this genesis matter may have populated many planets and been shaped by those worlds as much as they shaped them.
Big bugs are still around today. Just think of the giant burrowing cockroach or the goliath beetle, both reaching several inches in length. Big as they are, these guys would be dwarfed by their ancestors that lived during several of the farthest back prehistoric eras.
The Paleozoic era occurred 542 to 250 million years ago and is separated into six periods of time. The rule of insects occurred during the Carboniferous period (360 to 300 million years ago) and the Permian period (300 to 250 million years ago).
Atmospheric oxygen is the single most limiting factor on insect size. But during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, atmospheric oxygen concentrations were significantly higher than they are today. So bugs grew big, real big. The largest insects lived during the Carboniferous period. It was the time of the dragonfly with over a two-foot wingspan, eighteen-inch mayflies and a millipede that grew to ten feet in length. There was also a creature called a griffenfly (Meganeuropsis permiana) and this airborne meat eater had a twenty-eight inch wingspan and inhabited what is now the central US.
Our oceans were also inhabited by arthropod giants — an ancient sea scorpion (Jaekelopterus rhenaniae) grew to nine feet in length — one and a half times the size of a man! In 2007, Markus Poschmann unearthed a fossilized claw from this massive specimen in a German quarry and the claw alone measured fifteen inches!
These prehistoric insects breathed air that was up to thirty-five percent oxygen, as compared to just twenty-one percent oxygen in the air today. Unlike mammals, insects can absorb air via their exoskeleton’s surface. When oxygen levels were higher, it meant a diffusion-challenged respiratory system could supply sufficient oxygen to meet the metabolic needs of a larger insect.
After spending over two decades working in the information-technology sector, I saw many of the new wave advancements come and go (or come and grow). There was the Y2K bug, customer analytics, interconnectivity, Wi-Fi, cloud computing, and on and on. But nothing is matching the new push into deep AI.
The big players like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Baidu are all significantly beefing up their technologists and researchers, and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the search for the next big breakthrough, advancement, or AI calculation.
And it’s bearing fruit — problems that seemed intractable a few years ago are now being solved. Artificial Learning has boosted Android’s speech recognition and given Skype unbelievable language translation capabilities. There are self-driving cars, air and seaborne drones, and robot dogs that act and walk just like the real thing.
But these rapid advancements are now accelerating at such a pace that what took decades before is now being achieved in a few years. And it is this speed that is causing quite a few of the senior heads of the industry to speak out.
One such industry luminary, Elon Musk, is suggesting builders of the new wave of AI products consider all the implications — financial, physical, and ethical — as they move forward. There are pitfalls for creating something that one day might even replace us.
Consider the three stages of AI evolution as described by Xia Jiantong, director and CEO of Recon Group.
Initial stage is being made-by-humans.
Next stage is copying humans, and,
Final stage is replacing humans.
Today, we are just at the commencement of the made-by-humans stage, and at the pace we are moving we still have a long way to go before we reach true Artificial Intelligence, that will allow humans to be replaced by robots.
However, humans work slower than robots, and as soon as they control the production lines, then something that can work around the clock, and never sleeps, never gets sick, or takes a coffee break, will complete the final two stages of intelligent robotic evolution in the blink of an eye.
At the 2016 World Robot Conference in Beijing, astonishing human-like robots were revealed. One intelligent droid named Jiajia amazingly demonstrated the ability to understand human language, detect facial expressions, and make realistic body movements. Added to that, her synthetic skin was more lifelike than anything that has come before it. She was almost… perfect.
According to media reports, at a counter-terrorism meeting in London, a former UK intelligence officer suggested that by 2025, the US Army will have more combat robots than it will have humans.
Let’s hope they all remember which side they’re on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Geoff Brown, Amanda AJ Speeding, and Matthew Summers; tireless professionals in the industry — I thank you.
About Greig Beck
Greig Beck grew up across the road from Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. His early days were spent surfing, sunbaking and reading science fiction on the sand. He then went on to study computer science, immerse himself in the financial-software industry and later received an MBA. Today, Greig spends his days writing, but still finds time to surf at his beloved Bondi Beach. He lives in Sydney, with his wife, son and an enormous German shepherd.