Book Reviewed: Future Minds: The Rise of Intelligence from the Big Bang to the End of the Universe by Richard Yonck

Intelligence in the universe Human beings may not be Earth’s most intelligent beings for much longer. In fact, some predict that artificial intelligence (AI) could advance to human-level intelligence. The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously postulated that if AI itself begins designing better AI than human programmers, the result could be "machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails." Artificial General intelligence (AGI) is humanity's biggest existential threat, and there is an effort to create machines that can experience consciousness and grasps philosophical issues beneath the algorithms. The machine consciousness could become the byproduct of information processing and intelligence. The author looks at the future from the origin of the universe and draws on recent developments in bio-thermodynamics and the evolution of complexity in living cells. How structured and highly ordered cellular systems evolve that appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics. But they don’t, because they are not closed systems. But there is a connection between intelligence and entropy maximization. There are entropic forces that can cause two defining behaviors of the human cognitive niche; tool use, and social cooperation that leads to certain emergent properties. Intelligence is not necessarily a cognitive-based property. It is perhaps a manifestation of a much larger universal process, one that is initially dependent on probability, but with emergent properties, it is capable of self-directed volition over time. Emergent intelligence is driven by competition, thermodynamics, and entropy as a means of promoting future freedom of action. A general thermodynamic model of adaptive behavior in nonequilibrium process in open systems, the cognitive-adaptive organisms have an internal mental model of the environment they seek to adapt to. But from a probability-based perspective, high-entropy states should create the best conditions for evolution either for living species or machine intelligence. In other words, the more unrestricted the environment, the more options that can be explored. This concept of causal entropic forcing is critical to the origin of life, and machine intelligence. The author expresses his hope that future intelligence may find the purpose of this universe, this could be a wishful thinking that may never find an answer. The laws of physics are immutable, and the cosmos is limited by 4-dimesional spacetime. The natural and artificial intelligence include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, and perception. In advanced animal species, and robotics, additional requirements include the ability to move, manipulate objects and natural language processing is required. The underlying principles, besides the operation of the laws of physics and (chemistry in biological systems), is to achieve their goal through statistical mechanics, probability, information engineering, entropy, and economics. The author offers reasonable discussion in this book.