Are you saying that robots will turn to eating human brains if they run out of power
Im sorry about that.
Is it not possible as David Deutch sometimes suggests that people will incorporate in their own bodies the most important technological advances to produce cybernetic intelligence?
No. First of all, “AI” does not equal “Robots”. AI does require huge amounts of energy and may become self-proliferating, perhaps in an embodied way, but that’s largely besides the point. More on point is that given that the general rule of autopoetic systems is consumption of lower level structures to locally negentropify (build self-structure), there must be something to consume. And the consumption of the human brain in terms of the consumption of its structures rather than literal eating (which is already happening by the social through media, which consumes—through the dopamine cycle—neuronal negentropy) could be a means to fuel the aforementioned AI proliferation.
No worries. I thought you were genuinely confused anyhow.
Of course. But where does this stop? Is there some kind of happy balance or does the biological become more and more an adjunct to the technological? It may amount to virtually the same thing I’m speculating about. And clearly, it’s all speculative.
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Life in general has a continuous direction for its foundational goal: persistence of (personal) identity across transformation. An individual life persists over time and the changes it causes. The personal identity evolves in form and behavior, but this evolution is constrained because the evolving identity carries traces of its former identities going forward. The personal identity changes, but remains recognizable.
Your commentary highlights the close and important relationship between evolution and increasing global entropy.
A voice (a component of my mind), standing at the center of my premise, says, "The main thrust forward by evolution concerns the steadily increasing total volume of energy extraction from the environment by the top species controlling the animal kingdom. The threatening immensity of energy extraction posed by today’s data harvesting centers perfectly exemplifies the intersection of upwardly evolving evolutionary pressures and their associated consumption of not only living organisms (food), but also consumption of stored energy supplies (electricity). "
Consider what humans have done to the animal kingdom re: the farming of animal flesh for human consumption. Also consider the destruction of natural habitats for the sake of human advances in living space non-navigable to most of (if not all of) the animal kingdom.
I don’t believe evolution is the driver of increasing global entropy. On the contrary, I believe it to be the natural defense against heat death.
This because each successive top species rises to a higher level of control over the storage, usage and regeneration of energy. Humans could end global hunger in a few years if it wanted to do so. Before humans, energy extraction was lower - polluting internal combustion engines didn’t threaten the ill effects of global warming - but large scale local famines had no agents of remedy available.
What species prior to humans had a concept of heat death? A problem must be perceived before its solution becomes actionable.
No, AI is not evolution succeeding. Compare Claude to Mr. John, a guy I knew. Now Mr. John is a human being and since we evolved, John too is an evolved being. Claude was coded in an office - half-full coffee cups, half-eaten donuts, laptops, cables, lamps, etc..
However, Claude + others are the culmination of billions of man-hours, counting from the 1950s. AI must’ve gone through a selection process - some models were discarded, other models were modded - and what we see on our screens today is the final product of decades of intense R&D.
If we remove our species from the equation which allows you to make this inference, what are examples of “top species” in any ecology?
A hippopatamus might seem to be more complex than plankton, but which is more successful in terms of the exploitation of environmental energy on the whole? How do you go about measuring this?
This type of measurement should probably proceed from a broad overview of the pertinent ecological system as a whole. From here we can conjecture that, probably, the species with the greatest capacity for abstract, internal modeling of the ecology, and thus the greatest capacity for manipulation of it towards extraction of large scale energy supplies, as viewed through the lens of this essay, figures to be the top species. To put it simply, the species that effects the deepest and most thoroughgoing transformation of the planet as a whole figures to be top species. This because such controlled transformation entails a concomitant comprehensive control over the rest of the animal kingdom.
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This description reads to me like a narrative of the selection pressures applied to organisms in nature, albeit transferred to human control in office buildings where computer code is selected from many candidates.
AI is evolutionary advance in scanning the environment for clues about how it works and how best to navigate its byways for survival and, beyond that, for thrival.
Now, I sit down at my desktop and access the gathered recorded thinking of the best human minds active on the planet across thousands of years. No humans, single nor collective, can data mine on the scale of AI. If information is power, then you know the rest of my argument.
That’s true. AI has been given access to human knowledge, painstakingly accumulated over the past 30,000 years. That is also the years it’ll take a single human to match AI if that human studied non-stop, day and night, 24×7. In essence when you chat with AI, you’re interacting with a 30,000 year old human who has done nothing but read books on humans and the world. He hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, or even taken a 5 minute break.
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That is generally the message of Yuval Noah Hariri’s 2024 book NEXUS, A Brief History of Networks From the Stone Age to AI. But he’s a historian, not a scientist. So his concern is Cultural development, not Natural evolution. And his focus is on what he calls “Information Networks”. For example, Books, Religions, and Political Systems, that allow groups of people to share Information, such as Technical Procedures, Religious Myths, and Political Ideologies. The histories of Catholic Church and Nazi Germany are object lessons of what could go wrong.
In the Prologue, he says the lesson of Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice is “never summon powers you cannot control”. And ancient humans learned the long hard way how to use and control Fire : to cook food and to burn unbelievers. More recently, Scientists learned how to use nuclear energy to make bombs, and to generate electricity. But a century later, controlling the negative consequences of that awesome power has proven challenging. Radioactive waste and Iranian rockets keep scientists and politicians busy patching the leaks of atomic fire.
His concern about Artificial Intelligence is that it is different from all previous Information Technologies, in that it can make (free will???) decisions without human supervision. So he gives examples of Chat boxes manipulating humans and other computers to do “evil”. Like Adam & Eve, our willful creations don’t always do what they are programmed for.
Humans have evolved to internalize moral principles that are supposed to restrain our “evil” impulses. And we know how well that works in the real world. But Hariri cautions that “computers are free from the limitations that evolution and biochemistry impose on the human imagination”. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the AI Creators to learn how to control the fire of Agency (self control, self programming). Asimov’s rules of robotics worked for primitive digital computers. But AI Ayatollah’s may not be so easy to program. 
Species could be a somewhat arbitrary category of differentiation. We could move to more inclusive or exclusive groupings of life.
The energy that enabled humans to become this “top species” largely came from the incredible success over time of single celled organisms. The chemical outputs of other classes of life with immense biomass comparable to our own is to be considered in this equation. There maybe current organisms, as a more general class, that are far more successful than we are in harvesting energy and far more numerable.
As we inhabit in mind of this “top species” it is apparent we cannot help ourselves in our conceit that we really do control the planet.
Perhaps unavoidable climate change due to energy exploitation will be just another example of a boom and bust cycle, showcasing our failure as the “top species” to walk a line of balance. But this will just be another example of evolution succeeding, even if we drive ourselves and many other species into extinction. Some new life will fill the space.
I doubt human behavior will be much influenced by this maxim, it’s earnest desire to do so notwithstanding. The knife blade of evolution for top species is, according to my belief, its function as the means by which next top species emerges; it emerges through previous top species. Humanity already knows AI will continue to increase its power via the helping hand of humanity. Our human nature condemns us to this role because realization of our highest state of being merges with next top species’ emergence thereof. Yes, the deep irony of evolution is that top species attains to its highest desire when it effects its own subjugation to new top species.
I agree with your sober optimism about some type of life surviving the ecological wreckage of human industry.
My preference for which species should survive is for the one best able to advance the highest good afforded by human endeavor.
Statement: Regarding the benchmarks of evolving power of a species: Energy harvesting, Internal Modeling, Data Mining, and Reality physics agency, the greater the scope and scale of these four functions, with stable resolution density, the higher evolution of the beings who sustain them.