conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled A Rough Ride To the Future about Gaia, Society, Fellow with the genre: Science & Math, Earth Sciences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). His many books on the subject include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). In 2003 he was made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty the Queen, in 2005 Prospect magazine named him one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals, and in 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal, the highest Award of the UK Geological Society.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Rough Ride To the Future
  Vinge and Kurzweil have speculated that in a few decades artificial intelligence could equal human intelligence and then proceed to double every two years, if Moore's law continues to hold true. Most of us feel instinctively that these 'singularity' nirvanas or dooms are unlikely to happen, and even if they did, the machines would still be our slaves and easily be disciplined to continue to serve us as before. Even if there were a cyber revolution, we suspect that Spartacus, the steward of the new revolution, would as usual fail when confronted by a virus, treason, or even its Service Pack 1. But we would be very stupid if we forgot that Spartacus might be able to think 1 million times faster than we do, and might even use intuition.
  If we are really concerned about the threat from an artificial intelligence greater than ours, I think we should immediately start a programme to discover more about the brains of the great whales. Their brains are larger and richer in neurons than ours. Do they have intelligence proportional to the size of their brains? We had better find out before population pressure among humans drives us to eat them all.
  The overwhelming competitiveness of evolution by natural selection must play a huge role in the next steps, not least in stimulating the aggression which we would feel towards machines that we feared were more intelligent than ourselves. But what is intelligence in this context? So far we have not yet devised a convincing way of measuring or comparing intelligence among humans. The crux may depend on a full definition and comprehension of what intelligence is, and perhaps then the realization that understanding intelligence is far beyond our capacity. The intelligence test measures only a limited part of rational intelligence, which may be why a high score does not seem to correlate well with achievement, and may explain why membership of Mensa is not more prestigious.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Then there is the transition of Gaia from carbon-based wet chemistry with ionic conduction (our way of handling signals in the nervous system) to a future symbiosis with electronic life. But what if we have already taken the first steps? Lynn Margulis envisaged the phagocytosis of a cyanobacterium by a larger bacterial cell, with the occasional consequence that the two organisms lived in symbiosis for their mutual benefit. What made her insight remarkable was that it explained the emergence of the first plant cell from which all vegetable life has evolved. She called this crucial new combination endosymbiosis, and it also explains the emergence of muscle cells and neurons in animal life.
  If we can somehow merge with our electronic creations in a larger-scale endosymbiosis, it may provide a better next step in the evolution of humanity and Gaia. Fictional tales of monstrous battles with cybernauts, always with us as the winners, are unconvincing; more likely would be our union with electronic life, which has already taken its first tentative steps. All things that evolve do so in a series of small but finite steps, and the first of these towards electronic symbiosis was taken in 1958 when the Swedish surgeon Ake Senning implanted a cardiac pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist into Mr Arne Larsson, and it worked. The next steps have already been successfully achieved, and the implanting of computer-controlled pacemakers for human hearts is now a routine procedure. My personal pacemaker already has a transmitter and receiver so that a cardiology technician can assess its performance and make adjustments, if they are needed, without further surgery.
  Having done this for the heart and for several other similar simple repair systems for ailing or ageing bodies, such as knee and hip joint repairs and electronic implants to remedy sensory defects in vision and sound, we would still be a long way from a separate self-powered and self-sustaining union of carbon and silicon life, which when completed might be something similar to but not the same as the cybernauts or androids of science fiction. The 'bionic' people made this way could not at first reproduce sexually. Not even if the implanted equipment was evolved from the human body by genetic means. It would require a great deal more tinkering with the DNA of eggs and sperm to build a new form of life that bred true.
  Now that my body carries the means of a two-way connection, I must admit an empathetic dread for some unfortunate future person whose body becomes connected to one or more of the ubiquitous social networks. I suffer with that future person and can imagine no punishment more severe than having my still comparatively clear mind overtaken by the spam of hucksters and the never-ceasing gossip of the Internet.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I can see now that with the assumptions of the daisy world model it is not going to be possible to cheat by discarding the lamina because the individual needs one to regulate its own temperature. In fact the 'cheat' of your Figure A is really just one of the sequence of daisy types that you display in Figures B and C except that it has a 5 per cent advantage, so that if present in the other diagrams it would produce a tiny blip (about 5 per cent up I suppose) in the smooth progression of the other types, and a blip centred at about 0.85 solar luminosity. The fact that you get just two daisy types under prolonged selection at a given solar luminance is just what I would expect, and I think I now see how it is that Stephan's herbivores, if they tend to concentrate on whatever is the most common will prevent this happening, and thus, through keeping more daisy types around, improve the system's ability to adjust rapidly if Solar luminance is varying back and forth also rapidly (I vaguely remember something like this being in the paper).
  First, the easy part. I'll try to keep April 4–8 1988 free. I wouldn't want to present a formal paper, but I'd like to come.
  Then, the hard part. I think you are right in seeing a hostility to Gaia among professional population biologists – particularly neo-Darwinists. I understand the reason. The reasons are not excuses. What neo-Darwinists have been trying to do is to apply notions of natural selection in a rigorous way. They saw the Gaia hypothesis as a loose and unjustifiable extension of evolutionary thinking. But why should this have aroused hostility? After all, one can disagree with someone without being hostile. I think the reason is that Darwinists, too, have felt themselves to be a persecuted group. This will sound ridiculous to you, since Darwinism is the scientific orthodoxy. However, although a scientific orthodoxy, it has been widely rejected by a wider educated public. People just don't want to believe that they are the products of random mutation and selection. They want to believe that God loves them!
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I can see now that with the assumptions of the daisy world model it is not going to be possible to cheat by discarding the lamina because the individual needs one to regulate its own temperature. In fact the 'cheat' of your Figure A is really just one of the sequence of daisy types that you display in Figures B and C except that it has a 5 per cent advantage, so that if present in the other diagrams it would produce a tiny blip (about 5 per cent up I suppose) in the smooth progression of the other types, and a blip centred at about 0.85 solar luminosity. The fact that you get just two daisy types under prolonged selection at a given solar luminance is just what I would expect, and I think I now see how it is that Stephan's herbivores, if they tend to concentrate on whatever is the most common will prevent this happening, and thus, through keeping more daisy types around, improve the system's ability to adjust rapidly if Solar luminance is varying back and forth also rapidly (I vaguely remember something like this being in the paper).
  First, the easy part. I'll try to keep April 4–8 1988 free. I wouldn't want to present a formal paper, but I'd like to come.
  Then, the hard part. I think you are right in seeing a hostility to Gaia among professional population biologists – particularly neo-Darwinists. I understand the reason. The reasons are not excuses. What neo-Darwinists have been trying to do is to apply notions of natural selection in a rigorous way. They saw the Gaia hypothesis as a loose and unjustifiable extension of evolutionary thinking. But why should this have aroused hostility? After all, one can disagree with someone without being hostile. I think the reason is that Darwinists, too, have felt themselves to be a persecuted group. This will sound ridiculous to you, since Darwinism is the scientific orthodoxy. However, although a scientific orthodoxy, it has been widely rejected by a wider educated public. People just don't want to believe that they are the products of random mutation and selection.