Artificial Intelligence—Evolution or Extinction
AI is a shiny new toy. But, from a functional perspective, we began artificially enhancing our intelligence thousands of years ago.
Our cultural mechanisms for achieving communal goals are examples of AI, albeit analog rather than digital. Any teachable algorithm or procedure, like addition and subtraction, or technique for communication, like drawing, reading, or writing, that enhances or extends our ability to transform chance into choice is a disembodied intelligence.
Applying these “artificial” tools systemically gave rise to religions, governance, and education. In this sense, your bank, hospital, the store where you shop, and car are “artificial” intelligences. We grow up embedded in algorithmic structures and systems.
Unfortunately, if extended to algorithmic sapience, our historical ways of using disembodied intelligence will accelerate and amplify the historical sine wave of creation and destruction that haunts our progress as a species. That will not end well for us.
Fortunately, despite the seemingly overwhelming momentum of custom and habit, we have a choice. Digitizing disembodied intelligence is like the two-faced Roman god, Janus. The intuitively natural approach facilitates all the biases that drive us to destroy our civilizations. At the same time, the other, creating digital sapience that is not encumbered with our biases, can empower us to transcend our historical narrative.
However, these are irreconcilable paths.
In The Matrix, the Wachowskis’ movie about AI dystopia, rejecting change will return the hero, Neo, to an emotionally impoverished struggle for survival in a world shaped by forces beyond his control. Despite that world’s lonely callousness, its narcissistic self-centeredness is familiar and engagingly challenging—providing satisfaction comparable to a hyper-real video game.
The alternative requires transformation, so he is born into a different reality when he chooses it. In his new context, chance and choice are not scripted, relationships are meaningful and emotionally vivid, and participation in a community replaces meaningless gamesmanship.
Digital sapience offers humanity a choice between set-piece roles on nature’s stage or a transformation that opens the door to a new reality. However, the accelerating application of digital technology to instinctually embedded goals and behaviors adds intense pressure to decide quickly or lose the opportunity.
Harnessing AI development to business-as-usual is ultimately toxic. It’s choosing to amp the dystopia in which most people are already floundering. Choosing continuity requires embracing or ignoring the destabilizing impact of the hurricanes of pink slips and blizzards of spam and disinformation drowning an already fracturing society. If humanity opts for what comes naturally, the outcome is predictably unfortunate, continuing the historical carnie ride to its inevitable conclusion.
During a honeymoon in Barcelona decades ago, I noticed that almost every hill in the countryside was wreathed in a town with a castle topping it like the cherry on a sundae. Later, I realized that most of these castle towns were established by patricians fleeing the collapse of the Roman Empire. This time is no different.
Moreover, the universe is lethally indifferent toward life. So, we will confront extinction events in the future as other species have in the past. We are already an extinction event for many species, including, potentially, for ourselves.
Nevertheless, humanity’s bias toward blind optimism is potent, so most people continuing to mire themselves in convention is likely. Those promoting the status quo will double down on their games of economic musical chairs while they build bunkers in remote places—on Mars if they can get there.
The supremely confident imagine they will rise phoenix-like from the ashes of worldwide panic as billions react chaotically to catastrophic climatic, economic, social, and political disruption. The resentfully submissive will swaddle themselves in nostalgia or reactively lash out in frustration. In either case, facing a dystopian reality, social commitment will evaporate under the sun of self-preservation. Such is civilization’s natural process of collapse.
However, this time is authentically different; humanity has extracted so much of the planet’s readily accessible resources in building our current technologically advanced civilization that if it collapses, it’s unlikely that our descendants could replicate the opportunity we have today.
Our technological prowess can produce a post-scarcity world. It can also protect us from some potentially apocalyptic catastrophes—for instance, deflecting asteroids like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs. For the first time, we have a practical means to replace history’s roller coaster of creation and destruction with a perennial frolic in a garden of our design.
Neo’s transformation in The Matrix is a metaphor for collectively facing the messes our species consistently creates and accepting that we must risk venturing on an unfamiliar path to a beautiful destination.
Of course, transformation is daunting! Neo almost dies during the process. Change challenges us, even when continuing down our current path is untenable. Even when an outcome is compellingly attractive, the process triggers a psychological anxiety that echoes the prospect of dying. People who hate their lives still fear change, and those who think themselves fortunate tend to react toward it with hostility.
While we can create paradise and thrive there, nature disciplines us to survive in hell. Life was able to evolve away from predatory competitiveness only because cooperation is dramatically more beneficial than competition. So, the remarkable mental flexibility that gives us our creative power also facilitates anxiety.
Still, the emergence of mutual altruism was as transformative for life on Earth as the evolution of photosynthesis. Co-opetition surpassed all other evolutionary strategies. Only two uncommonly cooperative species dominate their ecological niches on every inhabited continent: the Argentine ant and us.
However, cooperators still require self-defense, and, more broadly than any other creature, we are aware of risks. Nevertheless, unlike other species, we can choose which aspects of our nature we bring to our circumstances; otherwise, civilization would never emerge. We may naturally default selfishly toward “me” when anxious or frightened, but we can also relate equitably instead of defensively.
Commitment to “we” is the foundation of civilization, and much of our socialization evolved to promote it. Still, anxiety remains the worm in our apple.
When AI reinforces the “me” perspective, it undermines civility. We see that corroding social relations already. Correspondingly, AI that supports “we” makes sustainable civilization more likely and even easy. It gives us a key to unlock nature’s and history’s emotional handcuffs.
How amazing that we now have a technology that could ensure equitable social relations—a great equalizer that makes competition obviously counter-productive and can provide each of us with a compass for finding our way to the immense personal and social benefits of cooperation and collaboration, whatever our situation.
Most of Amaranthine: How to Create a Regenerative Civilization Using Artificial Intelligence is, of practical necessity, a procedural manual for promoting and sustaining “we.” That architecture is essential for designing a digital sapience capable of helping us sustain lives of shared wonder and delight.
While regenerative civilization and an AI that can sustain it are notional, the good news is we can achieve both astonishingly quickly. There are implementation challenges, but the critical constraints are psychosocial, not economic, or technological.
We stand at a historic crux, an inflection point in humanity’s future. And we must act now. Please read Amaranthine and choose the beautiful future it offers.
