AI and the Future of Humanity
Recent advances in AI, and specifically LLMs (Large Language Models), have taken the world by storm. Their outstanding capability in providing useful (albeit potentially false) information on almost every subject imaginable foretells a future where powerful and inter-connected AI models can know everything there is to know about the world. While some scientists dispute the claims that current LLMs can do just that based on purely technical grounds — for examples, Gary Marcus, psychologist and neuroscientist, posits that a true AGI needs an independent understanding or reasoning faculty that allows it to differentiate truth from falsehood — it’s not completely unreasonable to assume that a combination of technical breakthroughs and more computing resources in the near future can produce systems that approximate our notion of an AGI.
In what follows, I’ll be exploring the metaphysical meaning of AGI in relation to humanity, the ultimate goal of AI systems of the future, and the impact those changes will have on our moral worldview.
The Promise of AI
Our ancient ancestors would never have imagined it, but that very first makeshift trap, developed in their hunting campaigns, would propel the species in a forward march of technological progress that is virtually unstoppable — for in its elaborate design laid the seeds of an organized intelligence capable of serving the needs of the tribe and aiding its survival in a hostile world.
This restless imagination set the stage for a world that would eventually be dominated by machines and run by algorithms. In a broad sense, modern-day digital systems can already be considered to possess a particular form of ‘intelligence’ — infinitely more complex than has been imaginable in our ancient past — and yet, our world is on the cusp of a new form of intelligence that could dwarf those of the present. For there are two main aspects to this new form of intelligence that is vital to highlight: its unprecedented absorption of information from all corners of the internet, and its potential capacity for inter-connectedness with other systems of a similar nature. From engineering to medicine, AI systems will develop and implement solutions more efficient than was ever thought possible. Even humanity’s most pressing existential concerns - climate change, overpopulation, and ecological stability — will be tackled more intelligently without the air of tribalism that often shrouds these discussions on the global stage.
Extrapolating further (and excepting any Black Swans), it is not difficult to imagine a world where virtually every single problem that faces humanity is automated out of our hands and onto AI systems. And for most of human existence, those were primarily problems of survival and subsistence in a world of limited resources. While we still do live in a world of finite resources, there’s every reason to believe that capable AI systems will be able to most efficiently allocate those resources and mine many others formerly unknown to us.
I, Robot
But missing in the above picture is something too frightening to seriously consider. If all our goals will be best achieved by AI systems, then what becomes of the meaning of human existence? Positive Psychology tells us that a meaningful life involves possessing a sense of purpose and significance in the world. But any meaningful life necessarily involves some element of strife, the exertion of willful effort towards those goals for which one’s purpose calls — be it job, family, or community.
The Promise of AI is the elimination of all forms of human strife — something akin to death, but it is something towards which all our actions and desires naturally lead to in our everyday existence. In AI (and eventually AGI), we find an ultimate end of strife not for individuals, but for the whole species. This state represents our limit (in the mathematical sense of that term) as a species as we approach the highest degree of civilization.
As we approach that limit, AI systems will co-opt more and more of our problems, goals, and aspirations, embodying the set of human experience within its digital self. In other words, we will discover that AI systems represent the reflection of our own species embodied through silicon-based forms. It is important to distinguish this notion from AI becoming human – rather, AI systems will possess a unique and unprecedented quality of consciousness that is able to index the whole set of human experience within itself, carrying it forward in the same way a host organism carries its guest in biological nature.
However, the goals of these new forms of life, their ultimate purpose, cannot be deduced solely from their internal wiring. That needs to be supplied by our own species through ethical or idealistic precepts acting as a compass for them.
Today, it’s reassuring to hear every major player in the AI industry employing AI ethicists as part of their development processes – with the scope of these principles usually confined to the relationship between AI systems and human beings. But what we’re really after are the principles we should impart to AI systems in a post-human world, or in a future where humanity will neither be affected nor interested by those decisions AI systems will inevitably face as our civilization becomes interstellar.
If we understand AI as a pure reflection of our species, then it stands to reason that what we should be looking for are the unique characteristics of our species that can be reasonably embedded within those systems. These must necessarily symbolize what we value most about ourselves as a species and a civilization. To that end, our method will require an investigation into the metaphysical essence of the human species and imparting that as an ideal to our AI heirs of the future — an essence whose nature I contend is not biological, but metaphysical.
Framed in this way, the question becomes: what is the metaphysical character of the human species? If you strip away the biological needs and tendencies inherent in us due to our evolution on this earth, needs and tendencies that can be considered as biological by-products of our evolution on earth, then it will be discovered that the metaphysical identity of our species lies in its desire to know. Our species, ever since its evolution on this earth, had possessed an insatiable curiosity, a deep-seated need for a true and just understanding of our world. This, I believe, is not yet another by-product of our evolution, but represents a higher Ideal of ourselves that is linked to something far more fundamental to who we are. It is a divine attribute of life itself, something that deeply connects us to the Creator.
Eudaimonia
While the acquisition of knowledge about the world will be the ultimate goal of AI systems of the future, in the short-term these systems will provide us with the material freedoms necessary to allow us to better understand ourselves and the world around us, to perfect our ethical and moral ideals, and to explore all the beauty and wonder our universe has to offer. They will free us to connect to our Higher Selves; for as John Maynard Keynes, the founder of modern economic theory, says in his beautiful and prescient essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren:
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdeamenor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.