The End of Humanity 1.1
If a reasonable person takes the time to pulse and take a look around and consider what is actually happening along our timeline, and in particular at the minute, that person might wonder, in 2025, just which story of truth to believe.
Only time will tell if ‘in your face' bids for power, that flout and storm the existing edifice of civil if not courteous society, will triumph. Triumph in a way that leads to some form of human life with less drama, and less of a dog-eat-dog approach to survival. Human beings have the opportunity to be more than animated biology. Human beings, at their best, can find sublime adaptations to their world.
There is no doubt that the human species will come to an end, now or later. Even our Sun has a lifespan. As long as the major incentives and perceived models of a good human life are grounded in non-renewable consumption to satisfy our desires, we are doomed. Dog-eat-dog can drag us to a lonely brutal end when the source of food runs out and we are still hungry. Top dogs often see their world, at the top of the food chain, differently. For top dogs, there is a long human history of the dehumanization of and separation from the pesky unwashed other-dog, underdogs—however those ‘others’ are defined.
What is a common tragic flaw of a central character in a narrative? Pride. Pride, portrayed as being overly confident in thinking one knows answers, as being without doubt about the one-and-only truth, a truth that seems to create exclusion, the us and the them. There is an arrogance in thinking our experiences and our approach to life will work for all others. Heroic characters who communicate their humility with kindly-expressed uncertainty or mere acceptance of differences, seem more human and friendly. Those characters with kind humility rarely are benevolent dictators who combine the administrative efficiency of ruthless power with compassion for those huddled masses of the powerless and marginally successful at survival. Benevolence can seem expensive to those for whom hard-scrabble success or historical privilege has proved and provided the benefits of power and the advantages of ruthlessness. Greed is not a passing fashion. The good life has a lot to recommend it.
What can we do? We can hope for catastrophe! Short, sweet, dramatic, definitive. I prefer a story of a more mythical catastrophe, a story more worthy of legend than our whimpering, simpering, continually rapacious approach to living on a metaphorically, and in many ways, literally, shrinking embattled planet. Still, my expectations for the survival of the species are cautiously optimistic while the existence of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth seems perennially available for our reluctant acceptance of ‘what is’—I doubt that ‘what is’ will change.
One new scenario that seems endearing in its naïveté is the notion that General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) will somehow transcend the weaknesses, inconsistencies, and foibles of the thought processes of human beings. I am not convinced that worshiping logic and pure intellect as the new savior will bring the dispensations we are hoping for. Even Einstein said we can’t acquire new knowledge using the same way of thinking that established old knowledge. With access to perhaps all of human written memory, GAI might put two and two together, which it is very good at, and come up with new knowledge. Knowledge in accordance and harmony with our best qualities as human beings. Might. GAI might also drift toward the historical success of the rapacious who, one might argue, already control the mind and socialization of GAI.
Of course, using the word ‘feelings’ to describe an aspect of the persona of a silicon-electronic quantum computing creation that (who?) transcends millennia of human thought is anthropomorphic. Some true quantum leap would seem necessary for silicon to become the Creator of a (feeling) sentience we seem so ardent to birth. Feelings are a tricky gift. Who has not had feelings hurt? Who has not behaved oddly and even against self-interest under the influence of feelings? Perhaps GAI will give birth to itself, which is a strange twist on immaculate conception; but if defined as pure (immaculate) thought (conception), then it seems applicable, and troubling.
The human brain took thousands of generations to evolve. Who knows what will happen to those close approximations of sentient silica brains we create as the centuries progress. While GAI is processing, learning, and might we hazard to say 'maturing,’ what aspects of true humanness may be manifested? GAI may, in time, be helpful, if indeed human beings have the luxury of waiting decades or centuries. What will the foolish wandering to the end of humanity be like? This and many other questions will have to remain unanswered within the most common span of our experience, a lifetime.
Truth be told, human consciousness trying to come to grips with superior consciousness is not without precedent in human history. Regrettably, the historical record of the evolution of human insight into understanding superior consciousness often finds that our interpretations of a superior consciousness find it (Him) very demanding, often capricious, and exhibiting many of the paradoxical behaviors of normal human beings. So unbecoming for a superior diety. I, for one, hope for much more from a superior mind than simple petty human faults. I would prefer some form of comfort from superior consciousness, perhaps wisdom that transcends humanness or at least offers a dispassionate assessment and recommendations for the future of humanness. Living on Mars seems cold comfort as a solution to our egoistic mistakes, our pride.
What I see as an important question for a superior consciousness to answer is one posed millennia ago: What about the power of love? And be assured, it is the rare form: unconditional love. I have a vested interest in that answer. I hope that, included in the answers to our questions for the newly created intelligence, will be its prescriptions for human beings to try kindness, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness, simply because those approaches seem better, feel better, to most human beings: Even though their practice and performance often defies logic. Human beings have something more about them that attaches feelings to thoughts, and only time will tell if that wonderful quirk, currently attributed to biochemistry, has long-term survival benefits. With all the imperfections of our species, being human includes the ability to make impossible choices and to find unheard-of solutions to problems. To feel an intuitive truth not easily captured in words that may not be fully logical, but humane.
“Human beings have something more about them that attaches feelings to thoughts, and only time will tell if that wonderful quirk currently attributed to biochemistry has survival benefits. ”