( Five minute read)

On July the 20th this year it will be fifty five years since one of us stood on another planet. Since then only 24 people have seen the whole of Earth. Achived with less computer power that is now in our phone’s.

In those fiftyfive years we have had fifty-five active conflicts. Eight of these 55 conflicts were classified as wars.

This is the world we got.

We are truly living in a very unique time in the history of our civilization, facing several simultaneous challenges and converging crises:

Because the world is a cauldron where dozens of cultures, religions and ideologies mix with each other, which always leads to a conflict. We are all born of frailty and error.

A deteriorating environment, a very unequal distribution of dwindling resources, widespread poverty, wars, climate change, oppression of many peoples, and dissatisfaction with life even in those countries with a surplus of material wealth.

What can we do about it?

The answer to such question is certainly not simple, and you will not find it in any textbook.

All these problems and converging crises are systemic.

For the most part these crises we humans have brought upon ourselves over the course of many centuries by our attitudes towards each other and towards Nature, and by the concepts we have developed regarding who we are and the very purpose of our being here — in other words, our worldview.

The 20th century revolution of technologies that permits long distance travel and instant communication across the world has brought all cultures closer together, making us more aware than ever of the many diverse spiritual-cultural traditions that have flourished for millennia as intricate, elaborate meta-solutions to the challenges and opportunities of living in a particular place.

Now we are challenged to integrate the wealth of knowledge and capability that this remarkable period has brought us into a new narrative of interbeing — a synthesis of ancient wisdom of our interconnectedness and interdependence with modern science and technology.

We now have a choice to make!

Either we move into a new phase in the evoloution of consciouness and a new ear of life on planet Earth, or we will witness the unraveling of the web of life and the immature end of our species and much of the community of life along with us. 

The time to make this choice is now!

It starts with a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview. It is time to grow up!

A world with less gravity and more humanity.

Where people get what they deserve rather than deserve what they get.
Where there is a God for everyone and no one God is better than other.
Where an empty stomach is an alien concept.
Where mind is held high and heart is held higher.

Where people are immaterialistic.
Where people think logically, question and reason everything without blindly following anything or be superstitious.

Where people respect each other and not judge others for their actions.
Where one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.

History shows us that none of the above is possible without AI augmentation of human intelligence to enshrin values of beauty, agency, and individuality. by benevolent, incorruptible agencies that are beyond human intelligence.

The era of Artificial Intelligence is here. AI has already started.

AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.

Its true that AI doesn’t have goals of its own, but its influnce on our lives is endangering the very meaning of life and  instead of us embracing a worldview based on facts, it will cause us to lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.

Understanding what “we” want is among the biggest challenges facing AI.

It is very difficult to encode human values in a programming language, but the problem is made more difficult by the fact that we as humanity do not agree on common values, and even parts we do agree on change with time. The question then becomes how do we aligne AI with Human values.

Whose human values?

Ah, that’s where things get tricky.

A major change is coming, over unknown timescales but across every segment of society, and the people playing a part in that transition have a huge responsibility and opportunity to shape it for the best.

So here are some of the questions we should be asking.

What does it mean to you to have artificial intelligence aligned with your own life goals and aspirations?

How can it be aligned with you and everyone else in the world at the same time?

How do we ensure that one person’s version of an ideal AI doesn’t make your life more difficult?

How do we go about agreeing on human values, and how can we ensure that AI understands these values?

If you have a personal AI assistant, how should it be programmed to behave?

If we have AI more involved in things like medicine or policing or education, what should that look like?

What else should we, as a society, be asking?

Globally, humankind must think about the kind of future we want to have.

The recently articulated United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a good starting point, but these goals are merely the preconditions necessary for survival and flourishing, so they are not
enough. A further step is needed to determine our common goals as a civilization, and more
philosophically, the purpose of human existence, and how AI will fit into it.

Generative AI is not hype.

Instead, it acts at a scale so large that it will transform how we interact with technology itself.  It will far outpace what we’ve seen so far today.

AI has been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human speech, technologies that rely on model- and algorithm-based machine learning and increasingly focus on perception, reasoning and generalization.

If we reach a point where AI is able to understand our languages, AI systems would be able to read and understand everything ever written. In the mean time rest assured that we will continue to fight wars against each other, as we have done since day until the end of time, or at least Earth’s time which is in about 5.4 billion years.

All human comments appriciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com