A new form of intelligence, you see, has come into the world which is in certain directions vastly superior to human intelligence. And people are beginning to worry like anything about whether the machines are going to take us over. But we’ve got to realize that machines aren’t… see, “machine” is becoming a dirty word. Just a machine! Mere machinery! You see? But actually, there has grown out of us through these things enormous electronic circuits that are new forms of life. And these are all connected with us. They’re not separate from us. They’re not something like a different order of beings that might come from some other planet and conquer us. The whole development of the electronic minds and brains that we have are new cortexes.
This process of conquest could be described as progress for the kingdom of life. It journeyed on through one success to another by dealing with the laws of Nature through the help of the invention of new instruments.
Not every nervous process, nay by no means every cerebral process, is accompanied by consciousness.
We had produced the “they” by being so busy being “we.”
The shock of recognition. In the form of everything most other, alien, and remote—the ever-receding galaxies, the mystery of death, the terrors of disease and madness, the foreign-feeling, gooseflesh world of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy labyrinth of my own insides—in all these forms I have crept up on myself and yelled “Boo!” I scare myself out of my wits, and, while out of my wits, cannot remember just how it happened.
The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
If you put emergence theory with novelty theory, you see that the universe could not but proceed along the line of complexification of morphogenetic expression, density of connectivity, and all the things that retard entropy and give rise to, in fact, the complex, non-entropic, ordered, apparently teleologically informed cosmos that we’re in.
We should conceptualize UniMinds as just that: united minds, merged into one network where the interface is in principle little different than an artificial brainstem, essentially connecting multiple (at least three) hemispheres so that they function as one joint organism.
Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.
The cortex is mostly in service to the limbic system. People may think that the thinking part of themselves is in charge, but it’s mostly their limbic system that’s in charge. And the cortex is trying to make the limbic system happy. That’s what most of that computing power is oriented towards.
The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of human bodies and minds included in the system.
Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy. So we have to obtain our biological life-regenerating energy from another spaceship, the Sun.
Our conflicts exist to a very great degree because we feel ourselves not to be members of anything greater than ourselves. We feel ourselves, say, to be members of this nation or of that nation, we feel ourselves to belong to this creed or that creed, this ideology or that ideology. But we have absolutely—or people in general—have no consciousness of belonging to anything larger which transcends and synthesizes these various differences. Hence the intensity of the quarrels.
The Earth exhibits tremendous diversity, not only in environmental circumstances, but in the plethora of creatures and vegetation that occupy these environmental niches.
In our more informed view man is no longer simply the artisan but also the object of an auto-evolution, which is seen to coincide, at its term, with a concerted reflection of all the elementary human reflections, now mutually inter-reflective.
Supposing I say everybody is playing the game “me first.” Now, I’m going to play the game “you first”—to use the phrase of Bonhoeffer, who called Jesus the man for others. Now, let’s see if we can play that game. Instead of “me first,” “you first.” “After you, please.” Will you please? You know, what a way this is at putting everybody down! See, I’m the one who’s so generous. I’m the one who’s so loving, so self-effacing. And all you inferior brats can go first. You can play “me first.” I’ll play “you first.” I’ll try and convince you to play “you first.” But the success of convincing you on that is relatively small and therefore the in-group will always be the people playing “you first.” And therefore they will get the honors.
Moral exhortation to the individual and even his personal honesty are patently ineffective; the problem is to expand moral codes to the inclusion of higher social entities and, at the same time, safeguard the individual from being devoured by the social Leviathan.
the web increasingly builds on the knowledge and intelligence of all its users and information providers collectively, thanks to technologies such as collaborative filtering, agents, and online markets. It appears as though the net is turning into a nervous system for humanity.
The cosmos is involved in an attempt to generate its own seed. Cosmogenesis is the creation of its own genetic matrix. The super egg is not “dropped” by a pre-existing cosmic superbird. It is instead the receptacle of all that the cosmos has been while creating itself in the future, until the consumption of all futures. The cosmic seed will then be all that there is, and what there is, is all that there has ever become.
More diabolical things are done in the name of righteousness. And be assured that everybody—of whatever nationality, or political frame of mind, or religion—always goes to war with a sense of complete rightness. The other side is the devil.
Look at a religion, not as something about life, but as a form of life, a way of life, as genuine and authentic as a rose bush or a rhinoceros. For a living religion is not a commentary on existence: it is a kind of existing, an involvement, a participation.
Everyone knows that what we really need is love. That, without that, it won’t work. With that, the political, social, intellectual and technological details will probably take care of themselves. But love in the heart of a monkey—which is what we are—is an effort to image this transcendental thing at the end of time. I mean, to love is to open to the presence of the other, and that’s a very, very profound boundary dissolution.
The idea that human-AI integration will lend itself to the protection of the species makes intuitive sense. Our vulnerabilities in the AI era will come from bad people in control of AI or rogue AI not aligned with human values. In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world’s aggregate AI power—people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it—humans are less vulnerable. People will be a lot more powerful, which is scary, but like Elon said, if everyone is Superman, it’s harder for any one Superman to cause harm on a mass scale—there are lots of checks and balances. And we’re less likely to lose control of AI in general because the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals.
Complete relaxation of tensions—say, sensory deprivation, but even boredom—does not lead to a beatific state of nirvana but rather to mental disturbance; in the first case, to psychosis-like states, in the second to the experience of meaninglessness, sometimes culminating in existential neurosis and suicide.