Early-stage AGI systems will interact with groups of humans and narrow AIs to form a global emergent intelligent network that can be thought of as a “global brain.” This global brain, rather than any individual AGI software system or robot, will be the general intelligence that ascends to superintelligence and realizes the Singularity vision.
The prospect of a “machine takeover” takes on a whole different aspect if it’s humans who are becoming the machines, at a pace slow enough that it comes with the feeling of transitioning to a new kind of humanity, rather than the feeling of being supplanted by something alien.
What might it be like to be a global brain?
To discuss what the global brain mind might look like, we first must imagine the mind of a society. The psyche of a society as it exists today is likely to be less focused than a human mind, and perhaps less oriented toward declarative and linguistic knowledge. A society doesn’t currently communicate with other societies using language, and it doesn’t appear to deliberatively reason. Very roughly, the society’s mind might be closer to that of a child at Piaget’s pre-operational stage, lacking the ability to understand concrete logic, and who has grown up without any exposure to language or books or other formal knowledge.
A mindplex is a collection of individual minds, each with their own self-model and goal system and knowledge base, that are able to interface with each other much more closely than human beings can. For instance, two minds in a mindplex might be able to inject thoughts directly into each other’s minds, or give each other clones of one another to consult and to study. These minds might be able to directly adopt each other’s goals on a temporary basis. They could even fuse into combined group minds, and then separate back again, changed fundamentally by the experience.
Our consciousnesses are tethered to our individual bodies in ways that don’t need to apply to AIs. Even if an AGI mind is focused on controlling a particular humanoid robot’s body, it still can copy itself into a different robot, or use itself to control an avatar in a virtual world, or save its mind-state into a database to be analyzed or partially imported by other minds, etc. What would it be like to be a mind with this sort of fluid individuality? This is difficult for the human mind to imagine, but it may be what lies ahead for the global brain, in a future where multiple powerful AGI systems are launched onto the internet, each with their own orientations and interests but also with the urge to collaborate and cooperate in creative and productive ways.
The door is going to be wide open for a quite incredible array of post-Singularity cognitive systems with a variety of states and structures of consciousness. What we now think of as mind, intelligence, and experience just scratches the surface of what’s possible.
Big Tech is programming our consciousnesses not only to “stop worrying and love the Big Tech oligopoly,” but also to keep on staring at our phones and jumping from one app to another, while in the meantime, Big Tech and selected governments push hard in the background to create a Singularity that they control.