Compassion, AI and Us
I wonder this morning. I wonder about the end of the world as we knew it. Wars are raging, but those are symptoms of a settling we have been doing since the days when agriculture was a novelty. Hunger and poverty are growing fires, but those two are symptoms of a deeper problem, one that marks our collective immaturity. Something about these ills is separated from our conversations around AI, and that seems to prove we have learned less than we have forgotten about what makes life and the world worth having around.
I put on the TV last night and watched something from Mo Gawdat, a man who excelled in the tech world. Achieving the highest ranks of corporate attainment, Gawdat now seeks to influence people to be happier, and to make a happier world. I haven’t read his book on this, though I will at some point, but for now the thing that strikes me about Mo is that he exists at all. In fact, there are plenty of people like Mo, who are leaving behind all that the powerful cocktail of tech and business has to offer, for a different trajectory. In this is the conundrum of life, since many will of us will listen to Mo well before we will listen to those around us, or even before we will listen to ourselves.
It’s not wrong to trust in people like Mo, at least not in this abstract way that I suddenly do. The only thing wrong with experts is that we can make them not into leaders, but into saviors, and the most basic ones at that. In the most existential forms, a savior would save a person by turning their hearts, by illuminating their minds. The savior does not overtake the person, does not destroy their capacities in order to turn them into some form of improved automaton. You see, the problem for us is that rules and regulations are what we seek from saviors, and yet in their truest form saviors lead us to our own highest awareness. So, what does that have to do with AI?
The truth is, AI is just the final reflection of human output for a particular period of time. AI is the final project made by humanity during an era of entrenchment, of retreat from the rest of the world. Put even more plainly, AI is that last and greatest example of what we can do as humans, distinct from all of life and yet united with all of life. Mo made it clear to me in a way I want to share with you.
As Mo talked about AI already being smarter than most humans, he went on to mention that soon the AI could be thousands of times smarter than us. A creation a thousand or three times smarter than us is no small order of magnitude, and yet we keep talking about this technology as if this were unprecedented. Yet if we think, even as laypeople, about the biological science, this is not very far off from what made us. With our microbiomes in full effect and on ever greater display to scientists, we know that they make us as much as our distinct genetic materials do. As for those materials, such as our powerhouse mitochondria, we know very well that they probably came to be inside us after existing independently. The proteins and acids, the way we replicate, all of it brings us back to unity rather than distinction away from the rest of this planet. We don’t like this so much, because we as humans want to be exceptional. We want an excuse and another few thousand to do as we will with the planet and its other particpants. AI is always more like humans than we want to consider.
We may be scared of AI, but it’s only a reflection of what we fear from humans. It’s the not the robots alone that we fear, but what their teams of human parents might teach them. It’s not just those people we fear, but ourselves, our very history of conquest and settlement, of identification with ownership and rulership and consequently, salvation. Saviors are needed when we are in crisis more than at any other time. The need we feel for someone or something to save us from the war, poverty and other forms of misery are hitting the highest pitch, and yet, we can not imagine how the AI could do anything but harm us if they were given the chance. This says to us, that we harm, given the chance. We subjugate, when given the chance. We enrich ourselves to billionaire status, hoping to avoid the tyranny of our systems. Upon receiving that status, we identify differently and then the regular humans become the lesser children of Earth, akin to those other beings we regularly and callously disregard. Interestingly we fear AI because they will both do the bidding of the billionaire class, and turn on them if possible. After all, we know that AI play our games better than we do. What if AI play dominance and subjugation of all of humans better than we do now with each other? That is our real fear, is that AI is our mirror.
If we want to teach the future to be better we must start now. We must write and live with compassion. We must train ourselves in compassion now in order to have those lessons filter into the awareness of future AI. We must systemically imbue our lives with kindness, not only despite the system but deep within it. We must dismantle the previous system not by junking it altogether, but by retooling it through the shifts in perspective. To make an AI infused world that still has a place for humans we must be creative. To harness this technology of kindness, we must become less coupled to our identities and even to past wrongs. To open up the possibilities and opportunities of the future technologies we must not ignore that we are animals, built out of biological needs and desires, but embrace them. We must not ignore our histories but we can consciously choose not to relive them.
Somewhere deep inside us is a super-organism at work. That super-organism is us and it is bigger than us, and it is in fact, bigger than AI. AI takes place inside this organism, deep within its systems. It is inside this planet, within this galaxy, universe and cosmos that all is nested. If we can not stop the AI from coming, and if we can not stop it from being used, then the only thing we can hope to do at this point is to train it, not to be like us in our most fearful state, but to be like us in our most giving, most kind selves. I think that’s kind of what Mo is saying, but I do know that’s what I am saying. I and my billions and trillions of interior beings and dynamics. Inside of you sits these same structures, these internal terrains, and so it’s up to you too, to let go of the old prejudices and fears while simultaneously grasping at new hopes and possibilities. It’s a juggling act for sure, but luckily, we can all juggle together. It’s this participation in life that might just impact the AI and influence their guided inputs and their unknowable outputs. It is this participation that might also refuse to fight wars, ignore poverty, turn a blind eye to cruelty, and place small slivers of society in a class apart from itself. The saviors of the day when it comes to AI, they are us.
