Everything Is F*cked(64)

There is a lot of fear out there that AI will wipe away humanity. Some suspect this might happen in a dramatic Terminator 2–type conflagration. Others worry that some machine will kill us off by “accident,” that an AI designed to innovate better ways to make toothpicks will somehow discover that harvesting human bodies is the best way.16 Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk are just a few of the leading thinkers and scientists who have crapped their pants at how rapidly AI is developing and how underprepared we are as a species for its repercussions.

But I think this fear is a bit silly. For one, how do you prepare for something that is vastly more intelligent than you are? It’s like training a dog to play chess against . . . well, Kasparov. No matter how much the dog thinks and prepares, it’s not going to matter.

More important, the machines’ understanding of good and evil will likely surpass our own. As I write this, five different genocides are taking place in the world.17 Seven hundred ninety-five million people are starving or undernourished.18 By the time you finish this chapter, more than a hundred people, just in the United States, will be beaten, abused, or killed by a family member, in their own home.19

Are there potential dangers with AI? Sure. But morally speaking, we’re throwing rocks inside a glass house here. What do we know about ethics and the humane treatment of animals, the environment, and one another? That’s right: pretty much nothing. When it comes to moral questions, humanity has historically flunked the test, over and over again. Superintelligent machines will likely come to understand life and death, creation and destruction, on a much higher level than we ever could on our own. And the idea that they will exterminate us for the simple fact that we aren’t as productive as we used to be, or that sometimes we can be a nuisance, I think, is just projecting the worst aspects of our own psychology onto something we don’t understand and never will.

Or, here’s an idea: What if technology advances to such a degree that it renders individual human consciousness arbitrary? What if consciousness can be replicated, expanded, and contracted at will? What if removing all these clunky, inefficient biological prisons we call “bodies,” or all these clunky, inefficient psychological prisons we call “individual identities,” results in far more ethical and prosperous outcomes? What if the machines realize we’d be much happier being freed from our cognitive prisons and having our perception of our own identities expanded to include all perceivable reality? What if they think we’re just a bunch of drooling idiots and keep us occupied with perfect virtual reality porn and amazing pizza until we all die off by our own mortality?

Who are we to know? And who are we to say?

Nietzsche wrote his books just a couple of decades after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. By the time Nietzsche came onto the scene, the world was reeling from Darwin’s magnificent discoveries, trying to process and make sense of their implications.

And while the world was freaking out about whether humans really evolved from apes or not, Nietzsche, as usual, looked in the opposite direction of everyone else. He took it as obvious that we evolved from apes. After all, he said, why else would we be so horrible to one another?

Instead of asking what we evolved from, Nietzsche instead asked what we were evolving toward.

Nietzsche said that man was a transition, suspended precariously on a rope between two ledges, with beasts behind us and something greater in front of us. His life’s work was dedicated to figuring out what that something greater might be and then pointing us toward it.

Nietzsche envisioned a humanity that transcended religious hopes, that extended itself “beyond good and evil,” and rose above the petty quarrels of contradictory value systems. It is these value systems that fail us and hurt us and keep us down in the emotional holes of our own creation. The emotional algorithms that exalt life and make it soar in blistering joy are the same forces that unravel us and destroy us, from the inside out.

So far, our technology has exploited the flawed algorithms of our Feeling Brain. Technology has worked to make us less resilient and more addicted to frivolous diversions and pleasures, because these diversions are incredibly profitable. And while technology has liberated much of the planet from poverty and tyranny, it has produced a new kind of tyranny: a tyranny of empty, meaningless variety, a never-ending stream of unnecessary options.

It has also armed us with weapons so devastating that we could torpedo this whole “intelligent life” experiment ourselves if we’re not careful.

I believe artificial intelligence is Nietzsche’s “something greater.” It is the Final Religion, the religion that lies beyond good and evil, the religion that will finally unite and bind us all, for better or worse.

It is, then, simply our job not to blow ourselves up before we get there.

And the only way to do that is to adapt our technology for our flawed psychology rather than to exploit it.

To create tools that promote greater character and maturity in our cultures rather than diverting us from growth.

To enshrine the virtues of autonomy, liberty, privacy, and dignity not just in our legal documents but also in our business models and our social lives.

To treat people not merely as means but also as ends, and more important, to do it at scale.

To encourage antifragility and self-imposed limitation in each of us, rather than protecting everyone’s feelings.

To create tools to help our Thinking Brain better communicate and manage the Feeling Brain, and to bring them into alignment, producing the illusion of greater self-control.