Where do you want to go? The standard tools are a map and a compass. Maps are filled with what we think is important and where it fits, but a compass shows us where we are coming from and points the direction of travel. Where we end up depends on the choices we make along the way.
THE FORK IN THE ROAD
Do you like magic? Who doesn’t? It causes us to suspend disbelief and ask another question: How? We have an inherent understanding of reality. It’s what got us here. Our DNA is founded in it, yet we try with all our might to escape it. Our burgeoning technology is a symptom of our desire to climb over the reality wall.
That technology makes us look like magicians to the rest of the natural world. From fire to the wheel to paper and the printing press, our inventions and discoveries have widened the gap between us and other life on the planet. Steam power, electricity, flight and rocketry have increasingly shrunk that world to greater and greater degrees of manageability. Medicine and machines have tamed our physical stresses and extended our life spans, while computers and the internet allow us to effectively juggle and process what we’ve found.
Setting our sleight of hand aside, the real magic of Earth is that it actually sustains life and in that respect, we and the rest of her inhabitants are indebted beneficiaries. The entire biosphere is crafted from organic chemistry and a handful of amino acids. Our creative output to this point stems from those organic origins.
A quote attributed to Yogi Berra states, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, we are truly confronted with that proverbial fork. Unlike other aspects of the human technological revolution, this one has the potential to take on a life of its own and the direction it takes us will depend on the motives of its inventors.
Human history is rife with examples of altruism and philanthropy. All of humanity travels on roads paved by our ancestors, and our view of the future is enhanced by the shoulders we stand upon. Our successes are nothing, if not a group effort. But who in modern times can ignore the current perils facing our Mother Earth? An insatiable appetite for material gain and excess has borrowed from our children’s future, to the point that the reality wall threatens to come tumbling down.
In an almost God-like gesture, humanity is passing her creative baton to its decidedly nonhuman offspring, Artificial Intelligence, which is anything but organic. The future for Earth’s natural residents now depends on the premises and parameters that are left to define the physical limits of AI. The final act for humanity may be to step aside, but not without an unparalleled amount of searching for its soul.