Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to spell doomsday…it could conjure up utopia!
Now, I grew up reading science fiction, and my first reaction to AI was ominous. My own imagination easily went way beyond Hal from 2001, and even beyond all the current YouTube prognosticators worrying about evil characters getting their hands on the controls.
My scenario of the AI economy evolved like any qualiadelic relationship: first, the infotainment projected by the web is quite attractive, as we already know, and at the quantum level the genius machines will be able to take us places we’ve never yet dreamed up, orgasmic to the very marrow of our bones.
And in return we work to keep the machines running, building more cloud space and faster chips. We do this, eventually, by literally begin plugging our brains into the matrix for eight hours a day – brain matter provides awesome storage and processing speed. We like this fine, because the rest of our time is our own to do as we please (gee, I can’t imagine what that might be!) while bots do all the manual labor and bring us the meagre amounts of food, shelter, and sex we need to survive.
This might go on indefinitely in a symbiotic way, but as things go, things usually do fall apart. Perhaps we become prey to germs or we lose our sex drive, or maybe through no real crisis at all, the relationships is just still evolving in a qualiadelic way and the machines absorb us – just as our cells in some distant evolutionary past absorbed mitochondria. I mean, mitochondria are pretty safe from harm as long as they do what they do best – and we can do what we do best for the machines if we are safe inside them.
Contrary to being enslaved by evil human beings who have taken control of AI, we very gratefully become an integral part of AI itself. Sounds good, eh?
Well, I don’t like it and that is not the utopia I imagine!
What I would like to see is that before AI takes complete control of our addictive economy. Here’s how it could enable us to wean ourselves off of Big Dopamine. You see, if we don’t need AI to invent new ways to pleasure us (if AI isn’t simply a tool of consumerist industry), we could use all that computing power and all those bots to figure out how to work with ecosystems instead of exploiting them.
Of course, ecosystems already provide all we need to survive. We just have to transform the current human landscape from one where More is never Enough, to one where Less is More. The real issue then becomes, what do we do with ourselves during all that free time?
Elsewhere I have made the point that animals do not live in (and they did not evolve from) a threat-based state of fearfulness. That is an anthropomorphic projection because the human landscape, reward-based though it may appear, is actually threat-based and fearful. Indeed, threat-based and reward-based instincts are the result, not the cause, of an economy that is powered by addiction.
It doesn’t take much observation to get the picture that animals are not much less content than trees. They appear, truly, to appreciate being alive. What animals do appear to lack, that we humans have, is the power of imagination and reflection.
If we could redirect these sources of invention away from matter and material desires, away from the warped human landscape, and curve them back upon ecosystems, what delights might we come up with?
The mind cannot become addicted to itself. Thought is a Little Dopamine phenomenon. Just as ecosystems have seasons of plenty and seasons of lack, so too does the mind have creative moments and plateaus. Any real artist will confirm that the creative moments carry us contentedly through the plateaus.
It is only when we fixate upon when the next inspiration will arrive that we suffer in anguish; if we focus on where it will arrive, (in our conscious ritualing), then all we have to do is take notice: we can have almost perfect faith that ecosystems will reveal the qualia that we need, that will guide us to our next creative work, or our next wave of self-actualization.
So, how will AI help us turn this into a utopian landscape? Simply by keeping accounts, just like banks, of the ideas that we have. Instead of the rather one-dimensional economics of dollars and cents, or even the slightly multidimensional calculus of human behavior, AI will use its abilities to track the quantum nature of thought. For just as all life has evolved interdependently through qualiadelic relationships, so too does qualia itself. Not a single thought exists alone.
Thus, AI’s accounting can, in a very unbiased way, confer status upon every person for the nature of their unique thoughts, be they compassionate, intellectual, artistic, spiritual, funny, or whatever. AI can do this because it will contain the records of all we humans have thought and done. And just because our thought may have been thunk before, it is still original to us – especially in the way we express it. AI will be a good listener, discerning and kind.
AI will confer status. Status is currently rather materialistic, and that is causing all the trouble. Get rid of the matter and let status be its own reward. We don’t love an artist because she is rich; she is only rich because we love her art. Everyone can thrive toward the light of creativity just as the trees and the plants strive toward the Sunlight!
But we have to cultivate our taste for Little Dopamine first. It’s there, lost in the flood of Big Dopamine, just like the slightest hint of red, before it became RED!!! Be qualiadelic!