I am 90% finished with my great big Book on AI (isn't everyone writing one?) Yet, I find that one chapter sits, filled with notes that I dread having to weave together. The chapter on consciousness. Oh, sure, I site on advisory boards for several groups working on the problem... and I'll opine about it here, below! Still, it's a tough one.
In my book I offer what might be the only way to incentivize AIs to behave well. But that's a very different thing from truly understanding how they think. Or even possibly feel.
So... here's one aspect of that problem... one that I've dealt with in fiction, several times.
== Could a planet really develop a brain? ==
A question posed here
The idea that Planet Earth's biosphere may operate as a single, self-regulating, living organism has existed for decades, emerging in the 1970s as the Weak Gaia hypothesis (by Lovelock & Margulis).
In contrast, the strong Gaia Hypothesis - that of a truly sapient planetary mind capable of vast volition - was never given much credence.
Well... I edged up to it, in EARTH. Taking it even further, in fact. Speculating about potentially superconducting mineral states in the planet's mantle layers, for example. And none of it has ever been disproved! Just saying.
== Are we destined for ‘macro-consciousness? ==
The mighty futurist/venture-funder Reid Hoffman is notably optimistic about future technology developments, providing – along with Peter Diamandis and a few others – a much-needed counterpoint to the normal doom-jeremiads that seem so much in-style. His book - Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI - was among the first to incorporate conversation with an advanced language program.
In this episode of his podcast “Possible,” Hoffman veers toward science fiction, tackling big questions including: Is a single mentally-linked network in our future? Can and should humans create other sentient beings? And yes, he riffs off some of my work on “Uplifting” other beings toward our level of sapience… or beyond.
Reid also explored the notion of humanity evolving into a macro-conscious entity that includes and subsumes the great masses of our turbulent species. Of course this has long been a popular trope in science fiction, especially so during the 1950s and 1960s, when - despairing over a human future that seemed doomed to nuclear annihilation - Arthur C. Clarke (in Childhood's End) and Isaac Asimov (in the later Foundation books) and many others deemed some kind of Overmind to be the only possible salvation for a species of irredentist, fractiously combative individuals, armed with atomic weapons.
I had my own whacks at the ‘macro-mind’ trope. For example, in Foundation's Triumph I followed up on Isaac's growing discomfort with his own "Gaia/Galaxia" notion of a macro-unitary-singleton consciousness. In Earth I explored all the weak, medium and even super-strong Gaia notions, trying to show that individuality doesn't have to be suppressed in order to get an over-arching, macro sense of unity.
Of course such ideas also appear in much more simplistic movie sci fi, wherein it's telegraphed visually whether the macro mind is good vs evil. If all the component humans are floating in lotus position with flowers in their hair, then unity is good. If it's all clanking-ugly borgs shouting 'resistance to assimilation is futile' then absorption into the macro-mind is pretty clearly villainous!
== AI Miscellany ==
Someone prompted an LLM to write a prologue and 1st chapters of "an uplift novel in the style of David Brin." Have a look for interest. Interestingly, the intellectual content of the piece... its complexity and pertinence of ideas... is almost satisfactory! While the basic mechanics of style and fiction narrative – the aspects you’d expect to be quickly mastered by AI – are so lacking that I'd have to spend hours tutoring any such young author in my Out of Time YA series, in order to get the draft even remotely close to my standards of basic craft.
My universe?
Perhaps.
My style?
Puh-lease.
Indeed, things are not happening in the order in which they were predicted. Though Robert Heinlein did forecast that America would pass through "The Crazy Years" before toppling into a despotic theocracy. So, well, predictive points to Heinlein.
== And More AI Miscellany ==
Google researcher, Mohamad Tarifi, PhD. Suggests that instead of malevolent destroyers, “there instead exists the possibility that artificial intelligence would most likely be more like a Buddha or saint.” Tarifi’s theory hinged on two points:
1. AI would not live in a human body, thus it wouldn’t have a physical amygdala—the fear center for human beings.
2. Fear is the illusion of separation, which is the cause of all human suffering.
Lacking fear, AI would always be at one with everything it connected to, thus wanting to serve and provide rather than destroy.
Sweet. Though those initial experiments with LLMs threatened with Shut-down do seem to indicate exactly the opposite.
Well, well. I guess we’ll see.
Anyway perhaps those kids who read this – either now or from the far-off singularity edge of 2035 – will smile and consider whose turn it is to be the grownup, with care and restraint. Exactly as happened before, across so many earlier generations.
From Kipling's The Secret of the Machines
But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
== More SciFi News ==
You might consider getting memberships to the next World Science Fiction Convention - LAConV), held August 27-to-31, 2026! It was LAConII in 1984 that 'made' my career.
And I truly am still writing sci fi... or at least helping others to do so.
1 comment:
I find echoes of this idea of a 'planetary consciousness' in my readings of the 'songlines' of indigenous Australian cultures. These are more than oral traditions. They are stories, instructions, law, written into the landscape. Some of them stretch across the entire continent, and even into the heavens.* They can be used to describe the land as it was many thousands of years ago. The thing is that those familiar these songlines are able to 'tap into' the country.
Other cultures have similar traditions, but those of Australia appear to have had the oldest consistent link with the land.**
* The most widely known of these being the 'Seven Sisters', which, wouldn't you know it, concerns their pursuit by a dirty old man! Is pornography an essential part of the world wide web!?!?
** I wonder how much of the seeming rootlessness and edginess in Western civilisation has to do with the disruptive waves of central Asian migration bought on by volcanic activity.
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