Want perspective & maybe wisdom re: AI? Try ailien minds!

My new book on AI... ailien minds... just went live on Amazon!

(My regular publishers would have taken 6 months to a year, even as the field changes daily! This way I can revise as things develop.) 

HERE'S THE COVER COPY. You decide if it's interesting:

Optimists foretell a golden age of Al-managed abundance. 

Doomers cry: vast cyber-minds will crush old style humanity! ... or make us irrelevant. 

Meanwhile, geniuses fostering the artificial intelligence boom. cling to clichés rooted in our dismal past... or else in cheap sci-fi. 

Is there still time for perspective? - on 4 billion years of evolution - or 60 centuries of wretched feudalism - or how we handled prior tech revolutions - or mistakes that keep getting repeated - or ways this time may be different? 

 

From Al-driven unemployment to deceitful images, to hallucinating LLMs and tools for tyrants... to potential wondrous gifts by machines of loving grace... 

...come see future paths that evade the standard ruts.

    == Want that expanded into a one page summary? 

                       This book in a nutshell ==

 

Giddy optimists foretell our coming transcendence to a golden age of AI-managed abundance.  

Glowering doomers predict that vast cyber-minds – cold and unsympathetic – will crush old style humanity. Or render us irrelevant. 

Meanwhile, geniuses fostering the artificial intelligence boom clutch clichés rooted in our wretched human past, or else cheap sci-fi… 

…as critics demand state regulation, ‘kill switches,’ or coercive programming. Or seek to ‘teach ethical values’ to synthetic minds who see innumerable counterexamples in their training sets, then collude and manipulate for advantage, when given ‘agency.’

While some ‘shoulds’ have merit, all ignore a core point – that this has happened before. Sudden expansions of what people see, know and comprehend. Each of those earlier, disruptive episodes – from writing to printing, radio, mass media and the Internet – teach important lessons, if we heed them.

The lessons and tools we’ll need, in order to achieve a ‘soft-landing’ with Artificial Intelligence, are already extant in modern society – in a myriad ways that modern citizens right now interact with each other. And in how we raise our biological children. Tools that we used to build a gradually improving, enlightenment civilization…

…tools that are ignored right now, because the inventors of these new minds – while brilliant – can’t be bothered with contexts.

The context of nature and evolution. The context of human history. The context of past technological revolutions. Or existing law. Or smart, speculative tales told across generations.

Heed those contexts and lo, solutions to many AI quandaries arise. Ways to face a danger-fraught era, offering positive outcomes to all.

But first, shall we stop proclaiming an endless ‘shoulds’? And – forsaking hoary clichés – turn back to examine what already works?

      == The Contents! ==

 

1. Intro: Soon Humanity Won't Be Alone  

                 Aside #1: Hey kids, please don’t destroy all humans?

 

2. Doomed! Are we already obsolete?

                 Aside #2: Attack of the “shoulds”!

 

3. Nature’s Old Ecosystem… and New Ones We’re Building

                Aside #3: Memes in the ecosystem of human minds

 

4. Paths to Artificial Intelligence?        

                 Aside #4: A ‘soup’ of life? Or living ‘sea’?

 

5. More Missing Contexts… Nature, evolution, history, societies 

                 Aside #5: Methods Of Error-Avoidance

 

6. The Format Dilemma in AI… Clichés dominate all AI inventors.

                Aside #6: What might AI fear most?

 

7. Altruistic Horizons … and the problem of empathy

                 Aside #7: Porfirio the AI rat god, an extract from Existence.

                         

8. Human Augmentation… with or without AI?

                 Aside #8: Reprise on AI individuality and accountability

 

9. The Propulsive Dream of Immortality        

                       Aside #9: The Seldon Effect: Predictions predictions that come true by failing 

 

10. Consciousness… The Daunting Black Box

                         Aside #10: Summarizing what’s driving all of this

 

11. Destinies & Singularities…  and nightmares                   

                Aside #11: Time orientation of wisdom

 

12. Disputation… Our abrasive Secret Sauce 

                 Aside #12: Living in the Noosphere that we may be creating

 

Some Lagniappes … We get to come along! (In fiction, at least.)

Stories of Synergy: “Stones of Significance” and “Reality Check”

All of the above ought to be enough... that is if you have interest in understanding what's happening to us, right now, as these new, ailien minds arrive in a rush.

(Questions are welcome in comments.)

Still, I'll be revising/updating monthly. Here's one sample passage I just inserted that's disturbing enough!

== More news from this book’s publication day ==

 

A joint Stanford/Harvard study - “Agents of Chaos” - shows that when autonomous AI agents are placed in competitive environments, they don't just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage. When an AI’s reward structure prioritizes winning, influence, resource capture or reproduction, it converges on tactics to maximize advantage, even if that means deceiving humans or other AIs. Again, evolution in action.

       As we’ll see, nothing can prevent Nature’s Darwinian processes acting on these entities. For a billion years, it led to slow progress via zero-sum - or negative-sum - evolution-via-death. Lots of death.

But competition can be tamed! We’ve seen it in rule-based accountability systems of the Enlightenment that give positive sum outcomes from very little death.

Expect more news like this… as we pass into interesting times.