Consciousness is hot! And may heat up the world

While striving to find time to finish a first draft of my big new book on AI - (isn't everyone writing one?) - I figure we'll take a break from political/social upheavals, in order to talk about a topic that's on (or inside) everyone's minds.

== Are we amid a thought revolution right now? == 

As usual, Nathan Gardels offers a thought-provoking essay in Noema Magazine, this time about how AI may enable humans to clamber up to higher levels of consciousness, as appeared to happen during a ‘leap’ in philosophical awareness called the “Axial Age” – when Buddha, Socrates, and other sages all seemed to emerge within roughly a single generation, across Eurasia. And possibly other areas, without historical note. Gardels suggests we may be embarking on another, greater leap, if AI tools allow us to augment our prodigious neo-cortexes to new levels of awareness and sensibility. 

In fact, the  two cited events cited by Gardels… a past “Axial Age” and a looming "AI-xial Age"... are clearly not alone. For example, about 40,000 years ago humanity's tool sets -- and presumably language and art -- took huge leaps ahead in just a few centuries, maybe less.

Then there's Julian Jaynes. Although his brilliantly entertaining tome The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of The Bicameral Mind is now dismissed by scholars as quaint, that’s unfair, since clearly something happened in the era of which he wrote, including the till-now ill-explained Bronze Age Collapse.

In my novel EXISTENCE I argue that we've had at least seven such major self reprogrammings, and we were already in another one, even without AI. 

Indeed, the rejection of Modernity that was featured in all 8 phases of the American Civil War, including the current one, could be viewed as an immune-response by older forms of consciousness vs. the onerous demands of newer models. 

In fact, I can think of not other model to explain all aspect of this ongoing cultural schism.

== How will AI amplify the next Big Shift? ==

Gardels continues with an excellent thought: "AI-driven planetary-scale computation has enabled us to conceive of climate change — a phenomenon that could not be apprehended by the human mind alone"... 

Absolutely!  In fact, I deem it likely that failure to perceive ecological self-destruction may be one of the top contending theories for the Fermi Paradox.  Perceiving and cancelling such failure modes in time may be rare... as Jared Diamond discusses in his great book COLLAPSE.

"Perhaps an approach that explores how consciousness expands and unfolds..."

We know the answer to that.  It unfolds under competitive pressure - NATURE's tool for 4 billion years. Our enlightenment tames competition to be less bloody and more productive and rapid than Nature! Nevertheless, that fact remains.

So how do we get that tool – reciprocally vigorous competition - to work peacefully and well for us? Well enough to deliver sane, decent AI consciousnesses?  I discuss that elsewhere.

== More on the hottest topic: Can we replicate consciousness… and should we? ==

Want other Noema articles on AI? This one: The Danger of Superhuman AI is not what you think - is a long and eloquent whine, contributing absolutely nothing useful.

OTOH this one is much better! AI Could Actually Help Rebuild the Middle Class.

"By shortening the distance from intention to result, tools enable workers with proper training and judgment to accomplish tasks that were previously time-consuming, failure-prone or infeasible. Conversely, tools are useless at best — and hazardous at worst — to those lacking relevant training and experience. A pneumatic nail gun is an indispensable time-saver for a roofer and a looming impalement hazard for a home hobbyist. 

"For workers with foundational training and experience, AI can help to leverage expertise so they can do higher-value work. AI will certainly also automate existing work, rendering certain existing areas of expertise irrelevant. It will further instantiate new human capabilities, new goods and services that create demand for expertise we have yet to foresee. ... AI offers vast tools for augmenting workers and enhancing work. We must master those tools and make them work for us."

Well... maybe.  But if the coming world is zero-sum, then either machine+human teams or else just machines who are better at gathering resources and exploiting them will simply 'win.' Hence the question that is never asked -- and that is the only crucial one -- is:

"Can conditions and incentives be set up, so that the patterns that are reinforced are positive-sum for the greatest variety of participants, including legacy-organic humans and the planet?"

You know where that always leads me - to the irony that positive-sum (PS) systems tend to be inherently competitive, though under fairness rule-sets that we've witnessed achieving PS over the last couple of centuries.

Which leads us to: A new study by Caltech and UC Riverside uncovers the hidden toll that AI exacts on human health throughout its production and use, from chip manufacturing to data center operation.

And this re my alma mater: Caltech researchers have developed brain–machine interfaces that can interpret data from neural activity even after the signal from an implant has become less clear. 

(Side note: I’ll keep letting slip – by accident – that Caltech gave me this honor. Hey. Credibility is relevant.)

Though… my kids remind me that the server farms delivering “AI” LLMs and other golem pre-entities are rapidly approaching bitcoin mining in their deleterious effects, heating up the planet. 

== And more on the topic? ==

A new consciousness book by Micah Blumberg -- "Bridging Molecular Mechanisms and Neural Oscillatory Dynamics" -- introduces "Self Aware Networks: Theory of Mind" a new framework for understanding how the experience of being someone arises from neural activity.

And sci fi history scholar Tom Lombardo is running one of his extensive, multi-part deep-dives into a topic, this time highly pertinent: The Future Evolution of Consciousness Webinar. 

Conscium claims to be “the world’s first applied AI consciousness research organisation.” From which my friend from the UK (via Panama) Calum Chace sent me this long paper re “Principles for Responsible AI Consciousness Research”.  He is deeply involned with PRISM – “The Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines” (Promoting responsible research into AI consciousness.) Which recruited me for their board.  

Though in fact I truly cannot say which – if any – of these endeavors is on a ‘right track’ toward humanity’s soft and happy landing with our new children of the mind. While detailed and illuminating, that PDF – for example - remains vague about the most important things, like how to tell ‘consciousness’ from a system that feigns it… and whether that matters.

Broadening a bit into speculation… Take the exploratory dive into “what is consciousness’ that you’ll find in Peter Watts’s novel “Blindsight.”    … wherein Watts makes the case that a sense of self is not necessarily needed, in order for a being to behave in a way that is actively intelligent, communicative and even ferociously self-interested.  

All you need is evolution. And an overall system in which evolution remains (as in nature) zero-sum.

== And again, my own highly… different … takes on AI and dangerous clichés… like how best to navigate the future by using tools we already have! ==

While some – like Nathan Gardels and even more-so Reid Hoffman and Ray Kurzweill – suggest a coming AI-propelled apotheosis – or AIpotheosis (did I coin it first?) – from merging and expanding what it means to be human…

… others, like Eliezer Yudkowski publish jeremiad hand wringing like the self-explanatorily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everybody dies.

What is NOT helpful is the dismal mental laziness of Sam Altman and all the other Masters of The World, each of whom believes he (always ‘he’) is the Robur of Robots (look up the Verne reference!) A clade of tech wizards whose lazy assumptions about AI format could wind up proving Eliezer right.  

And so, I conclude by reiterating…

My WIRED article breaks free of the three standard 'AI-formats' that can only lead to disaster, suggesting instead a 4th. That AI entities can only be held accountable if they have individuality... even 'soul'... 

And still-more pertinent than ever… my related NEWSWEEK op-ed dealt with 'empathy bots'' that feign sapience and personhood. 

 

Want it laid out more vividly detailed? My Keynote at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”  

And you'll get it all, plus a dozen missing contexts that the robo-roburs have been utterly ignoring, in my coming Ai book. That is, if those new children of humanity allow it to appear in time.

Whatever comes next (WCN)... and our global future.

Okay, last posting was a science update. And politics is in hiatus to see what drops in Chicago.... So how about we turn to issues on a global perspective? Starting near term:

Now that India has surpassed China in population, Beijing is issuing dire directives.

'As China's population has begun to decline and fears rise of a looming demographic crisis, China's leaders are putting pressure on women to curtail their career and educational ambitions and return to traditional roles in the home. 

President Xi says: "Doing a good job in women's work is not only related to women's own development, but also related to the harmony of families and society, as well as national development and progress." '

In its early decades, the Chinese Communist Party bolstered its revolutionary credentials by emphasizing women's equality both inside and outside the home. But the CCP's own top ranks have long been male-dominated.  Well, well. I've been saving up a posting about the goals and aspirations... and mistakes... of the Central Kingdom. 

Only now let's focus on a question of the longer term. What if we succeed in winning this wretched phase 8 of the US Civil War... and strengthening the 80 year 'pax' that gave humanity by far its best era of (relative, per capita) peace and progress?

Does this mean that the American Pax will last forever? 

Of course not. But then... what?

==  Whatever Comes Next? ==

I’ve long asked a difficult question about the future. One that can be disturbing to some USA citizens, especially that wing who might be called American Imperialists (e.g. the Bushite neocons, now a nearly extinct species, since the oligarchs betrayed and flushed them all away, to be replaced by MAGA isolationism). 

The question: “So how long do you envision a world with the USA calling all shots?…

Decades? A century? A thousand years? A million?” 

I’m used to peering across those time ranges via sci fi. And in SF there’s a clear trend for dealing with this extrapolation. Go beyond 100 years or so… even half a dozen decades… and the governing entity coping with Earthly dilemmas, or the solar system, or aliens, or even the galaxy, is always some kind of Earth Gov or Earth Union or… some federated something. 

Except for the movie Aliens, of course, with its 23^rd Century warp drive troopship of U.S. Marines! (Ain’t Cameron a hoot? LOVE that flick!;-)  

Indeed, I think this is one reason that some of our neighbors here in USA desperately pray for the gruesome reification of that nasty, sadistic culmination-trip, the Book of Revelation… so they won’t have to envision even one generation ahead, or do anything to build a healthy posterity.

Not you, though? 

You are one of those far-looking sci-fi folks? All right, then. So, what’s your notion of WCN?  Whatever Comes Next?

Let’s be clear, I regularly defend the last 80 years of the “American Pax.” Since 1945, guided by several principles cast by the person of the 20th Century - George Marshall -- we've experienced, by any metric, the best era of general peace and progress and increasing justice ever. Especially after 6000 years of wretched (and world ubiquitous) macho feudalism. Despite some nasty acts and mistakes and even bloody crimes, no other nation that was ever tempted by great power ever handled it so… um… less-terribly. (Go on. name an exception, in comments. I'd love to be shown a past empire or kingdom or 'pax' that you think did much better.)

Yeah, sure it’s been a tense and immature ride – sometimes a hellhole, compared to what oughta-be!  Pax Americana was so very far from perfect and often hideous!  Merely vastly better than any other era … or all other human eras, combined. 

Across the last eight decades, poverty plummeted worldwide. Today, 95% of kids on this planet have never starved and are in school. Sure, the ongoing chain of wretched violent wars is horrifying! (Especially lately.)  But step back a minute and realize a historically amazing fact -- that over 90% of living adults have never witnessed war with their own eyes. Something that’d be deemed a freaking miracle, by any of our ancestors. 

So yeah, our standards are rising. As they must! But pause now and then for perspective. I go into this elsewhere. And before you stalk off in rage, consider your own reaction! 

Your very concept of how things oughta-be would have been deemed utterly dreamy, even psychotically delusional by those ancestors. Especially, your reflex to question authority - your own society and its tribal elders. Find me another example - across all cultures and eras – of an empire that taught Suspicion of Authority as a central moral reflex to generations of its youth. And yes, it was relentless Hollywood memes that taught you those reflexes.

 In pointing that out, I am not dissing you or those memes!  Dig it: I was raised by them, too! They are part of the secret of our success! As I show thoroughly in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

Still, one has to ask – returning to the core question of this posting - what’s your notion of a Whatever Comes Next to govern this fractious globe and nearby worlds? 

What’s your recommended replacement for the lumbering, sometimes crazed, if generally good-natured Pax Americana?  

The United Nations? Are you freaking kidding me?

== Is an end-to-nations possible ==

Which bring us to the reason that I raise this topic. In this Noema essay, Nathan Gardels made a strong argument that the European Union (EU) is a much better model for gradually evolving sovereignty. 

Ponder: The UN grew out of those infamous Westphalian notions, establishing that separated national sovereignties must be viewed as the sacred thing. A notion that only got reinforced by the prickly 80 new nations that emerged from colonialism.  

The EU, in contrast, is about layering of negotiated sub-national, national, and supra national responsibilities, all of them (so far imperfectly) accountable to the ultimate authority of citizens. An approach necessitating calm reasonableness and negotiation at levels that – again – those fractious ancestors would have found boggling.

I recommend giving Nathan’s missive about this a look. 

BTW… it’s a general notion I’ve dealt with before. In Earth, for example, I speak of the “EU” several times, allowing readers to assume that it means “European Union”… until the book reveals that in the year 2038 “EU” now stands for Earth Union. A nascent but not-yet world government that still relies on the old pax to keep things together, while it matures.

Care to entertain a standing wager across the next two decades? Assuming we get past the current crises, incited by an attempted worldwide putsch of cabals of powerful but unsapient oligarchs, united in shared desperation to end the Enlightenment Experiment and re-impose 6000 years of utterly imbecilic feudalism… supposing we get past all that… 

… in which case, what is to prevent say the Maldives, or Costa Rica, or Ghana from some fine day sending an envelope to Brussels, containing their accession application to join the EU? 

Are you telling me those Brussels factotums would refuse even to consider it, because of a defined word?

Play it out in your head. Then consider how confident you are that “It’ll never happen!” 

Okay then. Are you so confident that you’ll give me odds?

Comments welcome.

== And some important miscellany ==

A while back I posted outrage over the Trump Administration’s fire sale of the US national helium reserves to cronies at well under market prices, allowing them to jack-up and corner the market for this element that’s rare on Earth and essential for many (including medical) uses. Ah, but Adam Smith comes to the rescue!  Wildcats drilling in Minnesota appear to have found a new trove of this vital resource! Maybe this will help keep helium prices down. Although that will depend on who owns it and how big it is. 

"Important"?  Well, I think so. Because indicates the right path to neutralize villains. By creatively leaving all their schemes behind us in a soft cloud of our progress that even benefits them, galling them terribly! It is certainly how to best deal with the mad/idiotic 'prepper' lords in their zillion dollar bunkers, salivating over an "Event" that would not go as well as they think.

And more...  ‘With little fanfare, researchers from Apple and Columbia University released an open source multimodal LLM, called Ferret, in October 2023.’  

Well…. In 1989 - in my novel Earth - I showed software geniuses releasing 'ferrets' into the (then largely theoretical) Web.

So is the Great Big AI Crisis of 23-24 starting to fade? Not a bit of it. Even today's primitive versions will likely wreak great harm via political misinformation and manipulation. (More on that soon.) But it’s also swamping its way into science too. 

“It is not always so easy to spot the use of AI. But one clue is that ChatGPT tends to favor certain words… such as meticulous, intricate or commendable.” But all such detection cues are temporary. 

Only one thing will even possibly work - either in politics or science or anywhere else that unaccountable AI is used to cheat. That approach is the same one that allowed us to get some constraints on all kinds of human cheaters... and that approach is to sic AI programs onto each other, competitively, with incentives to tattle on misinformation...

...as I describe here.

And more vividly detailed? My Keynote at the huge, May 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco – is now available online.   “Anticipation, Resilience and Reliability: Three ways that AI will change us… if we do it right.”