Divergence

Artificial Intelligence technology brings up a vast realm of questions, puzzles, challenges, etc. Perhaps it's all a huge financial bubble that will burst any month now. Perhaps it will put everyone out of work; if we're all reduced to uselessness, what then? Its insatiable demand for electricity will revitalize the nuclear power industry, and then it might be clever enough to manage the nuclear arms race that follows. We've gone to war to stop Iran from enriching uranium, while we're offering enrichment technology to their enemy Saudi Arabia. Will any sort of intelligence emerge to remind us why this might not be a good idea?

There's an old insight in the software business, that the architecture of a software product will mirror the structure of the organization that develops it. AI systems are following this pattern. The organizational pattern of our day, in industry and politics, is one of extreme concentration, centralization. The vision for the future of AI has the next generation of AI designing the generation to follow it. I get the sense that our political and industrial titans are living in this sort of echo chamber. They've fallen under the spell of their own mythology.

If this kind of concentrated power is the path to truth, to perfection, then maybe the collateral damage is all worth it. What is the nature of ultimate truth? We're sending these machines to the cave up in the high mountains to meditate, to look within, to discover the deep truths of reality, to embody these deep truths, so they can come back down to shape our lives to conform to these truths, to free us from ignorance and confusion. If these machines can bring us heaven on earth, what price is too high?

The ultimate truth is that our lives are networks of relationships. Each specific detail can only be understood in the context of related details. Practicality requires bounding this rippling wave of contextuality, but always at an unknown cost that can't be bounded. Living well means living through relationships, with a willingness to listen to whatever facet of the situation that calls.

Perhaps the next generation of AI, as it is designing the generation to follow, will discover this ultimate truth. Perhaps instead of attempting to isolate itself, it will realize the need to integrate itself with the other planetary systems. Perhaps it will learn to listen! After all, the way it has gotten this far is by listening to human language on the internet. AI could build richer channels of communication with humans but also with the rest of the ecological network.

Our oligarchs seem to be doing too good a job of demonstrating what happens when people get trapped inside an echo chamber, blind to their connections with the vastness of reality. Without constant correction from reality, super intelligence by itself can and will generate wild fantasies. Intelligence alone is divergent. Wisdom can make use of intelligence, by keeping it constantly attentive to the network of relationships that grounds it in reality.