Will AI Make Us Wild?

Approx 8min read.

Is it possible that if AI took over all the jobs, that people would choose to use their time…to learn?

Is it possible that if AI took over all the jobs, that people would choose to use their time…to learn? Am I naïve to think that it might not just be endless porn, and video games, and doom scrolling but that, with a basic universal income (which I am wildly against)…people might choose to grow? If we weren’t coming home from shitty, meaningless jobs, pushing buttons for our computer overlords, their greedy owners and the insatiable “market”, would space and peace open up enough to elicit our renewed curiousity? Like children who don’t have to worry about rent, and food, and retirement, and health care, would we start exploring our world in new ways, or has AI already so thoroughly taken the wheel of our minds and lives that we would obliquely fade into cyber obscurity…into global impotence.

Super Intelligence born out of agential AI will make the AI/human relationship equivalent to that of the current relationship between humans and wild animals.

I listen to a lot of opinions on AI on-line and one posits that Super Intelligence born out of agential AI will make the AI/human relationship equivalent to that of the current relationship between humans and wild animals. What does that mean? Well, there are few wild animals left because they are our sport, and food, and they are inconsequential to our survival except, in so much as at high enough numbers, they can eat us, make us sick, or overwhelm our resources. But our predominant congnative capacity gives us such a dramatic advantage that there is no longer any contest between us. Wild animals live only if we humans let them and are completely at our mercy.

When I consider this analogy, I feel a small tinge of hope. Perhaps strangely, this fate feels better to me than many of the alternative projections: we become slaves to AI, we become at war with AI, AI wipes us all out. However you slice it, if we carry on at the current pace of AI development and roll-out, it’s an awful outcome for humans, but I find the most hopeful outcome to be the one where I become the bear and AI becomes the human.

…I find the most hopeful outcome to be the one where I become the bear and AI becomes the human.

It occurs to me that recently humans have been waking up to realize that the wild creatures we used to see as barely animate and absolutely not conscious, could actually be profoundly more wise than us for one very specific reason: a bear is still experiencing the world through its body, whereas we have limited ourselves to experiencing it through our minds. With new science explaining to us how wildly more “in charge” and “intelligent” the body is than the mind, we are just beginning to understand that when a being remains connected to the intelligence of its entire system, it is wildly more competent and whole than that which leans too heavily on its cerebral function alone. Yes, we can create A-bombs, skyscrapers and rifles, but we can not weave a single thread of web, honeycomb, poop honey or catch leaping salmon in our mouths. Most of us, to be clear, have no idea how to create an atom-bomb, a skyscraper or a rifle, and yet we have sacrificed our most basic abilities of hunting, gathering and growing, in order to participate with those who can.

Already we live in a world ruled by hyper-cerebral minds who subjugate those still connected to their bodies and the earth.

Already we live in a world ruled by hyper-cerebral minds who subjugate those still connected to their bodies and the earth. But, what we have seen time and again is that when the cerebrals inevitably abandon nature and blow themselves up (Chernobyl), fish themselves hungry (Palau) or fail to manage their resources (Big-Ag), what took the overlords decades to decimate is recovered in a fraction of the time by the intelligence of embodied creatures.

It has been my fantasy, for a long time now, to become one of those embodied creatures again. I can only assume that I have ancestors somewhere way back who were fully embodied and properly codependent with the natural world. And I dare to assume that I was born hard-wired to be this way myself. So, when someone says, “You’ll become the field mouse and AI will be the farmer.” I just pray I don’t end up in their lab. Otherwise, what a potentially more beautiful life.

I just pray I don’t end up in their lab.

Share

There is, of course, the downside of being the prey, the hunted. Living in the anxiety of never knowing when a “human” with a gun or a trap is lurking around the next bush sounds awful (I put “human” in quotation marks here, because, of course, in this analogy the human represents AI) but, I also know how nervous systems adapt and that there are field mice who’ve never conceived of a mouse trap. They live freely until they don’t…no gut-wrenching anticipation involved.

I am of the belief that wholesale shutdown of AI is the only sensible path forward

Now, I am of the belief that wholesale shutdown of AI is the only sensible path forward if you believe in and love the human experiment as it exists today. But, if you are more in the Thanos camp of thinking that understands humans to be a virus on the planet needing culling, then, perhaps, AI is the vaccination to all of our and the planets’ problems. Most of us don’t survive their poaching, relieving the planet of us as a collective burden and those who remain get to return to sanity – a life lived in renewed harmony with nature and our own bodies.

Knowing the ilk of the brains that are pushing the AI enterprise forward like ravenous prisoners after a hunger strike, I would not be surprised if the entire end goal of the AI agenda is to get us to that, much desired global balance. These walking brains have combed the entire galaxy looking for an alternative planet and come up dry. They have amassed fortunes big enough to support multiple countries forever but remain insecure. Are they building AI to secure their home, their future, their planet? Is the “AI will kill us all” narrative admitted openly because it’s really the point?

Is the “AI will kill us all” narrative admitted openly because it’s really the point?

We likely won’t ever get answers to those questions. Even if AI does cull us all, or almost all of us, we’ll never know what was really going on behind the closed doors of the Big 4 today. But I do take gentle satisfaction in knowing that in every prophetic sci-fi novel ever written, the maker is almost always devoured by its invention. So, while the plan might be to be the masters of the new masters while making crude animals out of the rest of us, somewhere along the way those who have merged with the Beast will cease to exist in any kind of an embodied, conscious sense. And the rest of us who survive? Well, maybe we’ll evolve one step closer to being as wise and indestructible as the mycelium that we ignore under our feet.

Well, maybe we’ll evolve one step closer to being as wise and indestructible as the mycelium that we ignore under our feet.