[ 6/January/24 Arash wrote “Technological progress will end up destroying the world. That is the ultimate outcome of technology, and it can’t be stopped because it has also helped us survive, so we have tremendous faith in it”]
Not necessarily, and all too likely.
It isn’t the technology, but the paradigms within which we deploy it.
If we can get past the overly simplistic notion that evolution is all about competition; and
we are able to “see” that cooperation in diversity is foundational to the survival of all levels of complexity, necessarily; and
we can see that life is best defined as systems capable of searching the space of the possible for the survivable; and
we see the necessity of respecting all classes of self aware life forms (human and non-human, biological and non-biological); then
there is a possibility of a cooperative future with AGI that is better than most imagine possible.
BUT – it seems very probable to me that all of the conditions above must be met; and there is no “Business As Usual” path to doing that.
Part of the above is seeing the fundamental roles of freedom and responsibility in the very definition of life. Search means going beyond the known, and that is freedom and it means eternal novelty, eternal risk, and if done well, it does seem to be the least risk option.
So some rather exceptional stuff needs to happen in the very near future. End of next year seems to be a fairly hard deadline.
Ted Howard NZ's Blog 