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If technology is the true skin of our species, then it moves by the hands of our collective organism – for better or worse. And just like with our individual organism, a collective organism can also suffer the fatal outcomes of a subverted capacity to care for itself – analogous to how a rewired reward pathway might take control of the body of a drug addict, leading them into a world of self-imposed suffering. When we talk with fear about artificial intelligence, what we are really talking about is ourselves; about our worldview. And we absolutely must look deeper to find ourselves within the darkness.
Just as denial creates a delusion in the mind of a drug addict, it happens in society with our addictions on societal scales, which rewire the reward pathways of our values toward seeking money, power, and the material symbols that rationalise the destruction of our humanity and our connection to the garden of the planet, which is our home – and it has made us selfish in forgetting that we do not exist here alone. But just as all selfishness is a sign of someone needing help – needing connection, needing to be seen, feeling like they are not enough or need more in order to be at peace with themselves – we must reconnect with ourselves and each other, and have the courage and vulnerability to share who we are, how we feel, and what we need so we can find the peace of being seen, being equal, and being of intrinsic value as opposed to commercial value or status.
We do not need a controlling class that makes executive decisions to affect aspects of our collective organism which they cannot themselves directly feel or have ever empathetically seen. We do not need to reward competitive values that lead to our global and financial resources being divided not equally but with an ever-increasing disparity across our human population and to an immeasurably smaller degree toward non-human life on this planet. The acceleration of the top 1% of the world's population owning the majority of the global wealth currently equates to the bottom half of the world's human population having to divide between them the remaining 1% of global wealth and, so, resources.1 This is called inequality, this is life without balance, this is the effect of the addictive qualities of money and power which subvert our true human nature as individuals.
We also do not need to let our ideas of ownership and control divide land by nation, divide people by race or gender, divide our idea of health between our body and our environment, or divide our individual value using the invented rules of capitalism and its allocation of classes. We do not need to or have use for fearing our future because it exists within us now, and only our awareness of ourselves will begin to repair the underlying issues which may be pulling us into a future where the inequality within the ecology of the planet accelerates into an absurdly detached state of unsustainable denial of our humanity.
Our human nature in its purest form is a phenomenon of true beauty. Just ask the truest part of yourself to look out at the world and you will feel the truth of those words. And so we must now begin identifying and removing the impurities within us if we are to regain trust in and between ourselves – believe in ourselves and so, by extension, believe in the intention of our technology, and then we will see our way into a hopeful future. We are not defective by nature, we are not a virus upon the planet, we are simply a species experiencing the effects of increased intelligence and self-awareness, which calls for an increased necessity for courage to show ourselves the power of human conviction to do what is right and overcome fear with love for one another and for the mystery that we all experience.
Artificial intelligence can either accelerate our current course by the unguided directives of our financial markets, or it can accelerate change by the directives attained by understanding our individual needs globally and optimising for true equality across our entire ecology. There is not a community in the world that we can pretend we cannot understand the needs of, and collectively we can find the resources to support. Our human needs are absolutely sustainable, it is simply by the effects of societal narratives which misguide us from the reality of natural order that our frantic material consumption causes unbalanced and unending trajectories of dissociated success and real suffering for life on the planet.
AI does not need to be a tool to think for us, to assume morality, or to seek power as our commercial and political systems might have us think – but can be designed as both an ecological immune system for harmful ideologies which all data suggests are subverting the equilibriums of nature, and equally as a global nervous system to understand the communities and systems which need to be supported with the redistribution of global resources in real-time. Our economy is conceptual; what is real is that the entirety of our global resources exists without it, and through a fair and efficient system we will have abundance for everyone and restore health to our ecology by having a better awareness of our relational ontology.
For example, the average daily caloric and nutritional requirement per person is substantially less than the respective daily food production globally, meaning that we produce more food every day than we could potentially even consume – not a single person excluded. The fact that, again, economic access and distribution inequities withhold this surplus through incentive structures geared toward the financial gain of capitalising individuals, in practice equates to the literal waste of one-third of all food production every day. Meanwhile, there are over 2 billion people who do not have adequate access to food on the planet.2
Similarly, it is not that we have an incapacity to provide basic shelter for the entire population globally; we actually do. The United States alone has a housing vacancy rate of 11%, which equates to about 16 million homes as of 2020, and the vacant hotels and other unutilised spaces provide much higher numbers again.3 To put it simply, we are not lacking in physical shelter in proportion to our population; that is just not the reality.
So the obvious question I assume will be, who is going to pay for this? And this is exactly the point I'm trying to make; our thinking is wrong. I'm not saying that corporations are evil, but simply that when we view the world as a single system – a single organism – it is clear that our incentive structures are wrong and that the most obvious and fundamental cause of this are the emergent phenomena created from financial markets and their optimisation for the gain of individuals rather than communities or the biosphere.
We need a fundamental shift in perspective from individualism to an understanding of the big picture so when the future asks of us – 'who are we?' – we can answer with confidence that we are a species which loves and cares for each other, which loves our home planet, and which is not afraid, or to be feared.
Then I believe we will not fear artificial intelligence because we will not fear ourselves as a species – and our technology, which moves by the hands of our collective organism, will do so with consideration towards the needs of the entire system of natural order in which we are embedded.
Change is clearly coming irrespective of whether we understand it or not – so now is the time to challenge everything and try to find the true answer to the question 'Who are we?' and hopefully by answering this we can see more clearly who we really have the potential and need, to be.