What happens when we explore the bare essentials of our minds?
It’s hard to fathom the challenges facing humanity, when we can barely handle our own New Year’s resolutions. Gym today, couch tomorrow. Well, maybe technology can help with that…
Imagine an intelligence that knows more about you than you do. Instead of using your iPhone to apply mascara, you can also use your iPhone to apply New Year’s resolutions. It doesn’t have to be a sentient intelligence, just an illuminating one. An intelligent and very observant mirror.
This isn’t an article about “How to Make New Year’s Resolutions that Actually Stick, This Time, This Year, For Real, No, For Real For Real, Like, Last Year Didn’t Count, It’ll Happen This Year, I Promise! You Just Have To Click The Article and Follow Me on Twitter and I Promise, I Promise, I Promise You’ll Be Skinny In No Time”.
This is an article about human nature and technology. About the dark parts of ourselves that hide beyond our awareness, the reasons why our resolutions don’t stick. And ultimately, a hope for new intelligences that drive greater self-awareness enabling more liberty and joy in the future. I have no answers for you, no promises.
All I have is just a little bit of hope. But before I paint a rosy picture of humans and artificial intelligences living together, side by side, happily ever after like in a Disney movie (or Bicentennial Man, see above), I want to start with the dark reality of 2016. A darkness so ever present that we can’t even smile past it anymore and pretend it doesn’t exist.
The Dark Reality of 2016
Trump was elected. Brexit happened. #BlackLivesMatter now. We had a dark year in the United States. There was a lot of fear, talk of walls, talk of national registries, talk of separation. Fear sells and fear motivates.
Trump voters generally voted for fear of poverty, fear of being left behind, and fear of “others”. Clinton voters generally voted for fear of Trump. Trump won because he tapped into a more primordial fear than Clinton was able to. But when we look at ourselves, is that really who we want to be as a nation or as a human race?
Do we want to be so easily pushed around by fear? Or do we want to look at fear for what it is: a message that things are about to change. And whether that change is positive or negative, desirable or undesirable — our actions would come from a clear and aware mind, not from a foggy and frightened mind.
Do we want to be so easily pushed around by fear? Or do we want to look at fear for what it is: a message that things are about to change.
If we could collectively learn how to face fear in healthy ways, then we can have true freedom from fear, liberty and choice in our individual pursuits of happiness and survival. We can collectively grow and adapt to the new realities that our environment, time, and new technologies are imposing on us.
Because the truth is, when we choose to open our eyes, we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. We will need every ounce of our awareness to survive.
[Link to list of upcoming environmental & geopolitical challenges in 2035]
The Light of Awareness
And that’s where new intelligence comes in. Our biological minds are not capable of full and functional self-awareness. In fact, our biology and mind heavily edits most of our experiences in the form of cognitive bias because we simply can’t process everything that’s happening. The closest that we have to come to full awareness, equanimity and peace is in the hearts of monasteries.
Monasteries are peaceful because they minimize temptation, create a sense of community, and cultivate awareness and calm. Monks literally spend 8 hours a day observing their own minds. It’s a full time job.
But when you look at it financially, everyone cannot be in a monastery. Monasteries are funded by society and survive on donations. They are a spiritual sanctuary that societies choose to invest in. Another aspect of our specialized human societies.
The only way to democratize peace is to create a way for all of us to have peace inside our own minds. Customized Peace. You can imagine that would be the last product to fly off shelves — because after that, we would all be so happy that we wouldn’t buy things anymore.
Peace will never take away pain, but we would no longer suffer from pain the way we used to. We would be happy with the clothes on our backs, the food in our bellies, and the relationships in our lives. Our lives would be occupied with learning and doing enough new things to keep our individual minds and bodies entertained and challenged, in a customized way, just for us.
We would be content riding the not-so-extreme roller coaster of each stage of our lives. Pain would come and then go. Pleasure would come and then go. We wouldn’t grasp for pleasure or fear pain.
We’d grow older, and no longer have the intense desire for new things, at which point we would become comfortable with the daily routines of our lives until our bodies are no longer able to sustain life itself, and then we’d pass away, peacefully.
In this way, we would all enjoy the present moment, with no desire for what we don’t have, and no fear of death or the unknown.
The Virtue in Vice
Now, isn’t that a strange picture. It’s oddly utopian, kind of nice, but kind of disconcerting. The drama of life is actually kind of exciting, spicy — oddly motivational. Why else would you do anything, if not because you wanted something or didn’t want something to happen? Who are we without our vices and our fears?
It’s almost hard to imagine life without fear or desire because it’s so fundamental to our human experience. Right down to our very first experiences during and after birth; an intense craving and gasping for air, crying from the shock of being squeezed head first through a dark and narrow birth canal into a cold and bright environment. Honestly, the thought of it is terrifying.
But also, it highlights why we need desire. If we didn’t crave for air, we wouldn’t breathe upon birth. If we didn’t crave for milk, we wouldn’t suckle at our mother’s breast. If we didn’t fear pain, we would leave our hand on the fire until we died from infection. If we didn’t suffer, we wouldn’t learn. Our environment dictates that we need desire and fear to survive.
But how can we survive our desire and our fear? I believe the answer is in the next step of our evolution through technology. We need to enhance our awareness in order to democratize joy and give freedom from needless suffering to as many people as we can.
Our environment dictates that we need desire and fear to survive, but how can we survive our desire and our fear?
In the roughly 12,016 years since humans first built buildings, it took 10,000 years for Buddha to realize and spread the message in 500 BC that attachment to desire and fear was the root of suffering. 2,500 years after Buddha we are reaching another pivotal point in our cultural and human evolution, this time more heavily intertwined in co-evolution with our own technologies.
We need to foster compassion. We need to evolve. We need technology. Because without it, we will be lost to the desire and fear which allowed us to survive this far. So, let’s use our intelligence to evolve wisely in 12,017.
TL;DR: Let me stop beating around the bush. We need AI to save us from ourselves. End message.
Thanks for reading and Happy New Year from Olivia :)
Take a moment to be mesmerized by these “biosim fireworks” by Maxime Causeret for Max Cooper’s ‘Order from Chaos’
Useful Links
Cognitive bias cheat sheet
I’ve spent many years referencing Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can’t recall the name or details. It’s been an invaluable reference for helping me identify the hidden flaws in my own thinking.
Don’t Set Too Many Goals for Yourself
We work in a fast-moving era where we’re overloaded with information and must prioritize and focus in order to succeed. That’s certainly the case for today’s corporations. But it’s also true for us as individuals. hbr.org • share
The Periodic Table of AI
As originally seen on Xprize. Visit the original article to view the interactive periodic table. This is an invitation to collaborate. In particular, it is an invitation to collaborate in framing how we look at and develop machine intelligence.
Introduction to the Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem
Viewers will finish the webinar understanding how the different AI technologies emulate human reasoning and how they may be able to apply these technologies to their own business.
5 Unexpected Sources of Bias in Artificial Intelligence
As originally seen on TechCrunch. We tend to think of machines, in particular smart machines, as somehow cold, calculating and unbiased. We believe that self-driving cars will have no preference during life or death decisions between the driver and a random pedestrian.
Why Ethical People Make Unethical Choices
Most companies have ethics and compliance policies that get reviewed and signed annually by all employees. “Employees are charged with conducting their business affairs in accordance with the highest ethical standards,” reads one such example.
A New History for Humanity — The Human Era (Kurzgesagt)
It is time to reframe how we think about our past.We need a new year 0 for humanity. But which one should we choose and why?
Who am I? Formerly an engineer, I traversed the product-marketing chasm and am now a full-time science writer and event producer. Working in the heart of Boston and Cambridge where cutting-edge innovation takes place, I share my unique perspective at the forefront of where technology meets humanity.
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