Mystery Unraveled
History of tomorrow
“It will be necessary to change our biochemistry and re-engineer our bodies and minds…so that we shall need to re-engineer homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure. Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn homo sapiens into homo deus. Now humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design and extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic.” Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
How can it be
That two gases make water?
What a mystery!
Who would have thought
That I could walk
On a planet going 186,000 miles a minute?
And then, the sun
The center of our universe
Copernicus, then Galileo
Saw the mystery, not heresy!
The wonders of the human birth
Beginning without end forever
God-Man came to earth.
Now that’s reversed.
With AI replication
Make a man-god universe.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous…. Until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago — Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going — rationally, we’re on very thin ground.” — E.O. Wilson, a brilliant American entomologist, citing 3 questions from Immanuel Kant
“The intellectual and cultural movement affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Priority number 1, 2, 3, and 4 should be to reduce existential risk…. We must not fritter away our finite resources and ‘feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy’ such as alleviating global poverty and reducing animal suffering, since neither threatens our long-term potential, and our long-term potential is what really matters.” — Nick Bostrom, Oxford Institute for the Future
“People need to understand that current AI, and the AI we can foresee in the reasonable future, does not, and will not, have a moral sense or moral understanding of what is right and what is wrong.” — Yoshua Bendigo
“The fabric of society could be undermined by AI impersonating real people so that it would no longer be possible to distinguish truth from falsehood. Deep fake technology is a threat to democracy and could be harnessed by hostile states to sow confusion and disinformation at the next general election.” -Ken McCallum, head of MI5 in UK, published in the London Times
“We have paid some high prices for the technological conquest of nature, but none so high as the intellectual and spiritual acts of seeing nature as mere material for our manipulation, exploitation and transformation. With the powers of biological engineering gathering, there will be splendid new opportunities for similar degradation of our view of man…. If we come to see ourselves as meat, then meat we shall become.” — Leon Kass
“Man’s conquest of nature means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
“The real risk of AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and, if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”
— Stephen Hawking
“Regulation will be critical and will take time to figure out; although current-generation AI tools aren’t very scary, I think we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones.” — Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI
Accountability. Reliability. Trust.
It’s your choice.