Last week a friend of mine put my two recent Blogs about simplicity into an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to create a spoken podcast episode based solely on the text. What it produced was amazing. Two ‘people’ chatted on the podcast, they sounded natural and human. The ten-minute episode flows between them in a realistic manner, faithfully reproducing the content of the Blogs. AI has been in human consciousness for many decades, but stepped up front and centre again with the release of ChatGPT. This is an advanced natural language processing tool which allows interactive human-like conversations. It performs best where there is a large amount of good information about a subject already online. So, it is a human like interface to interrogate the internet. Combined with improvements in AI are the continual developments being made in robotics. Inevitably, each step forward in the world of AI and robotics raises human fears about self-aware machines becoming independent and ‘taking-over’ the planet. Our books and films are filled with images of machines dominating humanity, dredging our deepest, darkest fears up to the surface. For me there are three issues raised by AI. The first is the fear, the second is about what is consciousness, and the third is about what is humanity’s purpose.
Before we develop self-aware AI we need to change our ideas about what consciousness is. At this time, it is vital for us to understand that consciousness is prime. For sure that’s not where our mainstream scientific view is right now. Nevertheless, we do have enough scientific information to realise that consciousness produces our experience of physical reality. More than that, we will see that we are not in physical reality, rather physical reality is within our consciousness. From this understanding we can begin to then see that everything we experience in physical reality is really a projection of our own consciousness. The reality we experience is a mirror. If we feel fearful and powerless we will reflect that back at ourselves. So, if we choose to collectively build up enough fear of AI, then I am sure that we could manifest that in physical reality with a negative experience with AI. But once we realise that we are naturally, inherently, self-empowered and that physical reality is just a mirror for our consciousness, then we can let go of any fear of AI and embrace it as a tool for good.
Even if people are not afraid of self-aware AI, many still harbour a fear about AI or robots taking their jobs. Throughout human history advances in technology have done exactly that. But one of the lessons from history is that these advances have allowed us to develop new jobs or more leisure time. The aviation industry supports 88 million jobs worldwide. Where were these jobs before the Wright brothers first powered flight in 1903? We need to embrace advances in technology and use them to make life on this planet more fulfilling. And yes, I am sure through that process many people will need to re-train or re-skill themselves. This can be a challenging thing to do, but as ever we need to embrace change and go with the flow of it.
When you look at the planet we inhabit today it is riven with conflict and a ‘them-and-us’ mentality. As I explained in my book It’s Time, we need to see the unity, not just in humanity but in everything. Everything is an expression of the same one thing, appearing to be different, in many cases appearing to be very different. For us to overcome, to transcend our conflicts and divisions we need to start accepting diversity as an expression of unity. And if that feels paradoxical, then you are connecting with the paradox that is inherently built into reality. See diversity as part of the unity of everything. As an analogy, a jigsaw puzzle is made up of many, many different, highly unique pieces, which when combined together make a whole. Unity in diversity. There is no point in invalidating any piece of the jigsaw, you need all the pieces to make the picture. When we create AI with self-aware consciousness we should programme into it this idea of unity. That way it will see us and itself as being part of the whole. This is what will stop it from seeking to dominate us. In fact this is a vital, urgent lesson that we need to learn for ourselves now too, so that we can stop dominating and killing each other. The sooner we learn this lesson the better.
“Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ But the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?’” Steve Jobs
