Economically and politically, our systems appear to be taking us backwards rather than forwards but there seems little appetite for change or interest in genuine alternatives. And there’s surely an irony in the way that attempts to break the economic and political consensus are frequently dismissed as unrealistic because they ‘go against human nature’.
The strange thing is that while the rise of the machines has been an enduring nightmare over the last 100 years or so that looms closer than it ever did, the dream of a new world order based on harmony, peace, co-existence and the eradication of war, inequality, poverty, hunger and disease seems more distant than before.
Having evolved to the stage where we rule the world and all its creatures, there are fewer external biological pressures or threats spurring humanity to evolve further. The exception, of course, is in the evolution of the intelligence which separates us from those other creatures. But here I wonder if there’s an argument to be made that just as we have created (and are still creating) machines to overcome or improve on our physical limitations and handle many manual and physical tasks better than we do, we could also be in the process of accelerating the evolution of our intelligence through the development of AI.
In other words that having subconsciously accepted our own evolutionary stagnation, we are creating our replacements by evolving their intelligence so they can become better than us. You might almost call it intelligent design except that, to echo Hawking and Musk, I’m not sure we really know what we’re doing.
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