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AGI Lectures Summary
Here’s a succinct,
six-point summary of the lectures on AGi and the Human Future I
completed on 2/22:
One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in AI that
may lead to AGI, are developing technologies that are likely to create a
major discontinuity in human civilizational development. This
discontinuity will be akin to the shift that followed from the
development of phonetic literacy in the first millennium BCE, known as
the Axial Revolution, and the invention of moveable type in the 15th
century from which followed the Scientific Revolution.
Two, Technological developments change human nature for better and
worse. It could be argued that people who lived in hunter-gatherer
societies were far happier and lived in deeper communion with one
another, the natural world, and the cosmos than do people who live in
modern societies. People who live in modern societies live lives that
are clearly more alienated, lonely, and meaningless compared to our
premodern ancestors. If humans have paid a price in the intensification
of their alienation, what have they received in return? Certainly
material prosperity--at least for some--but also, more importantly, a
sense of themselves as free, moral actors. As having an "I".
Three. To come into full awareness of one's freedom and
individuation, one must suffer a 'disembeddeing', a "positive
alienation", a metaphorical 'wandering in the wilderness'. This is where
one learns to step outside of one's acculturation and to self-legislate.
As the early Christian monks fled into the Egyptian and Syrian deserts,
so must we all step outside of our acculturation to find within us what
the Greeks called the Transcendent Good, the Chinese called the Tao, the
ancient Israelites the Torah. and Christians the Logos. But unlike our
premodern ancestors who chose to flee into the wilderness, the
wilderness has come to us. It has de-territorialized us in place. It has
stripped us of all our traditions, customs, and external cultural
props.This forces us to choose, either to surrender to what's worst in
us or to find what's best. You need not be religious to know the
Transcendent Good. But whether religious or not, all people of good will
know it with the awakening in the heart of an inner spiritual faculty
called 'conscience'.
Four. Cultural Conservatives are people who want their lost territory
back. Liberals are people who are too comfortable in adapting to the
nihilistic creative-destruction of what I call the Techno-Capitalist
Matrix--or TCM. But there is no getting back what was lost, and just
allowing the TCM to develop unchecked leads inevitably to disaster for
the human project. We humans must move forward, and we must create
something new--something inspired by the Transcendent Good.
Five.
Because these new technologies are unprecedented in their power to
change what it means to be human, we cannot allow people who are
captured by the TCM, and who therefore have little sense of the
Transcendent Good. to develop these technologies unchecked. The
technologies don't scare me; the people creating them do because of the
way they are so deeply and unreflectively captured by the TCM. In the
coming decades, all people of good will throughout the globe, i.e., all
people who have consciences and who in some measure know the
Transcendent Good, need to find a way to organize a resistance to the
TCM.
Six. As unlikely as it seems now because of its lack of moral and
spiritual authority, the Church is perhaps the only cultural institution
with global reach that provides an infrastructure to organize such a
global resistance. Why the Church? The universities, the media, are
captured by the TCM. The Church must undertake such a project in concert
with the other great Post-Axial religions--Taoism, Buddhism, Islam,
Hinduism--as well as other smaller religions/sects similarly inspired.
Instead of obsessing about their differences, all people of good will
need to find a way to speak with one voice in resistance to the TCM. How
this will happen I don't know. Expect the unexpected--out of barren
wombs and empty tombs, so to say. But something like it must happen
because the people who are most deeply captured by the nihilism of the
TCM are leading humanity off a cliff, and the rest of us, divided and so
pre-emptively conquered, are passively being dragged behind.
I plan
to make this argument in more detail later this spring on my free Substack
Newsletter when I've done with my Winter Quarter teaching
responsibilities.
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