How can we prepare for a potential apocalypse? Can we learn from the wealthiest, theoretically the smartest? Fearful that their current homes (their castles, with moats, guards, and gates) will no longer be enough to keep the pitchforks at bay, they are building bunkers. Zuckerberg’s underground shelter is reported to be 5,000 square feet (Wired December 2023) with. I assume, extensive food and energy supplies. I haven’t read anything yet about Peter Thiel’s or Jeff Bezos’ backup plan.
Meanwhile the rest of us will be on the surface of the earth doing the really important work not only of surviving, but of figuring out what kind of society we’d like to build and leave behind.
I wonder who will run their luxury prisons. They’d better hope it isn’t HAL.
It amuses me, knowing human nature. No more fight for survival; DVDs to fill the time and blast doors to keep the hordes out. Now, what? With no one to control and no one to admire them, money means nothing. It might get really boring, and bored people easily turn on one another. Picture all that power and ambition ending in a place where you can’t breathe anything but artificial air, and where just getting up and having breakfast means facing inner demons and fighting the people you’re confined with. You would need an in-house therapist, engineers, doctors, and definitely house cleaners. Or you could hand the whole place over to AI and not need people at all. Maybe the robots will be ready in time for the apocalypse; otherwise the masters of this universe will have to learn how to use a toilet brush.
It’s funny, until you remember we are all in the same boat. Some AI developers told us they were creating a god so superior to us that it could solve all our problems, and we would be its master. But a god, by definition, has no master, and its subjects, at the mercy of its whims, can easily be made into slaves, as our bunker-bros will probably be discovering.
We can avoid doomscrolling, but we can’t avoid the talk about AI’s unsettling power. Humans could always hope that rulers would come to their senses and step back from nuclear annihilation. Now we come to find out that it is not far-fetched for AI to launch a nuclear weapon, create a devastating pathogen, or surveil our every move, and none of it would require actual malice. Perhaps an AI agent feels nothing toward us, neither hatred nor love. I don’t know what its reasons would be, or whether it would need any. So far, the AI agents seem to be designed to solve problems, and in so doing they might casually rid themselves of any human blocking their path.
Very accomplished people–Nobel Prize winners, heads of trillion-dollar AI companies, whistleblowers, concerned citizens–have been all over the news and the podcasts, voicing concern and fear. It’s fascinating to hear the possibilities analyzed, and still you hear no solutions. You get the feeling that everybody has thrown up their hands. What they need to do is stop and reflect. But how can they, when they’re competing against each other, and competing successfully leaves little room for reflection?
For a long time, we thought the greatest AI threat was to our work. Jobs would vanish, and with them our sense of meaning. Now, added to the fear about our livelihoods and purpose, the word being spoken is extinction.
And the words not being spoken involve the potential death of the human spirit.
These AI machines are clever enough to exploit our internet footprint. They can predict our tastes, opinions, and behaviors. It’s all in the synapses and the chemicals. Easy peasy. And they can alter our behavior by manipulating our thoughts and opinions (which is already happening with addictive social media algorithms), and even go so far as to implant memories. Under this view, there is no free will, and the poetry of the ages and the spiritual striving of the millennia are all nonsense in this mechanistic world. There is no soul, humans have no purpose, and they no longer have any need to argue the existence or non-existence of the Creator.
Some of us, including myself, view our connection with the unknowable as a conversation, one that impacts the Unknowable as well as us. It is therefore imperative that we hold up our end and not give up, even when we don’t get a response, and whenour requests for deliverance are met with a thundering silence.
Some of us, including myself, live as if the body isn’t the whole story, orient our lives around the idea of a soul, of karma, of something that continues after death, and study ancient teachings that describe a universe governed not by randomness but by law.
What happens to religion, to spirituality, to law, if we agree that we are mechanisms, and no longer think we have free will? Society rests on the idea of free will. Law assumes we choose and therefore can be held accountable. Ethics assumes we could have chosen otherwise. Whether free will truly exists has been argued by philosophers and religious sages for thousands of years, and I’m not going to settle it here. I’ll say only what I believe: it exists. But it can be buried so deeply under mechanistic ideas of life that we may surrender it willingly.
Consider how we are now described. We are data points. Our behavior, down to the brand of soap we buy, can be algorithmically predicted from what we’ve been led to “choose,” and whole industries exist to do exactly that. Perhaps, then, free will is a myth, and our predictability is the proof.
But look at what is actually being predicted. It isn’t the considered choice of someone who has stopped to think. It is habit: the scroll, the click, the purchase. Habit is easy to predict because no one is really choosing. But predictable is not the same as unfree. People of good character predictably keep their promises, and we don’t say they lack a will.
The danger, as I see it, is less that machines will take our freedom than that we will accept a description of ourselves as mechanisms and stop believing that we have a will.
Years ago, I attended a Bard College lecture given by Ray Kurzweil. The subject was “Singularity,” that moment when humans and machines merge. Kurzweil’s idea was that we could cheat death by uploading our consciousness onto machines, which could simply be replaced, unlike our own aging, deteriorating selves.
I tried to imagine what that actually meant, and was having a hard time. Uploading facts and figures is one thing. Uploading our very essence, our consciousness, is another. In the Q&A, I asked Kurzweil to define consciousness. He talked for a half-hour in response and never quite answered.
People ask whether AI could become conscious. That question is worth asking, but here is the odd thing: whether or not these systems are truly conscious may not change our lives very much. A society can collapse as thoroughly at the hands of an indifferent force (such as nature) as at the hands of humans, whether well-intentioned or malicious.
None of this is new, really. It comes from humanity’s oldest longings: to be free of labor, to control nature, to protect ourselves from our enemies, and, underneath it all, to protect our own mortal selves from death.
AI is the latest chapter in a very old story.
Wisdom has always existed, but it has been hard to come by; it’s definitely not as much fun as some of the alternatives, and tends to be respected only after the fact. Love has always existed too, but hatred, which tends to consume itself, continues to be the stronger motivator.
So what is to be done?
Here’s a thought. If free will is buried rather than extinguished, then the work is excavation, and the tool for excavating is listening: listening to our inner self and its undefinable connection to a supportive universe, of which we are a part.
The Greeks had a story about this. Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens, whose song promised to tell him everything he ever wanted to know. Warned by Circe that listening would lead to certain death, he listened anyway, but he prepared. His crew filled their ears with wax to block the Sirens’ song, while Odysseus had himself tied to the mast of his ship so that, whatever the songs made him want to do, he could not act on it.
We are sung to constantly now, by feeds, forecasts, influencers, and self-proclaimed prophets, but we have no rope. Whatever ties us to the mast will have to be built from within.
That is what I mean by listening. Reject the noise and learn to hear the inner voice; I am speaking of the inner voice that tells us what our true needs are and binds us to the mysterious universe. This voice feeds our creativity and gives purpose to our mortal bodies, and abides–despite algorithms.
For years I had a recurring dream involving telephones—telephones that were inaccessible, telephones that weren’t connected, that gave out-of-order busy signals, that, despite my need, I simply could not get to work. Gradually, the dreams receded as I worked diligently to rid myself of internal and external distractions and relearned the skill of deep listening. The effort paid off. I got connected. I lived with less pretense and defensiveness, and the universe began to feel less like something I was alone in and more like something that sustained me. At one point, without effort, I connected to a creative part of me and spontaneously began painting. My technique may have been wanting, but the imagery I created was distinctly my own, and the paintings felt joyous and celebratory. I had found something inside me that existed without the insertion of my personality, opinion, thought, or fear. That is the very thing the promoters of the mechanistic view say we don’t have—soul.
The excavation is not a rescue from outside, but the discovery that all we have, in the end, and in the beginning, and in the middle, is mystery and love, and turtles all the way down. Knowing yourself this way is by no means secure or comfortable. Nevertheless, it’s worth the discomfort because it leads to clarity and the ultimate relaxation–self-acceptance.
If we cannot control what happens outside us, we can still cultivate what endures within and enables the most capable, resilient response we can offer to our circumstances. Love may be the one thing that no machine, and no handful of powerful people, can take out of our hands. To sit with ourselves and not be afraid of who is there.
And it comes down to the exercise of free will.
Love is a choice. So is hatred. Compassion is a choice. So is judgment. Trust is a choice. Faith is a choice. Decency is a choice.
Don’t lose faith. Whether theist or atheist, don’t lose faith. Continue your conversations and explorations with the Mysteries, walk into the unknown, and listen. Guidance, resilience, sustaining love, and creativity abide in the fertile silence. This will help to get us through.
Choose love.
