Wall-E humans are going to be reality. That last century has already proven that humans cannot be expected to responsibly indulge in Gluttony, Sloth or Lust. Now these models can skip the material desires and trigger permanent hormone releases through perfectly personalized content.
I genuinely fear that the breakdown of millennia old social structures that kept us human might lead to a temporary (century long) turmoil for individuals. The answers to the 'meaning of life' and 'what makes us human' are going to change. And we will never be the same again.
This isn't just about AI. External wombs, autonomous robots, genetic editing & widespread plastic surgery each fundamentally destroy individual aspects of 'what makes us human' or 'the meaning of life'.
Might be for the best. But such drastic change is really hard for the fragile human brain to process.
This argument has been made since at least the start of written records:
> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
- Plato, in Phaedrus, ca. 370 BC
While our replacements for parts of ourselves have gotten far more advanced, the fact of the matter is that we haven't stopped being human simply because we can make tools that remember things for us, build things for us, or let us change parts of ourselves more easily.
This is because what makes something human is not our body--an argument that Diogenes famously refuted in about the same era--nor is it merely our minds, though our minds are pretty impressive. What makes us human--what makes us alive, in a sense beyond merely being an animal that isn't dead yet--is what we do with those things. I could grow fox ears and a fluffy tail in the world of tomorrow; I could use an AI to remind myself to self-care; today I already benefit from a thousand different kinds of mass-produced products. But none of that makes me a different person, because I'll still be doing things with my life that meant something to me yesterday--because those things will continue meaning something to me tomorrow.
> This argument has been made since at least the start of written records:
That argument has been made since only slightly later. The key difference is that this truly is a unique time in history by population numbers. It's also unique in that humans could destroy the biosphere if we wanted to - that was never possible before the mid-20th.
Just because people jumped the gun in the past doesn't mean they are wrong now. The truth is that people are always preaching about the apocalypse, and will continue to do so as long as there are humans, I think. But this does not mean an apocalypse isn't coming. Just like the person who always predicts rain is sometimes right.
My assessment for most of my life has been if most of the world's ~10k 'strategic' megaton-scale warheads exploded in air over Earth's major cities it would kick up enough dust to kill the sun for several years, which would kill off a large fraction of Earth's flora and fauna, akin to a major volcanic eruption or asteroid collision.
There would still be life of the smaller sort, and deep in the oceans of course. Only a terribly unlucky cosmic event, like a nearby supernova spewing enough neutrinos at us could kill literally all life, even in the cracks and crevices.
That is an ephemeral change. It takes very little time for the biosphere to make a full recovery. You're talking about a small, brief, suppression of the biosphere. And you're calling it "destruction of the biosphere".
Even if you're talking about the fires in Yellowstone in 1988, the only way to call that "destruction of the forest" is if you define the forest as being the trees. That's a defensible choice.
(And temperate forests "burn down" all the time as part of their normal operations.)
But you can't define the biosphere as "the species that go extinct in a particular scenario". You're stuck with the whole thing, which is not going to notice whatever humans do. It would make as much sense to call it "destruction of the biosphere" if I moved a rock thirty feet.
Perpetual happiness is already a solved problem in humans. It's called the mu-opioid receptor. That's what opioid junkies sprawled on the sidewalk half-naked in San Francisco have discovered. Fentanyl is very cheap and you could put someone in factory farm like confines and feed them bare sustenance and fentanyl for the rest of their lives and they'd probably be "happy" if kept perpetually high.
However, those opioid receptors should not be pushed synthetically because they have been positioned by evolution in all sorts of strategic spots to encourage pro-social behavior, mating, eating, etc. that are part of our millions year old evolutionary program that must have intrinsic value in itself. If it has no intrinsic value and any happiness is as good as any other happiness, then someone spending the rest of their lives in an opioid haze and someone interacting with the world in a way that evolution tells them to in order to be happy would be considered equivalent, and that would be the end of the human race essentially.
> That last century has already proven that humans cannot be expected to responsibly...
...advance technology. Some group is just going to do whatever they want and hope for the best, and we'll find out decades later if it was a bad idea and if we have a mess to clean up (which we probably won't clean up).
> Might be for the best.
People are going to assume that, because the changes going to be forced on you, like it or not.
Maybe. There is another plausible path: the post-scarcity vision where universal individualised high quality education feeds the natural human desire to grow, and we learn to balance our hedonism with our ambition.
Just like we learn to brush our teeth and eat candy and breath fresh air and even exercise. Not everyone does it but folks with means tend to…and means won’t be a restriction forever.
> I genuinely fear that the breakdown of millennia old social structures that kept us human might lead to a temporary (century long) turmoil for individuals. The answers to the 'meaning of life' and 'what makes us human' are going to change. And we will never be the same again.
Meanwhile, the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews are going to refuse to talk to AIs - it’s a sin - and will go on having lots of kids, just like humanity always has, while the AI-addicts will be too addicted to bother having any at all. Maybe the future of the human race will be the people who reject AI rather than those who succumb to its charms
I don't think you give humans much credit if you don't believe they have an infinite capacity to get bored by things. AIs can't produce endlessly compelling content because nothing can.
Eh. I'm not so concerned, mostly because we have a whole hell of a lot of "imaginary relationships" already through a number of media. Celebrity worship, video games, even going back to novels.
I genuinely fear that the breakdown of millennia old social structures that kept us human might lead to a temporary (century long) turmoil for individuals. The answers to the 'meaning of life' and 'what makes us human' are going to change. And we will never be the same again.
This isn't just about AI. External wombs, autonomous robots, genetic editing & widespread plastic surgery each fundamentally destroy individual aspects of 'what makes us human' or 'the meaning of life'.
Might be for the best. But such drastic change is really hard for the fragile human brain to process.