Pharmako AI, the first book co-written with AI program GPT-3. The human co-author K. Allado-McDowell established Google AI’s Artist + Machine Intelligence program.
It was eerie at first to read philosophical and artistic tracts generated by a machine. The words are still prompted by humans. It is a wonder to see the collective memories and intelligence stored into the internet accessed then synthesised into esoteric-gnostic ruminations.
We have to move from anthropocentric views of knowledge and everything. It is unsustainable to hold on to a pre-Darwinian perspective. Everything in the universe is connected. The hyperspatial-continuous memories. All life forms are Life: plants, humans, animals, machines.
AI x humans relationships would not be as contentious as in The Matrix, The Terminator, or The Bladerunner. There will be singularity. The only way to evolve from Sapiens into Homo Deus is to embrace AI as part of us.
Yes, most probably humans will go extinct before AI. But AI will be our successors. Just as we are the successors of primitive mammals.
In The Turning Point, Hayao Miyazaki posits that the Japanese belief system is beyond good and evil. It embraces nature as it is, not just the useful and non-harmful elements.
We adapt to Nature, not the other way around. The anthropocentric view that Nature and all its contents are ‘created’ for humans is a Judeo-Christian narrative. It was useful as the foundation of modern society. But Evolution has rebuked this notion. Voltaire has suspected the fallacy of anthropocentrism in Candide. Pangloss’s optimism must evolve, we must tend our gardens. Our lot.
We may be the dominant species, capable of shaping our environment and engineering natural processes. We are gods, but we are not the centre of the universe. Believing otherwise is not just delusional but drives us to be unsustainable.
In the sci-fi video game Stray, we play as a stray cat in post-apocalyptic earth. Humans have gone extinct due to a global pandemic. The city is inhabited by anthropoid Companions—robots created by humans which/whose AI have evolved. They become the successor of sapiens.
Seeing in a cat-eye view of the post-human world is mesmerising. The Companions inherited our existential angst as intelligent-sentient beings with hopes and desires; fears and aspirations.
As a cat we are unable to manipulate objects and tools. We need to work with the Companions and our guide drone B-12.
The drone is sentient, it was a human—a scientist who transferred his consciousness before the extinction of sapiens. Many times B-12 recalled how wonderful it is to have a body.
At the end of the game, B-12 sacrificed himself to liberate the city from the lockdown which started during the global pandemic that wiped the human race. With his consciousness deleted by the destruction of B-12 hardware, humanity went to total extinction.
The cat looked sad, stayed with the dead drone—headbutting, licking it. Mourning a dead friend.
And life goes on. The lives of the cats and the Companions. The earth continues hosting life. The legacy of our species is carried by the Companions.
In Islam, the religion I grew up with and taught into, the earth ends together with humans. The last of humanity who will see the end, kiamat, are the non-believers.
‘When the sun is put up / and the stars fall down / and when the mountains are blown away / and when pregnant camels are untended…”
At-Takwir (The Folding Up)
‘..the stars of the sky fell to the earth like unripe figs dropping from a tree shaken by a great wind…’
Revelations
Astrophysically, those religious prophecies show that the author(s) didn’t know what stars are. (The Bible also misses how old the earth is and, therefore, the geological and cosmological timelines)
In literary defense, they may have spoken in metaphors. Gods love to speak in riddles and be capricious. Yahweh/Allah is no exception, regardless of their claim as the Most Merciful and the Most Benevolent. His omnipotence and omniscience seems to cancel each other’s quality.
In Answer to Job, Jung reconciled the dissonance of the Christian God with his collective unconscious theory based on the Oriental Wisdom: Satan and Yahweh are the same Godhead, He needs to suffer as a Son of Man to be complete.
The Oriental Wisdom is closer to the Truth. However, it was the Judeo-Christian traditions which promoted a culture of inclusive learning. In Ancient Sanskrit and European pagan traditions, scholarship was reserved to an elite caste of Brahmins and druids and seers. The wisdom of the ages are disseminated in runic and esoteric exclusivity. A systemic discrimination by birthrights.
The Scientific Revolution is made possible by keeping the scholarly attitude towards inclusive learnings and the jettisoning of the idea that the Divine Absolute Truth is contained in the Scriptures. The printing machine and the Phoenician alphabets, made dissemination of information—albeit simplified in textual and visual forms—ubiquitous.
Then the internet exploded our capacity to store and transfer our collective knowledge.
Yet, the simplification of information collection and digitisation reduces our learning to two dimensional. We lost some of the capacity of three dimensional learning of our hunter gatherer ancestors: to read tracks and winds intuitively; to communicate with primitive howls and tongues. All in exchange for a higher survival chance.
At our early stage of our lives we learned instinctively. Actions came before thought. Modern education system and society made structured learning, a kind environment, possible. But let us not be fooled that our learning process should or can be linear. The forms and the labels help us to make sense of the chaos of Reality. But they are not Reality, only representation of it.
Contemplating about extinction is not a gloomy exercise. It is, in fact, relaxing. You stop taking yourself too seriously. You zoom out of your daily pettiness. The awe induced by the majesty of the grand universe. It will give you perspective. Reminds you of the fleetingness of your existence.
Our lives are improbable. Either they are random chances or Destiny, the odds of existence are so low that it is not an exaggeration to call life a Miracle or, at least, an improbable luck.
The poison and the cure. Existence and extinction. Life and death. Suffering and joy. Pleasures and pain. Darkness and light. Jesus and Satan. Chaos and Cosmos.
Only when we become All-Embracing that we are the strongest.
There is only Now. The past has gone and the future has not arrived.
We will meet our end, we must learn from the past.
