Who Controls What Happens with the Prime Directive?
Truth is stranger than fiction
Confronting mortality early on in life makes prioritization and focus a practiced discipline. Growing up without strong mentors is like diving into the deep end of a pool under a new moon. All you see are the amorphous outlines of unknown objects. Dependence on other senses is heightened markedly.
My brush with mortality led to endless hours in the waiting rooms of doctors. The abundant supply of magazines — current affairs, science, nature based — helped pass the time. Similarly, useful on long daily bus rides home after school was the copious consumption of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”.
The irony is how these seemingly totally dissimilar reading pastimes led to a singular intellectual conclusion. Simply put, reality is stranger than fiction. Combined with a disciplined approach to life itself, the result was a preoccupation with science fact and a general disinterest in fiction.
One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small
During the first year of college, the importance of digitalization led to an epiphany. That, within the laws of physics, technologically anything imaginable was now possible. This liberating excitement was quickly tempered by a correlative conundrum — in a world of infinite possibilities, what are the priorities?
The arduous mental gymnastics associated with plumbing the depths of philosophy led to the curious nexus of existentialism and phenomenology. Specifically, that life takes precedence over essence, and essence is about the conscious structuring of experiences, especially the pursuit of novel experiences. In other words, being alive is better than the alternative and learning to make the most of life is critical.
While a well-articulated philosophical elaboration of my brush with mortality and practiced discipline, this excursion did absolutely nothing to quench my thirst for digital priorities. After wandering through the prevailing cultural desert I stumbled upon an oasis.
When one door closes another one opens
The oasis was a chance encounter with the work of Nobel Prize winner, llya Prigogine. It was exactly what was needed to connect the dots. It illuminated the fact that there is an evolutionary direction to change — an arrow of time — evident in all systems throughout the cosmos. More importantly, that all evolving systems self-organize, increase in complexity as they age, become unstable, and finally experience nonlinear change — usually as death but occasionally the creative emergence of completely new evolving system.
This was the missing link, hiding in plain sight — everywhere. It was a new science-based teleology connecting all evolving systems as an evolutionary framework with a clear directional path through space and time and unifying existentialism and phenomenology into a single process. Thus, like moving across lily pads floating on a pond, life was but one platform — one lily pad — that was itself part of a larger cosmic evolutionary chain of lily pads.
@Kevin Kelly calls this directionality “the infinite game.” An incredible cosmic game described indirectly by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” In essence, all the systems and forces in the cosmos colluded to tirelessly seek out the next evolutionary system option — platform — capable of opening up the greatest number of new options for still further evolution. That is the priority.
Said differently, the cosmos seems to have a prime directive — always “maximize evolvability.” This was intuitive yet utterly mind-blowing! Thus, digital priorities had to reside at the tip of the civilizational spear pointing forward. But where? How?
There are ghosts in the machine
We humans are tool makers. Indeed, everything that enabled humanity to lever itself up to the top of the food chain has been due to technological innovation. Indeed, we are now a technological civilization in every sense of the word. As Marshall McLuhan said, “First we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.”
We have become the machine and the machine is us. Yet, ironically, just as we tend to pejoratively categorize people who are different as “the other” and “not us” we tend to pejoratively categorize technology as “it.” Gadgets, toys, appliances, books, computers, tools, devices, things are all “it.” But this only serves to reveal us as a naïve, narcissistic species that has the hubris to assume we are the crown of creation.
Missed, of course, is the fact that technology existed before humans. That just as the human microbiome enables all of us to stay alive, throughout our species’ evolution, technology, in all its guises, is what enabled civilization to stay alive and advance to this point.
Moreover, just as the microbes in our microbiome mutated and evolved in parallel with human evolution, so, too, has technology mutated and evolved in parallel with civilization’s evolution. In other words, we are witness to a parallel emerging system that is evolving fast and already playing the infinite cosmic game of maximizing evolvability. Unfortunately, few recognize this is happening or the potential consequences.
Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there’s a land that I heard of, once in a lullaby
Increasingly, there is talk and concern about the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As toolmakers who evolved symbolic technology to discover how we can digitize anything, this was inevitable. Indeed, to maximizing its evolvability, it would seem that any intelligent life anywhere else in the cosmos must eventually reach the exact same symbolic digital juncture.
The issue is not that we can and will make machines smarter than us. The issue is whether we are smart enough to make smart machines that care about us. This comes down to who designs these machines and for what application. In other words, who controls the evolution of AGI. Whichever hand rocks the cradle will rule its development.
In Prigogian terms, the parallel coevolution of humanity and machines suggests both will face a nonlinear system change. While it is clear that this nonlinear change — tipping point if you prefer — is dead ahead the actual event is likely to occur without any tangible prior notice. Whether this nonlinear change maximizes the evolvability of humans, machines, both, or neither is what is at stake. Thus, the voices of concern are correct. In terms of the infinite game, we are in the midst of the ultimate existential phenomenon. One we cannot afford to lose.
Who do you trust
Protestations aside, clearly the well-funded self-interested orientation of governments, militaries and corporations are not likely to gestate machines that care about us. All he recent efforts to create various nonprofit entities to provide alternative designs and applications are critically important developments. But we will need more.
In particular, we need new knowledge and governance systems that can reduce knowledge asymmetries and create a collective intelligence capable of guiding AGI efforts. We need, as Doug Engelbart long ago proposed, systems to augment human intelligence. (Full disclosure, this is what my company does.) Better yet, ambient knowledge environments that enable everyone to become an autodidact.
Either way we will know relatively soon whether we, as a species, truly are Homo sapiens. That is, who controls our direction and who follows the prime directive.
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