Imagine the best news imaginable. From an astrophysicist.

In Episode #111 of Smart Drug Smarts, I spoke with author Calum Chase about his 2015 book, Surviving AI, which I read late last year and really enjoyed.

I say “enjoyed” in the queasy sense that one enjoys monster movies, as you watch a tracking shot from behind the main character while the music and tension build. You know that something terrifying is about to happen — but it might wind up being freakin’ awesome, despite decent odds your favorite character may also be gruesomely dismembered.

It seems that with Artificial Intelligence — even among the most buttoned-down of academics — you just don’t find a lot of middle-of-the-road opinions. It’s a subject that pulls people into one of a few deeply polarized camps.

The rival camps’ lines of thinking go like this:

• AI will be the greatest thing that has ever happened to humanity; better than Santa Claus being elected President and someone improving on sliced bread all in the same year.
• AI will spell doom with the lethality of a super-virus, only worsened by the fact that it’s happening on purpose and that it’s our own damned fault. (This is pretty much the trifecta of shitty apocalyptic scenarios.)
• True AI will never, ever happen because there’s something fundamentally special about biological brains that will defy computerized replication; AI will give us marvelous telephone operators and self-flying golf carts and such, but will never bridge the gap to the self-aware giving-a-damn-ness at which humans excel.

Each of these outcomes paints the path to a radically different future. A time-traveler jumping 100 years forward would never mistake one of these futures for another. His scorecard would have three simple checkboxes boxes: AI Very Good. AI Very Bad. AI MIA. (Please choose only one.)

From Surviving AI, I didn’t get the sense that there was a rival cadre of experts with a more nuanced opinion. Artificial General Intelligence (the “General” is important, and you can learn more about it here if you want) seems to make everyone an extremist.

And Chase’s book is pretty much an up-to-the-minute, solid overview of current opinion and best guesses by those who really should know.

So it was quite a surprise to read another book just a couple of months later (by another phenomenally smart Briton, David Deutsch) that threw yet another plausible-sounding hat into the prediction-ring. The book in question — and I’m certainly not intending to turn Smart Drug Smarts into a book club, but this is too interesting not to mention — is The Beginning of Infinity.

(Note: don’t let the cover design stop you!)

The Beginning of Infinity, befitting both its theme and title, is actually about multiple infinities — intellectual launch-points in disciplines from astrophysics to political philosophy — and how, in almost every imaginable sense, we ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s a difficult book to synopsize, but the crux goes something like this:

1. There will always be problems.
2. All problems are solvable, given enough knowledge.
3. Knowledge can expand infinitely, given an appropriate appreciation for “good explanations.”

Just about every noun in the sentences above has an exacting definition explored throughout the book, so take my word for it that there’s profundity under the surface. (Also note, though, that the book counsels against taking anyone’s word for anything — including mine.)

Deutsch’s book doesn’t touch deeply on AI, but it does drop an ideological bombshell that I think suggests an actual fourth plank of potential AI-future to the three outlined above.

It goes like this: Any life form that possesses the complementary abilities to a) creatively solve problems, b) codify solutions into knowledge, c) pass on knowledge, and d) re-evaluate the ideas in previously passed-on knowledge (this last one is the kicker) will reach a sort of intellectual “escape velocity” at which there are no theoretical roadblocks to knowing/doing everything possible under the laws of physics.

According to Deutsch, humanity broke through this existential choke-point once and for all during the Enlightenment, after a few false-starts in earlier epochs that didn’t quite make it. (Athens in the time of Socrates and Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent get historical hat-tips.) The fourth criterion — the willingness to continually re-question “established” truths — is kind of the Intellectual Holy Grail in Deutsch’s thesis.

In fact, here’s my five-word synopsis of the book:

“Nothing is sacred” is sacred.

Once this breakthrough idea occurs to a society and gains traction, the society in question — whether this is modern Homo Sapiens, extraterrestrials from Alpha Centauri, or human-manufactured AI — becomes something distinct in the universe: a problem-solving machine.

And this is where Deutsch divides up what really counts in the universe. Not into matter/energy and emptiness. Not into living and non-living. Not into biologic and abiologic. Not into Democrats and Republicans, Sharks and Jets, or anything else. But into problem-solvers and everything else.

As modern (post-Enlightenment) humans, we are already problem-solvers. Our theoretical AGIs will be as well. Aliens we bump into someday might also be. (And if they aren’t, they won’t be terribly interesting to us, after the initial fanfare.)

Here’s where it gets interesting: Silicon-instantiated AGI might be computationally faster than we are, but in Deutsch’s view — and I hope I’m not bastardizing his point, as I try to wedge it down into an email — we and the AGI we invent are, in the most important sense, members of the same species.

We’re both problem-solvers. And if some of us experience the problem “Hey, my biologically-instantiated mind isn’t as fast as I’d like it to be,” we can rest assured that is a problem with a solution that won’t violate the laws of physics. And thanks to the intellectual escape velocity that we’ve already achieved, a solution will be found. (And after it is found, subsequent problems will be discovered. Both problems and their solutions are among Deutsch’s infinities. But he means “problem” in the optimistic “challenge” sense.)

The future is not a zero-sum game. It’s winnable, with an infinitely high score.

And unless we forsake the Enlightenment and backslide into holding things sacred instead of merely respecting good ideas — then we will win. And win fantastically big.

If you’re looking for a hyper-dose of concentrated optimism shrink-wrapped in dense academic rigor, I highly recommend Deutsch’s book.

If you enjoyed this article, we’d love it if you clicked that little green heart below!

This article was written by Jesse Lawler and originally appeared as part of the Smart Drug Smarts Brain Breakfast newsletter.