Note: If you haven’t seen Part 4-3, you can read it here.
“... the safeguards he wants to design: a machine that looks upon people the way parents look on their children. “In my opinion, this is the gold standard,” he says. “It is a generally true statement that people really care about children.” (Does he have children? “No, but I want to,” he says.)”
Few people ask themselves what family actually is. Living together is taken for granted, often justified biologically. Yet the heteronormative monogamous nuclear family is itself a product of society and by no means has always been so by nature. On the contrary: historically, for a long time there were no nuclear families at all and people lived in groups, so to speak, in a polygamous way. I don't want to judge whether the nuclear family or polygamous communal life is better or worse. I just want to point out that much of what we perceive as “normal” is subject to social rules that have changed repeatedly throughout human history.
““Lifelong, committed monogamy is a cultural invention,” says Penke. Sexologists and psychologists are dealing with the consequences of this invention. How does man get along with the model that he has created? Evolutionary researchers are trying to determine how man came up with the model in the first place.” [10]
With Advanced Voice, OpenAI recently showed us that artificial intelligence can sound so human that we can no longer clearly distinguish between humans and machines. It is only a matter of time before holograms and avatars or humanoid robots are so sophisticated that they take on such human traits that many people will fall in love with these AI beings and develop relationships with them. Whether it is out of convenience, because an AI causes fewer difficulties in living together (after all, it is known to be trained to please humans without having its own interests), or out of affection: it is certain that people are already developing relationships with AIs, such as character.ai, that correspond to those with human partners. In this respect, it is not surprising that it can be safely assumed that living together, family and relationships will also be completely reorganized and that ethics will also have to be rethought in this context.
Let's go one step further and address an ethical question that was already being asked in the early 2000s: Do we really need to give birth to children at all, or could we just grow them in a test tube? Children that can be conceived without error, into whom we implant the perfect genes, who are born without disease, with the highest IQ. Why do we still need a partnership between a man and a woman? Or is the relationship between man and woman, between two people, after all, part of our “human nature” (I don't mean human nature here, which I have already questioned above, but rather genetic predisposition. Hence the quotation marks.)? There is still no answer to that either, but the question of designer babies has been on the mind of human society for a long time – it's just that it has never been as tangible and real as it is today.
“Chinese researchers claim to have delivered the first genome-edited babies. The technique could conquer diseases – but it could also enable highly developed designer humans.” [11]
In this context, I will never tire of repeating that all these developments are not illusions, not fantastic dreams, but real facts that we can already develop today, and questions that are already arising today.
So let's summarize briefly at this point before we conclude. AGI will have an impact on all areas of life. Because it will completely change the global economy, it will also change our cultural life and thus human relationships in general. There is no area that is not subject to this change, and even the most intimate areas of human life, such as the body and physicality, will not be spared. Google DeepMind's Alphafold2 already shows how AI is having a major impact on the field of chemistry and giving drug research a huge boost. In the end, all that remains is the appeal to think together about what we as humans expect from life and what our common desire, our own principles are, with which we go into the future.
So let's summarize briefly at this point before we conclude. AGI will have an impact on all areas of life. Because it will completely change the global economy, it will also change our cultural life and thus human relationships in general. There is no area that is not subject to this change, and even the most intimate areas of human life, such as the body and physicality, will not be spared. Google DeepMind's Alphafold2 already shows how AI is having a major impact on the field of chemistry and giving drug research a huge boost. In the end, all that remains is the appeal to think together about what we as humans expect from life and what our common desire, our own principles are, with which we go into the future.
Conclusion
“If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years—the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights—I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them. I don’t mean the experience of personally benefiting from all the new technologies, although that will certainly be amazing. I mean the experience of watching a long-held set of ideals materialize in front of us all at once. I think many will be literally moved to tears by it.”
Ultimately, there is only one certainty: nothing will remain as it is. The exponential development makes it impossible to provide reliable future prospects. It is in the nature of things that progress is developing so rapidly that our human brain is hardly able to grasp its scope. In this respect, this text can be read less as an anticipation, even if it started with this claim, but rather as an ex negativo of what will no longer be.
In the age of AI, everything is up for discussion. Working life, our social culture, family, life and death, simply everything. Nobody can predict what the world will look like in 20 years. We can only try to set the course today and ask the right questions. The main thing is our survival, how we want to live together. If we wake up in a world of abundance—a world where, as Elon Musk recently predicted, robots will outnumber humans by 2040 at the latest. What do we want from this life, what do we expect from this life? There are many negative examples that show us dystopian worlds. Aldous Huxley, who in his Magnum opus “Brave New World” creates a world in which people are divided into classes from birth and only have useful activities to perform, but no longer feel any negative feelings due to a drug called “soma”, is generally considered one of these examples. I myself have often wondered whether we should read “Brave New World” as a utopia rather than a dystopia, and deduce from this that a world in which all suffering disappears through the use of a “drug”, or in our example the merging of humans and machines, and we only know the good life, the enjoyment. This sounds almost Epicurean, but here too the outline of a new ethic is emerging: the question of what actually constitutes life and whether suffering or even death is not necessarily part of life; philosophically, as Hegel's dialectic, as the essence of life.
In summary, this is the essence of my analysis: a radically different life is to be expected, in whose qualitatively new world we will have to ask ourselves completely different questions about existence. Nothing will remain as it is. But it is up to us how we want to shape the future. It is up to us, in our creative power, to demand and shape whether we want to make a dystopia a reality in the future or a utopia with all its paradisiacal promises that we will fulfill on earth. The promise of happiness, then, that is now being bestowed on us all.
It took me about two months to research, analyze and write the series of articles. During those two months, I learned a great deal, and I can't remember the last time I had so much fun at work. It was a journey that took not only me, but hopefully also you with me.
“Scale is all you need?” was perhaps a slight exaggeration, but if you were to sum up the near future in a single phrase, this thesis might not be as far-fetched as it seems at first glance. We live in a time of upheaval. The world will change forever. To put it in Sam Altman's three words:
“Deep Learning worked. In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”
It worked. The future lies at our feet. AGI will quickly lead to ASI. And what comes after that is impossible to predict. Ultimately, it is up to us humans to decide what the “afterwards” will look like. But we have to do the preparatory work today by deciding and demanding what is important. So let's get to work and think hard about what “life” means to us as humans.
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About the author
Social Coexistence