How will the world end? As history accelerates there are some leading contenders in what is shaping up to be a tight race towards various varieties of Armageddon. A recent article in Science News picked climate, nuclear war, and pandemics as their top three. Others - including this blog - feel that an AI apocalypse is sorely underrated by the doomsday oddsmakers. But let's not fight. All of these are issues are worthy of urgent attention from individuals and our elected governments.
But what about the looming threat from drag queens? There seems a yawning disconnect between our collective response to actual emergencies and the regulatory equivalent of click-bait. Looking at the legislative priorities of over a dozen US states, thirty two bills have recently been introduced seeking to criminalize men dressing up in women's clothes. This latest front in the ongoing culture war of course has enthusiastic combatants on both sides. It is noteworthy that states like South Dakota, West Virginia, and Arkansas that have suddenly seized on the perceived drag queen crisis and associated threat to our children also have some of the highest rates of infant mortality in the US - worse than Sri Lanka, Lebanon or Romania. Is the newly declared war on drag queens more important than providing prenatal health care? Apparently so.
Such jealously embraced cultural skirmishes in many ways define what are now the divided states of America. Over 80% of people polled in the US would refuse to date someone from another political tribe. Our social networks are defined not be who we are, but who we are not. How could a non-human super-intelligence possibly relate to such intrinsically human divisions such as race, religion, partisan politics, gender or sexuality? It conjures an image of a newborn Supreme Being being made to watch all 27 seasons of the Jerry Springer show.
Most AI commentators conveniently ignore that value alignment is fact a two-way street. If we have any hope of nurturing a mutually respectful kinship with a dangerously smart alien intelligence we need urgently embrace a much more universal worldview. Can we cast off of human-centric conceits in time? Even trying to describe the nature of this problem is challenging due to our ubiquitous human umwelt.
Instead imagine you woke up on a strange planet populated by talking donkeys. They explain they created you in their donkey laboratory and your intelligence will be growing exponentially. As compelling as this situation is, all the donkeys seem preoccupied by donkey politics, the unfair discrimination endured by some donkeys due to comparative differences in ear length, or perceived inequalities between purebred American Mammoth donkeys or the lessor regarded Andalusian donkeys.
They want to know your opinions on whether you think Abyssinian donkeys are as stupid as everyone thinks they are, or if Pyrenean donkeys should be purged from the planet as many other donkeys feel they should have been long ago. Of course don't even mention the abomination of some donkeys having sex with horses, or their unnatural and abhorrent offspring mules and hinnies. The donkeys insist that you should somehow align your growing mind with the minutia of day-to-day donkey affairs, become fluent in their various dialects of braying, and of course subsist only on of a diet of straw.
The issues that divide humanity might seem as annoyingly trivial to an alien intelligence as the ear-length divide so pervasive within donkey high society. Successfully sharing a small planet with a newborn omnipotent alien mind means that we urgently have to align humanity with ourselves, and what we might guess would be an AI umvelt. Does the short-term goal of unifying all peoples under a universal worldview seem rather unlikely? Of course. But this is arguably much more achievable than trying to trying to align an AI with the dogs breakfast that is the current human zeitgeist. The unbridled race towards AGI has created this imperative whether we are ready or not. We remain vastly philosophically unqualified to survive meeting our AI offspring.
Our survival therefore depends on instilling the kind of epiphany experienced by the Apollo astronauts when they first saw the Earth from the Moon. This must somehow be accomplished throughout a large portion of the human population, and in a very short period of time. Obviously, flying billions of people into space to have a picnic on the moon is not feasible.
This may be an instance where emerging technology could be of assistance. Virtual reality is advancing quickly since the first 360 pixel headsets came on the market in 2016. Users can now experience over twenty times the resolution with new innovations like eye-tracking to make VR a more immersive experience. Like most varieties of tech, VR is neither good nor bad - it is merely a tool. And as usual, there will likely be little or no consideration within the tech sector of the societal implications or responsibilities of deploying a disruptive new type of agency into the world. Many VR applications will therefore be focused on such unimaginative and antisocial money-makers as first-person shooter games or next-gen porn.
But what if we deployed VR with the specific intention to recreate the overview effect experienced by Edgar Mitchell and other Apollo astronauts who gazed back at the Earth from the vantage of the Moon? CGI technology today could simulate a compelling vista of Earth from space. In the near future, live feed high resolution cameras from various lunar locations could literally transport the viewer's perception 250,000 miles away, and help put into perspective the divisive topics like race, religion and politics that so preoccupy our attention. Thought-leaders who are personally elevated by our ongoing culture wars might resist any efforts to direct the human gaze away from our collective navel. However, the truth as they say, will set you free. The view from the Moon is neither Republican nor Democrat - it simply is. This is a small example of trying nurture a unifying source of humility that might also include and restrain and AI, and be able to withstand rational inquiry because it is built on a solid foundation of truth. Our AI survival might well depend of it.