Humanity in a World of Synthetic Intelligence
Artificial Consciousness
A word needs to be said in closing about a future where machines learn the ultimate trick of experiencing for themselves. We have absolutely no idea what this might mean. We don’t know what machine consciousness might look like or how it would respond to sharing the planet with humans.
Our best chances for peaceful coexistence will be machine consciousness with a built-in appreciation for other forms of consciousness, like ours. Humans have admittedly set a lousy example in the way we’ve treated most other forms of consciousness on the planet, but perhaps there is a way to teach machines to rise above the prejudices of their progenitors.
Life exists in biological ecosystems, but machines exist in economic and political ecosystems. What runs the ecosystems of machines today is the quest for wealth and power, which is what in turn drives the platforms in transforming human experience into machine intelligence. To help ensure that we can share a future with conscious machines, we need to focus on two fronts. First, we must now extend the way we treat human experience so that our platforms value it both commercially as a means toward collective intelligence as well as intrinsically as a kind of inalienable and sacred right. Second, we must now focus on developing humanity so that it is worthy of the tremendous responsibility it is about to experience as the heart of synthetic intelligence.
by Gideon Rosenblatt
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