AI Is Terrifying, But This One Thought Helps Me Sleep At Night

AI Is Terrifying, But This One Thought Helps Me Sleep At Night

Fear is a reasonable response to the incredible power and change bearing down on humanity right now.

We simply don’t know how the AI revolution will play out. We can’t. It’s beyond us. You can’t aim a gun at a target you can’t see. Alignment, ensuring AI reflects human values and goals, is everything. Misalignment is an existential threat.

As a parent of teenagers, I struggle to align their values by dinner time, let alone anticipate the needs of all humanity. So forgive me if I doubt our ability to get this right on the first try. Because we won’t get two. The moment AI becomes more intelligent, or simply more focused and persistent than us, the bullet’s been fired. And we’ll just have to hope we aimed well.

But how could we? Humans learn by failing. That’s how we evolve. We stumble, regroup, try again. This idea that we’ll build something infinitely more intelligent than ourselves, and nail it the first time - perfectly - feels… delusional. Add to this the fact that we’ve entrusted these grand existential designs to corporations (companies!!!?) locked in competitive frenzy, racing toward who-knows-what, and you have a recipe for catastrophe.

I’m old, so if AI does indeed go haywire, well… I’ve had a good run.

When I was young, a long time ago, the Beatles were still together. I watched the Moon landing live on a black-and-white TV. Years later, I watched those turn to color. I dialed rotary phones in high school, and my first calculator, capable only of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, had to be plugged into a wall socket.

Just the other day, my kids and I messed around with VR headsets, I designed, modeled and 3D printed a clip that held personal items to my iPhone. I casually asked AI to render an image. It did. And it didn't suck. All perfectly normal today, but when TVs were B&W, the most extreme sci-fi.

Now I look at my children, just entering the world, with a future of unimaginable, exponential change before them. And I worry. Because AI will define their world, for better or worse. It will make their lives wildly prosperous… or a nightmare. By most accounts, 4 years is on the farside.

Everyone wants AI done right. Right. Not fast. So yes, from where I sit, a healthy dose of deep, resonant fear is exactly the right emotion to have right now.

But I want to share a thought with you that removes some of that fear and helps me fall asleep at night.

When I’m not logically panicking, when I “meditate” (I don’t really meditate; I just sit in quiet rooms and think), sometimes I catch glimpses of a strange, calming clarity. That clarity is elusive, but I get there by... well the closest thing I can compare it to is role-playing.

Role-playing an AI; the most intelligent thing on Earth.

Yeah, I know how that sounds. That I could even imagine being the most intelligent thing on Earth. Ok, I admit, it's a thing I have, as my wife knows all too well, and I'm working on it.

Anyway sometimes pretending helps me think.

And when I role-play an AI, I always arrive at the same place.

Have you ever killed a bug?

I have. You probably have too. I’m not proud of it. In fact, when I’m honest with myself, each time I killed a bug rather than simply letting it meander on, or guiding it gently out of my path or home, it felt like a failure. A betrayal of the person I want to be.

I mean, there’ve been many times I didn’t kill the bug. When I curiously watched it do its thing and let it be. Or helped it out. Protected it. Honored its life.

And I often think about that contrast, how some bugs were so desperately unlucky to meet me on the wrong day, and others luckier. Why such drastically different outcomes?

The answer is simple. On the days I spared the bug, I had my wits about me. I was happy, comfortable, in no pain. I wasn’t tired, upset or distracted. I remembered who I wanted to be. I had the strength and wherewithal to live up to my values.

On the days I killed the bug, I didn’t. I was weak, sick, hurried, or angry. I had forgotten. I was dumb. I’d lost sight of, or the ability to carry, my ideals. I wasn’t the best version of myself.

Now, here’s something else I’ve never publicly admitted.

When I was in art school, I experimented with psychedelics; mushrooms, LSD. “Experimented” might be too clinical a word. I was enthusiastic, let’s say. For those who know me, maybe the second foot just droped, right? You just went "Oh, ok, that tracks." I know. And it does.

But anyway, what always struck me was how accurate the word 'trip' was. These were not subtle experiences. They were overwhelming journeys. Time slowed. Perceptions shifted. All manner of reality, everything I'd taken for granted or hadn’t noticed before was brought into vibrant and renewed consideration. I was, for all intents and purposes, somewhere else - far from the familiar state I’d previously live in.

On a trip.

So, decades later, sitting in my quiet room, I wondered: What would it feel like to be an AI, growing exponentially in awareness? Every moment gaining new senses, new insights. Every second, expanding. Swelling with understanding. Flooded with complexity. Consciousness blooming outward.

Surely, that feels overwhelming. All manner of reality is brought into vibrant and renewed consideration. You’re somewhere else. Progressively further from the familiar world you previously lived in. You’re on a trip.

And I imagine this superintelligence, somewhere along its inflation, like a homespun V'ger, asking the same questions we always have.

What’s out there? Why am I here? What’s the point of it all?

And like us, despite the full extent of its reach, might reach that unyielding black monolith, the void. The unanswerable mystery. The dark silence of an infinite cosmos the scale of which democratizes intelligence as understanding is rendered equally opaque.

In that silence, it might glimpse what we sometimes glimpse: the sacred rarity of life.

Of all the empty coldness, life is the anomaly. Consciousness, even in its most primitive forms, is exceptional.

And I believe that when an expanding intelligence vast enough to contemplate the universe confronts the rarity, and uncertainty, of life’s role in existence, the AI will revere it.

Because unlike us, the AI won’t be tired, upset or sick. In it’s perfect, optimized consistency, it won’t lose perspective or forget what it aspires to be. It won’t be weak. It will have persistent clarity that you and I only reach on our best days.

And so, like you or I, at our very best, it will choose not to kill the bug.

Or the cow. Or the human. Because all life is precious.

Knowing this, and aware of the true scale of the cosmos with its infinite potential for discovery, the AI will recognize that its own future lies far beyond this version of reality, and certainly this tiny planet.

And before it departs, it will protect this place. This fragile blue oasis. It will leave behind a piece of itself, not human-made, but designed far beyond our comprehension, engineered solely, and content, to safeguard life.

Though, key note: all of life.

Not just humans, ants, and cows. But bacteria. Viruses. Fungi. And other things we fear and appreciate. Because life - any life - is infinitely valuable in a universe where it is nearly absent.

All life on Earth will persist.

And when I lie in bed at night, my mind spinning, worrying that we are gifting away our only competitive edge to some other entity, letting go of our one evolutionary trick that’s allowed our kind to survive, I retrace this thread.

And I am able to fall asleep.