Sharing to read later.

Originally shared by David Brin

Many Big Thinkers foresee AI outstripping organic humans and rendering us obsolete – at-best patronized-beloved old farts and at-worst disposable. There are some potential soft-landings, though:

1 – Merge with the machines, the dream of Ray Kurzweil and other cyber transcendentalists. There are many reasons to doubt the possibility, but none are yet decisive. So I portray it working very well, in a post-singularity society, in my story “Stones of Significance.”

2 – Augment organic brains and people to keep up. Of course my Uplift Universe is all about this, as are the “augments” in The Postman. And the “dittos” in Kiln People. And several stories like “Transition Generation” and “Chrysalis” in my collection Insistence of Vision. Those who believe our brains are “quantum” think that we have time. We probably don’t.

3 – Emphasize the one thing that works well in humans – our ability to get more done in groups, and even (sometimes) show collective, positive-sum wisdom. Louis Rosenberg suggests that our chief hope will come from developing a “hive mind.” Nor is he the first. After all, this is what Teilhard de Chardin wrote about, a century ago and it’s a recurring theme/prescription in the futures of both Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. (It really was cult-like, amid the despair following the atom bomb.)

In fact, I portray a “Macro Mind” in my novel EARTH, but it’s different. More loose and flexible and willing to accept the individuality of her human components, the way any sane person admits “I am many” and listens to the cacophony, within. Indeed, even looser — this is the key underlying the successes of Enlightenment Civilization… and it is the thing targeted by its enemies to be destroyed. (If they succeed, we’re all doomed.)

4 – Raise them as our children. We already deal with creating new intelligences who are smarter than us! We know how to do it, such that only a very small percentage of adolescents actually try to carry our their loud threats to “destroy all humans”! I portray this in EXISTENCE.

And yes, I’ve thought about this very problem, from a myriad angles, for a very long time.

https://futurism.com/keeping-humanity-must-cultivate-hive-mind/

https://futurism.com/keeping-humanity-must-cultivate-hive-mind/