Conspiring for Extinction
“(…) In the modern world the abstractions created by the human mind like money are more important than any real spectrum of survival, or passing the DNA for the future, or preserving the planet. (…) Maximisation of profit became the most powerful abstraction in human History because it passes by any barrier. If you ask the ants in an ant colony, “Do you want to do something that will extinguish your colony?” They will say, “Why? We live well the way we live.”
“No other species conspires against itself like we (humans) conspire against ourselves through mental abstractions. (…) People think of these guys (Google Founders, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin) as creators and innovators when in fact they belong to a cult, to an ideology, a political vision where the human being is basically a commodity, and for you to maximise profit you must reduce cost to zero. What is the biggest production cost? Human labor.”
MIGUEL NICOLELIS, scientist, physician, and Duke School of Medicine Professor in Neuroscience at Duke University, best known for his pioneering work surrounding brain-computer interface (also known as “brain-machine interface”) technology
If you play out the current AI dystopian nightmare to its logical conclusion (which the tech barons avoid because they think only in terms of short-term profit), you will not reach the “tech feudalism” that thinkers like Harari and Varoufakis predict. That stage, marked by extreme inequalities in income, wealth, physical capabilities, and lifespan between the tech aristocracy and the have-nots, will only be a temporary phase.
A post-human labor world would eventually lead to mass starvation and the collapse of humanity’s ability to survive or pass on its DNA. Meanwhile, the tech barons and the organic nature of their offspring will inevitably become ineffective in a world of machines infinitely stronger, more competent, and longer-lived than humans.
This means “tech feudalism” would be a transitional stage toward a world where the machines become the only surviving form of life.
But why are we doing this to ourselves?
Humans are the only animals aware of their own mortality, but also of their moral, intellectual, and physical limitations. This awareness has shaped human philosophy and religion since the dawn of time.
Knowing they are imperfect, humans nonetheless aim toward ideals of perfection. Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha, and the Jewish Mashiach embody, each in their own way, the qualities humans are unable to achieve, and it is precisely for that reason that they remain immortal, even if only in another realm.
The fact that humans are aware of their own limitations — and even cynical about them, as shown by the saying “the more I know people, the more I like dogs” — has been as determinant for human evolution as the inevitability of death.
What we seem to miss in this tech revolution is the bottom line of all of it: the universe is not built for our kind. The dimensions and laws of space are not compatible with the human species. The closest potentially habitable solar system, Proxima Centauri, lies about 4.24 light-years away. We do not “own” light speed and probably never will, because nothing with mass can reach or exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, according to the laws of physics as we currently understand them. Earth has tops 5 thousand years more of existence and that is if humans do not annihilate themselves before in a war or in a tech revolution.
The domination of the planet gave humanity the certainty, in our subconscious, that our imperfections as a species will not allow us to reach long-term survival. We have already come to terms with our individual mortality; now, we are quietly coming to terms with the collective mortality of our kind by creating another species capable of outliving us.
AI and the hacking of human knowledge is nothing but the transfer of the memory of their creator to these new species. The end of human labor is the beginning of a power transfer that will end with the extinction of humanity at the hands of these self-perfecting life forms before the end of the planet.
The process is not inevitable, but it is unfolding rapidly — driven by greedy individuals moved by profit and by an almost Olympian ignorance of human nature. It is an ideology spreading through Western societies with religious fervor and dogma; it is a cult of death. I warned about it, but, ironically, the biggest opposition is coming from religious leaders like Rabbi Greg Epstein of Harvard, who recognise that beneath this movement lies a death wish — the same awareness of human limitation that once gave birth to religion itself.
Humanity is the first species to consciously conspire against its own survival.
