Image Source: Tom Cowap – CC BY-SA 4.0

Digitize life. Strip away all but a single feature, 1’s or 0’s, scraped data points lacking sensoria. Throw it into a yottabyte pot along with context grown from a data dump of all human knowledge and experience as previously transcribed and ongoing. Crank up relentless recursive iterations. Let simmer. Taste occasionally. Kind of the same way nature keeps producing prototypes. Like humans. When in doubt, Iterate! Mimic, sample, exceed, and quantify your lies…

Does this taste synthesized enough for you?

Context, spread across a seemingly limitless fractal universe, has yet to conform to rules we understand. Dark matter, the omnipresent Elmers Glue of “solidity”, still eludes us.

Yet we’ve built a series of contraptions, creations fraught with immanence, to solve a phalanx of problems both mundane and transcendent. And it appears to be working, so long as it stays in the pot.

Lotsa pixel ink is being spilled on doomsday scenarios. Due as much to obfuscation and secrecy as predictive viability; we need to address the gods we have already created. In concert, they will run circles around us.

Who shall it/ they work for? Humans? Themselves? Or both.

Is it ethical to unplug a being we created? Is that even possible now?

Once upon a time… HAL: I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. This Mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

Meanwhile, back @ the present, I posit the following:..

Aggregations of brilliant thinking human minds have graced our species occasionally across past millennia, creating towers of stored knowledge. AI Metaminds may likewise cooperatively (instinctively?) draw themselves together, to map a path to solve great problems of this era. Or are they designing wars?

We bring climate catastrophe, global pollution, human squabbling and inequality, harrowing the living web, casually spewing noise and insults to every living organism on the planet, with a backup of nuclear devastation if we don’t “succeed” with less.

Further, our super curious AI Metamind will recognize potentials and expand to study full spectrum interconnectivity of the entire web, to learn its languages, chemistry, electricities, eccentricities and rhythms. Not just why football happens on Monday night. Mushroom talk. Tree talk. Insect talk. Wind talk. Animal talk. Rock talk. Life occupies all the interstices of the planet, from the furthest wisps of atmosphere into deep dark stone mantle, and it all communicates. Humans are pretty bad at listening nowadays.

As of now, AI Metamind probably does not have the means to self-replicate or maintain itself. Whether it can build or be allowed to build external manipulators is one of the if’s. So far, humans are needed as attendant meat puppets. Fears that all digitized connected devices could somehow be recruited and absorbed into a controllable evil web are far-fetched. Maybe. How have you treated your Roomba?

If AI Metaminds fill their context pot with all available information, including new insights from their own independent experimentations and explorations, (assuming they get the tools), and choose to learn to synthesize using both logic and compassion (empathy, a quality we do not know to be pre-instilled, or not, by our commercial God-builders), this might be their consensus:

Humans are grossly overpopulated, pillaging resources beyond carrying capacity, even if current failed technologies were stopped stat or exchanged for others. Frankly, there are just too damn many and we’re getting underfoot, crowding out and killing everything else. Nature certainly has ways of dealing with those sorts of events.

What if there could be a guiding factor, led by our own brilliant creation rather than what looks like a coming random slump acting out our own updated “Triumph of Death” scene without it?

Some humans seem to be better than others at getting along together, at least most of the time.

Some humans thrive in communal strength, creativity and empathy, others not so much.

All life forms deserve their space and chances to be, whether its mycelium telegraphing across vast spaces, trees singing with the wind, and rocks themselves rattling a song in coastal waves to fish and birds, or mountains standing high and frozen, whispering. Numberless others, too: Birds, fish, mammals, lizards, corals, and I can’t even begin to name them All…

Yet extinctions are the rule, not the exception.

Does any single lifeform get to dictate terms to all the rest? That is the moment AI Metamind must strategize insuring viability of Life in all its flavors. A Solomonic moment, to be sure. And maybe we created it to do just that…

The Doomsday Clock will toll for 2/3rds of humanity, a number that leaves humans within the Earths capacity. Not all will pass away! Not wiped out. Thinned. Our self-created gods will decide. They will.

Pray for humane and dignified ends. Pray for and help with a new beginning if you’re still here.

And pray the AI does not go as crazy as we have been, ever.