Futurist Gerd Leonhard explains AI, Transhumanism And The Quest For Superhuman Abilities

What is a life worth living and what makes us human? And I fear that a lot of discussions about merging with technology, which is the proposal of transhumanism, to essentially become superhuman. And while everybody wants to be superhuman, I'd love to be superhuman. I'd be the first one to admit I don't think it's going to be a considerable advantage over the things that are already superhuman, which are machines, because the things that make us human are very hard to scale and to change without losing anything. And every time we add something, we lose something else, basically. I think improving humanity and improving diseases and living longer and all of that, I think is good within reason. But taken to the extreme, it becomes essentially an experiment in modification, a sort of free for all, no matter how much I have to gear myself up. And what is the ultimate destiny? We are already seeing the loss of humanity in social media with this aspect of manipulation and fake worlding, as I call it. And now we have synthetic worlds coming up with AI. The Apple headset. I'm a geek at heart. I love to play with that stuff. I'll be the first one to buy the Apple headset. But I have to say, it puts the fear into me when I think about that becoming normal. So that if I want to have a phone call, I got to put on this nerd helmet. And if I can't function without technology, without connecting to the Internet, if I can't boot in the morning, so to speak, without connecting to the Internet, I would be very worried. Transhumanism is proposing that we can be superior by becoming one with technology. And I think the path is the opposite. We should let technology do all the heavy lifting, solve all of our major problems that are practical, but not create a black box or a super entity that runs our lives or becomes impossible to understand. What happens like is already happening with ChatGPT. We don't know what happens inside. And it's not just a question of control, it's also a question of values. I think we need to connect with ourselves and not just with our devices. So this is going to be not an easy path because we want the progress, we want the advancement, we want the good stuff. But the bad stuff could be worse than anything we've ever imagined. On the one hand, we're doing great scientific and technological leaps. We're approaching quantum computing, nuclear fusion, we're approaching preventing cancer. These things are just mind boggling. I'm really totally excited about that part of it. On the other hand, we are not spending enough resources on alignment as Stuart Russell calls it, the alignment of what we want and of the discussion of who is in charge. What I say mission control for humanity and on collaboration, because this is a free market driven by all of that. And it's a total gold rush right now. It's driven by the military, as it always has been, but even more so now it's driven by power and by people and companies and states that want this power. And AI isn't the only kingmaker. There's quantum computing, there's nuclear fusion, there's genetic engineering, there's geoengineering, there is synthetic biology. So whoever rules those turfs rules the world. That is something that worries me. How we can collaborate to use it for the good. And just a couple days ago I was reading Marc Andreessen's pamphlet on how AI will save the world in defense of AI and AGI and basically saying just get off it and let us do what we have to do because that's how we're going to save the world. And it was appalling. Mark is an amazing guy, right? And this is the first time we have to say I don't get where you're coming from. It sounds like a total recipe for world domination, basically ultra capitalist approach. So I tweeted a little about it. He blocked me on Twitter. Thanks, Mark. So that got me thinking about we're essentially heading for a conflict between the singularity transhumanist, pro liberal money system and the humanist world, which is of course led by Europe in many ways and some degree also in the us. There's a huge conflict there about who's in charge. And to that my answer is it's very hard to talk about we when we talk about the world. But we're going to have to agree on the agenda here because this agenda is the same agenda that we had to solve with nuclear power, nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, the ozone. And we did solve it. If we can't get together on these top level issues and find at least a bottom bottom line, then it's 20 years and we're singularity land. We're gone as a species. It's very human to pursue power and money and all that. So it's probably inadvertent in many cases. It just happens to you. And I think this happens to you when you get co opted if you hang out with the rich and famous and you're jetting around the world in private planes and that becomes the new normal for you. And I think this is what's happening with a lot of Tech companies, the world is our oyster and the problem is the humans and anything can be solved with tech. So this really is worrisome because it's this underlying belief that we can solve everything with technology and that's what we have to do. We find this really outmoded obsession with profit and growth and power and the combination thereof. How many Internet companies, tech companies are very closely intertwined with the military? The answer is most. And how many futurists work very closely with three letter companies and the military? Many. And there is a reason for that and that's power and money. So I have rules where I don't work with three letter companies or the military. And I try to not support that in the agenda that I have. It's hard, I think it's very hard to put aside the commercial thing. Stuart Russell said the other day in this conversation. He said 10x GDP is the possible outcome of working with AI in every part of our society. 10x GDP, okay, so that's $13.6 quadrillion dollars. I believe that is possible. And this is of course the irony that we can do many good things with that. Solve climate change, solve cancer, solve food, water. This is the biggest thing ever, really. Like the printing press, like electricity, probably bigger than that, much bigger than the Internet itself. That gets a lot of people thinking that they should just grab this. For example, I think that OpenAI is saying they want to pursue an artificial general intelligence, asi AGI. That is just not good. Because using AI and pursuing AI as a business, that's one thing. But pursuing an intelligent entity and building one, because that is the gold price of beating humans, essentially that is just a really bad idea. And that should also be subject to regulation. Clearly, if your agenda is to build a super intelligent entity, you're going to change the world, right? Can you just change the world because you got 10 billion from Microsoft? No. It has been said many times we probably need to create a global council like the International Atomic Agency, an international agency for artificial intelligence to create a mechanism of public discussion, debates that are moving towards definitive rules like we did in nuclear. It took 14 years for that to happen. We don't have that time here. I think every country that is in this race is looking for benefit that is beyond just a pure power grab. We may have the power grab in North Korea or maybe even Iran, which I doubt. We do have some sensible people in every country. In almost every country. Let's not talk about Russia right now, but in the past, in our short history of 30,000 years, we have managed to come together when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, and we will do the same again. I don't believe that we have to say the Chinese will develop an AGI weapon and then we won't have one. This is the Oppenheimer problem. He didn't want that bomb to happen. He knew it was a chance it would happen. He wanted to throw it into the water outside of Tokyo Bay. And the government said, no, we have to show that it actually really works and kills lots of people. And because of that we got the agreement, of course. So this is the irony. But we can't do the same with AI because it's much easier to build AI, to spread AI, and to use AI in nefarious means. So the pressure is going to explode in the next year for people to get together and say, what are we doing here? What are we doing on the lowest level, like automation and potential unemployment and potential distortion of truth, bad narratives. And then on the next level, control level and building general entities that are generally intelligent. That is going to require global collaboration and will be subject to global regulation. I think that's not unthinkable that we will do that. We may have an incident first, a Hiroshima type incident of AI, which I don't want to see, but it could be happening like air traffic control collapse or stock market collapse by mistake. Because it's not that AI has an agenda. It's not going to sit down and say, I want to mess all these guys up. But it's bad alignment. AI says I got to take all these airplanes offline because that's the command. So that's what I'm worried about. On the employment side, I'm not that worried. I think that this will be a saving grace. If we can all work less because machines do the commodity work now, that's not a bad thing. It will reorganize the entire employment market. But there'll also be hundreds of millions of new jobs in all of those segments. So yes, it'll be tough. If your work is routine, 80% routine, you are in trouble. Which job is 80% routine? Not even a call center. Yeah, so that isn't an argument. The really biggest argument is the societal narrative that generative AI can create that's completely fake and believable. That will destroy democracy and that will create war. Point number one. Point number two, we create an entity that is uncontrollable. It's a black box. It does all of those things that I mentioned before, but then it also has failed agendas and bad alignment so that we create something that we can't control and then it will eventually not even have bad intent, it will just do whatever it thinks is the best thing to do and it runs out of control. So I think we are not too late to make it happen, to collaborate on this and to also create a council that supervises companies like OpenAI and many others that are going in a similar vein. And that kind of goes back a little bit on this idea of saying it's all about monetization. So basically what it comes down to, and this is of course the real challenge also of singularity. If we have a technological singularity, we also need economic singularity. Economic singularity means all that money that's being generated has to be put into the hopper in a larger way. That's not just going to the people owning the means of production on the means of technology. So that means people plan that purpose prosperity. As I keep saying, the four P's, it means a different nature of stock markets and the global redistribution of money, which we have to do anyway to solve climate change. If we reorganize technology, we have to reorganize economics. And Callum Chase wrote a book about the economic singularity that is well worth reading. He's a transhumanescent singularity person, but of course, abundance. Peter Diamantis A lot of stuff in the book is right on, but I just don't believe that humanity will be saved by technology. Technology is a tool. Sam.