The Future of Artificial Life:
Another important use I’ve found for developing an objective understanding of humanity has come from dealing with computer engineers. Sometime within this century (and those are extremely conservative estimates according to people who are in the business of knowing about things like this—see The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil) artificial intelligence will progress to the point that questions will begin to arise like: When have computers become intelligent enough to be entitled to civil rights? And that’s just the beginning. Another good question is: How much control of our lives should we allow AI computers to take? I think a fairly safe answer to the first question is: When they have become equal to humans. But that raises the question: What exactly is a human? Never before in history has anything been similar enough to a human to make such a distinction necessary. The closest precedent anyone could draw upon, I think, would be the controversy over slavery in America. That wasn’t even a very difficult distinction to make, because the slaves were just as biologically human as anyone else. But for as simple a distinction as it was to make, 600,000 people died fighting over the controversy in just four years (which, compared to the population of the United and Confederate States as of 1860, would be the equivalent of over 5,000,000 Americans being killed in a war today). That was followed by a hundred years of racial segregation, and even now, 140 years after slavery was abolished, Blacks still don’t have equality to Whites in a lot of ways. Before we have to start going through that whole process again with something that isn’t even biologically alive, I think it would behoove us to figure out what exactly a human is ahead of time.
Another good question that raises is: Is there any other artificial force in our society that is taking control of humans already without our noticing it? And there is. Bureaucratic organization was a great invention because it allows people to cooperate efficiently, whether it’s a religious organization, a government, or a business. But somewhere along the way, as I’m sure we’re all familiar with, the bureaucracy becomes so efficient that the people stop controlling the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy starts controlling the people.
How does it do that? To be sure, any given bureaucracy exists to manipulate some aspect of humanity, whether it’s your right to vote, your taxes, your money, your car insurance, whatever. It is able to do that most effectively by finding a way to make mathematical predictions about people based on statistics. People don’t like being treated like statistics, but the bureaucratic structure has no way of recognizing them as anything else. The people who operate the bureaucratic structure might be able to manipulate the bureaucracy to fit your needs as an individual, but more often than not it seems, the people who make up the bureaucracy just hand you some weak excuse about “I’m sorry sir, but that’s our policy and there’s nothing I can do about it.” As I’m sure we all realize, if you put enough bureaucracies together, all the aspects of everyone’s lives could be controlled bureaucratically, and everyone would be reduced to statistics.
That has a simple enough solution though. All somebody has to do is to figure out how to make individual people function more efficiently as individuals than as statistics. If individuals could apply the efficiency of bureaucracies to themselves to make their individual lives function more efficiently than the bureaucracies that were trying to turn them into statistics, the tables would be turned! A system of objective spiritual logic would do just that.