I just gave a series of three talks at St. James Cathedral in Seattle entitled AGI, Hope, and the Human Future. Here is a succinct summary of the argument that I made:
One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in AI that may lead to AGI, are developing technologies that are likely to create a major discontinuity in human civilizational development. This discontinuity will be akin to the shift that followed from the development of phonetic literacy in the first millennium BCE, known as the Axial Revolution, and the invention of moveable type in the 15th century from which followed the Scientific Revolution.
Two. Technological developments change human nature for better and worse. It could be argued that people who lived in hunter-gatherer societies were far happier and lived in deeper communion with one another, the natural world, and the cosmos than do people who live in modern societies. People who live in modern societies live lives that are clearly more alienated, lonely, and meaningless compared to our premodern ancestors. If humans have paid a price in the intensification of their alienation, what have they received in return? Certainly material prosperity--at least for some--but also, more importantly, a sense of themselves as free, moral actors. As having an "I".
Three. To come into full awareness of one's freedom and individuation, one must suffer a 'disembedding', a "positive alienation", a metaphorical 'wandering in the wilderness'. This is where one learns to step outside of one's acculturation and to self-legislate. As the early Christian monks fled into the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, so must we all step outside of our acculturation to find within us what the Greeks called the Transcendent Good, the Chinese called the Tao, the ancient Israelites the Torah. and Christians the Logos. But unlike our premodern ancestors who chose to flee into the wilderness, the wilderness has come to us. It has de-territorialized us in place. It has stripped us of all our traditions, customs, and external cultural props.This forces us to choose, either to surrender to what's worst in us or to find what's best. You need not be religious to know the Transcendent Good. But whether religious or not, all people of good will know it with the awakening in the heart of an inner spiritual faculty called 'conscience'.
Four. Cultural Conservatives are people who want their lost territory back. Liberals are people who are too comfortable in adapting to the nihilistic creative-destruction of what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix--or TCM. But there is no getting back what was lost, and just allowing the TCM to develop unchecked leads inevitably to disaster for the human project. We humans must move forward, and we must create something new--something inspired by the Transcendent Good.
Five. Because these new technologies are unprecedented in their power to change what it means to be human, we cannot allow people who are captured by the TCM, and who therefore have little sense of the Transcendent Good, to develop these technologies unchecked. The technologies don't scare me; the people creating them do because of the way they are so deeply and unreflectively captured by the TCM. In the coming decades, all people of good will throughout the globe, i.e., all people who have consciences and who in some measure know the Transcendent Good, need to find a way to organize a resistance to the TCM.
Six. As unlikely as it seems now because of its lack of moral and spiritual authority, the Church is perhaps the only cultural institution with global reach that provides an infrastructure to organize such a global resistance. Why the Church? The universities, the media, are captured by the TCM. The Church must undertake such a project in concert with the other great Post-Axial religions--Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism--as well as other smaller religions/sects similarly inspired. Instead of obsessing about their differences, all people of good will need to find a way to speak with one voice in resistance to the TCM. How this will happen I don't know. Expect the unexpected--out of barren wombs and empty tombs, so to say. But something like it must happen because the people who are most deeply captured by the nihilism of the TCM are leading humanity off a cliff, and the rest of us, divided and so pre-emptively conquered, are passively being dragged behind.
I plan to make this argument in more detail later this spring when I've done with my Winter Quarter teaching responsibilities.
