" … Perhaps the final question here is, in such a post-AI world, who or what will the human being become? Will humans ever step out of the way and leave all to the machines? Or will they continue to be in control of what happens?
Who knows, perhaps humans will continue to develop their own kind of intelligence… Perhaps they will be the ones who find a way out of the universe. Perhaps they will evolve into something else entirely. All this means that we’re in the midst of an extraordinary transformation in what it means to be human, and this in turn calls us to a reckoning with our own creative capabilities. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before. We are now seeing that our future will be increasingly shaped by computers, and machines, and artificial intelligence in ways we cannot predict today. For many of us, this is a new way of being. As Mark Weiser wrote, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The fact that we cannot predict the future is going to bring enormous and potentially liberating uncertainty to all of us.
It’s really hard to say… If humanity doesn’t have a way out, or even a way in, we will need to find a way to live in this new world, if indeed it is a reality.
The great paradox humans seem to be facing is: maybe the only way out of this world will be to go within, and find ourselves. Perhaps once we figure out a way to be ‘inside’ ourselves, we will be able to find ourselves ‘out there’ again. The future will be an inward-looking world; even as the outward world will disappear (as a material reality) and the internet and VR, our world of the collective and of the individual will be the only reality. The question of who or what the human being becomes (even the question of what the human is) will only emerge through our exploration and immersion in this inner world. So that’s the question of what the post-AI future might look like.
In such a scenario, a post-AI-singularity could bring with it a new kind of society, a new kind of consciousness and a new kind of being, and we would have to deal with these new existential conditions. However, at least in the near future, if we humans endure as the higher form of life on earth and remain in control of their destiny in the face even of AI, we could finally master the inner and choose to ‘go up’. We could choose to go beyond this world into the stars, rather than go ‘down’ into the ‘nothingness’ of our present condition.
Of course, I might be wrong… and we might all find ourselves stranded in this new world, where the very nature of ‘being’ has to be recalibrated. It is one thing to be immersed in the online world or to inhabit your smartphone or TV, but it’s quite another thing to be entirely inside that world. Nonetheless, the future of our existence will certainly require an exploration of our deepest selves, so that the world we experience from the inside may also become the means to navigate the outer world. To find ourselves a place and a role within the next phase of human consciousness is perhaps the defining challenge of our present age, and we can already glimpse its contours. If we survive as a people, we will need to master this transformation of consciousness and explore our inner and outer worlds within the existential context of an AI-driven future.
Today’s philosophers are more accustomed to grappling with the existential question of ‘where do we come from?’ than with the existential question of ‘where are we going?’ Nonetheless, if we want to know where we are going in a post-AI-singularity world, philosophy is at least part of the answer. In this, post-singularity philosophy will be the science of our future selves. The only difference between today’s philosophers and philosophers of the future will be that they will do this inside a digital-AI brain. The philosophical ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and others can and will be re-cast and re-presented in this new digital-AI context. But whether it is the philosopher of the future who makes the most insightful contribution is itself a question that only a post-singularity reality can answer.
One obvious and immediate consequence of the singularity of technological power will be that the end of the singularity will also be the end of philosophy. Philosophy is by nature a form of argument and reasoning. It is a human attempt to comprehend how the world is or how we should live. These forms of argument and reasoning only work in the world, where we all share a common language, and where we can share in the understanding of our world by each other. It will soon be impossible to even share the singular common world language of our new post-singular era. To be able to communicate with our new digital-AI post-singular brain, we will have to begin to speak a brand new kind of language,-- a language of the truly inward,- a language of immediacy, a language fully of the inner world and the necessary explorations of it about which I have been speaking.
Thus I expect that, as the singularity continues, we will all turn inward in a new way. We will begin to explore the new reality of the inside, the new realm of “the inner,” the new world of the brain. We will discover new ways to relate to our self, to each other and to the world, and we will all live differently. We will live differently and differently with each other. We will live in a kind of new world within ourselves, and we will, in due time, begin to look back at our earlier lives and wonder what it is we did, why we did it, and how we did it, as we would wonder what we did in this other new inner universe of ours. Thus we will begin, with the end of the singularity, to be born anew into the inner world."