This is the last part (10) of a series of blog posts. Please start with part 1 first.
The title of this post is admittedly a bit clickbaity. To overcome evil is a task which will need the collective efforts of whole humankind. Therefore I will not be able to provide a complete bunch of instructions about what needs to be done.
But I can’t resist to discuss a few aspects which I think might be relevant for success.
As we have seen in part 7 it’s fundamentally impossible to contain evil by establishing stricter moral standards and creating and enforcing new laws. Such activities make things only worse. But currently this is exactly what we are trying to do and consequently the current trajectory of humankind seems to be headed towards self destruction.
Our only chance lies in changing the environment we humans live in. In changing our society and our economic system. We must create a society where humans are living in an environment which accounts for our minds structured by millions of years of evolution. This does not mean that we have to go back to the horrible Middle Ages. But maybe we should reinstall some basic features present in ancient societies before the invention of agriculture. Again: we don't need to „travel back in time“ and have to deny ourselves the blessings of modern technology. Technology is only a tool and fundamentally orthogonal to the structure of society.
If we continue the current uncontrolled (i.e. random) path which is shifting our living conditions continuously into more extreme territories, more and more human behaviors will become useless or even harmful. We have already managed that most people see wild sexuality and deep emotions with great suspicion. The reason is not that they are problematic per se but only the fact that we have created an extremely weird society where the completely natural behaviors resulting from them (which were even essential for the survival of our species for millions of years) don’t fit in anymore and/or have become perverted (and hence - in many cases - indeed harmful).
Consequently, both sexuality and emotions are widely frowned upon while we hold intelligence in high regard. Interestingly we learn these days that intelligence (and increasingly even intelligence superior to ours) can be produced quite easily and cheaply by machines.
But even if AI - trained on human data - is able to mimic emotions to some extent (and is also able to write a spicy story for us), things like feelings, desire and enjoying art (food, music, literature etc.) will always remain out of reach for machines [1]. Therefore we should not regard these things as nuisances/vices only because we have managed to deform our world in a way which leaves no space for them. If we insist on continuing to do so, cold intelligence will be soon the only human trait left which is required to live a „successful“ life - a skill without any real value.
Contrary to widespread present day beliefs, human emotions and sexuality (and our art built on their foundation) form the most significant part of our true heritage. The only things machines can’t replicate. They necessarily require billions of years to form slowly out of the chaos of the primordial soup. In their uncrippled original form, they are marvels of extreme complexity developed by trillions of rounds of life playing its fabulous game. Of course it also took a long time to create intelligence (in humans and animals like the octopus). But once created, intelligence is something without qualities. Intelligence has, like energy, no identity. If we - as described above - build a society based on pure intelligence, we will only create painful chaos. Pure intelligence - whether artificial or human - will serve any master, be it deranged humans or even itself [2]. Its potential to do damage is almost infinite.
But before we can change society towards a state which better suits our nature, we must understand ourselves first. Many of us are - of course - already today trying to understand why things are moving so terribly into all kinds of wrong directions.
But the vast majority of people is already satisfied when they believe to have figured out who’s to blame. Then they demand of the identified culprits to change their behavior (or force them using new laws or their army). As we have seen, this cannot possibly work.
Therefore we should not stop learning about ourselves and our society until there is nobody left to blame. Only then we have gained insights which are fundamental enough to be worth considering for our plans for change.
And then we just have to start changing….
[1] The problem is not that machines can’t experience qualia. We can’t possibly know about this. The problem is that such things can only be created in sufficient complexity out of a very long history. See also below.
[2] In fact, pure intelligence makes simply no sense. Intelligence is the art of solving problems. Therefore, a problem is required to make meaningful use of intelligence. There is hope that an artificial superintelligence (ASI) will realize this too.
Image: Pixabay / geralt