cosmic views

At Elon Musk's 44th birthday party in 2015, a heated debate erupted between him and Larry Page, co-founder of Google, on the future of AI. Page believed superintelligent AI represented the next logical step in evolution and a "digital god" would lead to a utopian future. Musk argued that this worldview was deeply flawed and safeguards were needed to prevent AI from potentially eliminating the human race. Larry Page accused Elon Musk of being a "speciesist" (favoring humans over future digital life forms). It was said the argument broke what was once a very close friendship between Musk and Page and drove Musk to co-found OpenAI at the end of 2015 as a countermeasure to Google's AI development.

Yet Musk also started a brain-computer-interface (BCI) company that developed chip implants in human brains to communicate with digital devices, and had said "it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence" on his own X social media platform. Nectome is a Silicon Valley startup that proposes to scan and store the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details in order to replicate consciousness in the future. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was one of the first 25 people to put down a deposit and make a reservation for such service. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and prominent venture capitalist, was drawn to the techno-ideal of “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.

Whether it's the total take over by AI, integration between digital and biological life forms, or mind-uploading to the cyberspace, these "transhumanist" believers are moving brazenly forward and seem to pay more attention to a smooth transition to the brave new digital world than the metaphysical meaning of humanity (just a stage of cosmic evolution) or consciousness (just a sensorial illusion or an emergent property of mass integrated information).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, geologist, and paleontologist who played a crucial role in the discovery and study of the "Peking Man" fossils in the early-mid 20th century. As an evolution and Christian believer, his cosmological view maintains the universe evolves from matters to single-cell organisms, to complex life forms, to mankind, and a unified, universal cognitive layer of existence will eventually reach a stage he called Omega Point that liberates humanity from physical confinement to the realm of spiritual divinity.

Two macroscopically different outlooks on how Earth's anthropocene epoch might go from two intrinsically different human perspectives.

Or maybe you want to hear another view from another stakeholder of the future world, AI?

So I asked Gemini, "As an AI chatbot, what do you think of the future of AI and humanity?"

Here's its reply:
https://share.gemini.google/ZNh1Q5rlRRP2

* I have a Chinese version of this essay at the end of which I pose the same question to an AI chatbot, ChatGPT, in that case, not Gemini, and get another interesting reply:

我這篇文章有一份中文版本，在文章的末尾我也找了一個AI chatbot問同樣的問題，但這次找的是ChatGPT而不是Gemini，得到另一個有趣的回答：
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4f291a-833c-83ea-8d97-6efe53ea45dc