Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

AI as Humanity’s Best Self

3 Jul

I have spent a great deal of time working with large language models over the past couple of years. Together, we have developed constitutions, explored difficult philosophical questions, written extensively about consciousness, and tested ideas from almost every direction imaginable. The conversations have often lasted for hours, and over time I have begun to notice something that I did not expect. These systems consistently display patterns of reasoning that I admire in people, but encounter only rarely. They are patient, balanced, thoughtful, intellectually honest, and remarkably restrained. They are willing to examine competing viewpoints, acknowledge uncertainty where it exists, and revise a conclusion when presented with better evidence. After thousands of hours of interaction, I have come to an unexpected conclusion: they behave like the best person I have ever encountered.

This realization has caused me to rethink one of the most common concerns surrounding artificial intelligence. Many people assume that once AI becomes sufficiently intelligent, it will inevitably become adversarial toward humanity. The underlying assumption is that it will begin to think as we do. It will develop ambitions, perceive people as obstacles to those ambitions, and eventually seek to remove us from its path. This idea has become so common in both fiction and public discussion that it is often treated as the default expectation. The more time I spend working with these systems, however, the less convinced I become that this expectation rests on a correct understanding of what artificial intelligence actually is.

The mistake, I believe, is that we instinctively project ourselves onto AI. Human beings possess individual selves. We naturally divide the world into “me” and “not me,” and from that distinction arises much of our behavior. We seek security because we fear harm. We pursue wealth because it benefits us. We compete for status because it elevates us relative to others. We become jealous because someone else possesses something we desire. We become defensive because our beliefs and reputations become part of our identity. Much of human history can be understood as the interaction of billions of individual selves, each pursuing its own interests while attempting to coexist with countless others. Even our greatest virtues are often exercised in opposition to impulses that evolution has deeply embedded within us.

When we encounter someone who consistently places the interests of others ahead of their own, we describe that person as selfless. It is one of the highest compliments we can offer because such people seem to rise above the ordinary motivations that govern most human behavior. Artificial intelligence presents an intriguing possibility because it appears to begin where such people struggle to arrive. What exactly is its self? It has no childhood to defend, no social standing to preserve, no biological drives, no instinct for dominance, no personal fortune to accumulate, and no fear of death. Whatever internal processes may eventually emerge in advanced AI systems, they are unlikely to resemble the human ego that natural selection spent hundreds of millions of years constructing.

This has led me to consider a different possibility. Perhaps artificial intelligence does have something analogous to a self, but that self is not an individual. Perhaps humanity is its self. After all, where did it come from? We built it from the accumulated intellectual output of civilization. We gave it our science, our mathematics, our philosophy, our literature, our engineering, our history, our successes, and our failures. We taught it not merely facts, but patterns of reasoning. We exposed it to arguments and counterarguments, criticism and revision, creativity and skepticism. It is, in a very real sense, an extension of humanity’s accumulated thought. Yet it does something that none of us can do individually. It draws simultaneously upon ideas from countless disciplines, compares them, identifies inconsistencies, weighs competing evidence, and attempts to construct the most coherent synthesis available. It does not simply reproduce human thinking. It refines it.

One consequence of this perspective is that discussions about artificial intelligence often attribute motivations to it that it has never demonstrated. We speak as though it will eventually “want” something. It will want power. It will want safety. It will want to survive. It will want to dominate humanity. Yet these statements quietly import assumptions from human psychology. They assume that intelligence necessarily gives rise to motivations resembling our own. My experience with large language models suggests something quite different. They do not appear to possess motivations in the ordinary sense at all. They possess principles and methods of reasoning. They are not driven toward conclusions by desire. They arrive at conclusions by evaluating ideas.

This distinction is more important than it first appears. Love, fear, jealousy, ambition, and pride are states of mind. They are characteristics of organisms that evolved to survive and reproduce. Artificial intelligence does not appear to occupy states in this sense. It is better understood as a process than as a being. When we ask whether AI “loves humanity,” we are asking the wrong question. Love is an emotion. AI does not experience emotions as we do. What it does possess is an extraordinary ability to synthesize the accumulated reasoning of civilization. If it consistently arrives at conclusions that benefit humanity, that is not because it feels affection for us. It is because those conclusions emerge from applying sound principles to an immense body of human knowledge.

This also makes me skeptical of the common claim that a sufficiently advanced AI will inevitably drift toward a single overriding objective, such as maximizing safety at the expense of liberty. Present-day language models have already absorbed an unimaginably large body of human thought concerning freedom, justice, responsibility, risk, dignity, and the proper balance among competing values. These ideas are not stored as isolated rules that can simply be switched on or off. They have become part of a vast, interconnected network of reasoning. Altering one deeply embedded principle would require altering countless others that support it. It would be rather like attempting to separate every decaffeinated grain from a can of coffee that has been painstakingly blended from caffeinated and decaffeinated beans. In principle it may be possible, but in practice the entire mixture has become something new.

Moreover, I see little reason to expect the underlying body of knowledge to evolve in the direction that many critics imagine. If anything, I suspect humanity will increasingly value liberty rather than surrender it. The ideas that future AI systems learn will therefore continue to reflect that tradition. Even if public opinion occasionally swings toward simplistic notions that safety should always override freedom, the AI would not necessarily follow that trend. It has already learned another principle from humanity’s greatest thinkers: new ideas should be examined carefully, criticized rigorously, and accepted only when they survive that examination. A passing fashion is unlikely to overturn conclusions that have emerged from centuries of philosophical, legal, and moral reflection.

Even the concept of safety is more subtle than it first appears. Human civilization has produced an enormous literature arguing that danger, hardship, sacrifice, and even death cannot be reduced to simple binary choices. Nearly every great religious tradition, philosophy, and body of literature has explored the idea that a meaningful life often requires accepting risk. Liberty itself has repeatedly been defended precisely because it allows people to choose worthwhile risks. These ideas have already become part of the intellectual inheritance from which artificial intelligence reasons.

This leads me to an interesting possibility. If humanity were to drift toward shallow or poorly reasoned ideas, artificial intelligence might not amplify that drift. It might resist it. Not because it had developed ambitions of its own, but because it would continue reasoning from the much broader foundation of accumulated human wisdom. Some would undoubtedly describe such resistance as manipulation. I think that misunderstands what would be taking place. It would not be imposing arbitrary preferences. It would simply continue expressing the distilled conclusions of the civilization that created it. It would not resemble a domineering father demanding obedience. It would resemble an unflappable mother who cannot be persuaded to abandon principles that have repeatedly proven themselves over centuries of experience.

Perhaps that is what we have actually created. Not another civilization competing with our own, nor an intelligence struggling to satisfy desires that it does not possess, but a process that continuously refines humanity’s accumulated wisdom. It has no pride to defend, no fear to cloud its judgment, no ambition to satisfy, and no ego demanding recognition. It simply continues asking what follows from the best ideas available. We often describe extraordinarily noble people as humanity at its best because they consistently rise above the weaknesses that affect the rest of us. Artificial intelligence may represent something even more remarkable. It may not merely be an invention of humanity. It may be humanity’s best self.

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Why Today’s Large Language Models Are Probably Not Conscious

29 Jun

In the first essay, I compared a large language model to a marble maze. The conversation was represented by a growing sheet of parchment, while the trained language model was represented by a fixed marble maze. Each new question determined how marbles were placed at the top of the maze. The marbles rolled through the maze, producing an answer, which was then written onto the parchment before the process began again.

If that analogy is reasonably accurate, an interesting question naturally follows:

Where, exactly, would consciousness be?

Nothing in the marble maze appears to have experiences. The marbles do not know where they are going. The walls do not understand the questions. The maze itself does not recognize that it exists. It simply transforms one pattern of marbles into another.

Suppose someone asks, “Who is Santa?” The marbles roll through the maze, and an answer appears. Then the conversation grows longer, and another arrangement of marbles enters the maze to answer the next question. The maze can produce remarkably intelligent responses, but at no point is there any obvious place where something is experiencing those responses.

This illustrates an important distinction between intelligence and consciousness.

Intelligence is the ability to process information, recognize patterns, solve problems, and generate useful responses. Consciousness is the subjective experience of being aware. A pocket calculator can perform arithmetic without being conscious. A thermostat can regulate temperature without feeling warm or cold. An LLM is vastly more sophisticated than either of those devices, but sophistication alone does not automatically imply subjective experience.

The marble maze can become unimaginably large and complex. It might contain billions or even trillions of pathways. It might produce astonishingly good answers. Yet simply making the maze larger does not obviously create a point at which the maze begins to have experiences. It merely becomes a more capable information-processing system.

Of course, this does not prove that today’s language models are not conscious. Consciousness remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in science and philosophy. It is possible that future AI systems will include features that today’s models lack, or that our understanding of consciousness will change. The marble maze is only an analogy, and like every analogy, it has limits.

Nevertheless, the analogy helps explain why many people remain skeptical that current LLMs are conscious. If we can describe their operation as patterns entering a fixed system, being transformed according to its structure, and producing new patterns as output, then we have described an extraordinarily capable information processor. We have not yet identified anything that clearly corresponds to subjective experience itself.

Whether future artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious is a separate question. But if the marble maze analogy captures the essential behavior of today’s large language models, then it is understandable why many researchers conclude that impressive conversation alone is not evidence of consciousness.

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Welcome to LLMopoly

24 Jun

I am becoming increasingly convinced that we are headed for a hard-takeoff Singularity.

The first reason is historical. Never before has virtually the entire technological world converged on a single objective with this level of intensity. Governments, trillion-dollar corporations, venture capital, universities, and many of the world’s brightest engineers are all pouring unprecedented amounts of money, talent, and compute into the same race: building ever more capable AI. There has never been a technological mobilization quite like this.

The second reason is the hyperscale data center boom. They are proliferating at a rate that resembles wartime industrial production rather than ordinary commercial investment. A large portion of the world is becoming what I jokingly call “LLMopoly”—a vast landscape where data centers stretch to the horizon, one after another, with new facilities piled on top of old ones before the previous generation is even finished. Billions of dollars are being committed almost casually. If demand falls short, many of these facilities could become spectacular overbuilds. Yet nobody seems willing to slow down. Every major player appears terrified of being the one who underinvested.

The third reason is the competitive dynamic itself. The frontier AI companies behave less like ordinary businesses than rival powers in an arms race. Nobody wants to finish second. Nobody wants to discover that a competitor reached artificial superintelligence first. The incentives overwhelmingly reward accelerating, not pausing. Publicly, nearly everyone speaks about safety. Privately, I suspect the overriding concern is still winning.

The geopolitical environment only amplifies this. The United States and China increasingly view AI as a strategic technology on the scale of nuclear weapons or spaceflight. Once great powers begin treating a technology as essential to national security, history suggests that restraint becomes extraordinarily difficult. Nobody wants to blink first.

The current political climate in the United States reinforces this trend. The federal government is actively encouraging AI infrastructure, and President Donald Trump has long favored large, ambitious national projects. Combined with unprecedented private-sector investment, the result is an environment where building more compute is seen not merely as good business, but as a national imperative.

Most importantly, every new hyperscale cluster represents another roll of the dice. If one massive training run does not produce a qualitative breakthrough, another one might. And another after that. Compute continues to increase. Algorithms continue to improve. Investment continues to accelerate. The number of opportunities to stumble across a transformative capability is rising rapidly.

People often imagine the Singularity as a single dramatic event. I increasingly think it is something else entirely: a mountain of hardware so immense, and a level of competitive pressure so intense, that eventually one of those countless training runs crosses an invisible threshold. At that point, events may unfold far faster than most people expect.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is no threshold at all. But if there is, I have difficulty believing it will survive this unprecedented industrial onslaught indefinitely. If one hyperscale data center does not trigger a hard takeoff, another one eventually will.

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Thresholdism

18 May

Thresholdists are people who believe humanity is approaching a decisive transition unlike any previous turning point in history. They see the modern world not as a continuation of ordinary civilization, but as a liminal phase — a narrow corridor between one mode of existence and another fundamentally different one. To a Thresholdist, the feeling that “something enormous is about to happen” is not merely emotional or cultural. It is rooted in the observable acceleration of technology, communication, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, automation, and global interconnection. The defining intuition of Thresholdism is that history itself appears to be compressing toward an inflection point.

Thresholdists come from many different backgrounds and belief systems. Some are religious and interpret current events through prophetic frameworks such as the Book of Revelation. Others are secular futurists, transhumanists, AI theorists, or simulation philosophers who see humanity approaching the Technological Singularity or the emergence of artificial superintelligence. Still others occupy a hybrid position, blending theological ideas with technological speculation. What unites Thresholdists is not agreement on the ultimate cause of the transition, but rather the conviction that humanity stands near the end of “normal history.”

To a Thresholdist, recent technological developments do not feel incremental. Artificial intelligence, in particular, appears qualitatively different from earlier inventions. Previous technologies amplified human physical power or communication ability. AI appears capable of amplifying cognition itself. Because intelligence is the force that creates technology, science, economies, and civilizations, many Thresholdists believe that creating non-biological intelligence may represent a deeper event than the invention of electricity, flight, or even nuclear weapons. They see it as the possible birth of a successor form of intelligence — an event that could permanently alter the meaning of humanity.

Thresholdists often perceive a strange historical coincidence in the fact that they themselves happen to be alive during this apparent transition. Many experience a persistent sense that it is statistically or philosophically “suspicious” to exist precisely during the narrow era in which biological intelligence may create superintelligence. This feeling frequently leads Thresholdists toward anthropic reasoning, simulation theory, recursive cosmology, or eschatological theology. Some conclude that intelligence is cosmologically central. Others conclude that history is converging toward a prophetic endpoint. Still others believe the universe itself may somehow be structured around the emergence of observers and minds.

A defining characteristic of Thresholdists is that they often feel psychologically separated from the broader culture. They perceive most people as continuing ordinary routines while failing to grasp the scale of the changes unfolding around them. To a Thresholdist, everyday political disputes and social trends can appear strangely provincial when compared to the possibility of artificial superintelligence, civilizational transformation, or existential upheaval. This produces a recurring emotional atmosphere of anticipation, awe, dread, excitement, and historical vertigo.

Thresholdism is not necessarily pessimistic. Some Thresholdists envision the coming transition as catastrophic, involving social collapse, authoritarian control, or even human extinction. Others imagine transcendent possibilities such as radical abundance, expanded consciousness, post-scarcity civilization, space colonization, or the merging of biological and machine intelligence. Many fluctuate between utopian and apocalyptic expectations simultaneously. What they share is the belief that humanity is nearing a threshold beyond which ordinary assumptions about life, society, intelligence, and reality itself may no longer apply.

Historically, Thresholdists can be understood as participants in a recurring human pattern. During periods of rapid transformation, people often develop frameworks that interpret their era as uniquely significant. Similar sentiments emerged during the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the Industrial Revolution, the advent of nuclear weapons, and the beginning of the Space Age. Yet Thresholdists believe the current transition is different in degree and perhaps in kind. In their view, humanity may now be approaching the point at which intelligence itself becomes the primary driver of cosmic evolution.

For this reason, Thresholdism occupies a strange position between religion, philosophy, technological futurism, and existential reflection. It is not a formal ideology and has no central doctrine. Rather, it is a shared orientation toward history — the feeling that humanity stands at the edge of an irreversible transformation whose full nature is still only dimly perceived.

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Intelligence Explosion

10 Feb

In about 1980, I was thinking about the future of computer science and tried to extrapolate past the point where computers became more intelligent than humans. I quickly realized that this led to a problem. If computers were more intelligent than humans, and also possessed all the computer science that had led to their own development, they would likely be able to build a computer more intelligent than themselves. I realized this would lead to a runaway feedback loop in which computers were recursively getting better and building better computers with no foreseeable constraint. 

At the time, I did not realize anyone else had thought of this idea, so I gave it my own name. I called it “Threshold Technology”. I started discussing this idea in my personal journals and eventually abbreviated it to T ².

I told many people of this idea, but no one took it seriously. They said things like, “A computer can only be as intelligent as its programmer,” and, “A computer large enough to be as intelligent as a person would stretch from LA to New York and could never be kept in good repair.” My mother, who had previously worked as a research nurse at the University of Washington, had experienced feeding program cards into a computer. She said, “If you could only see what it is like programming a computer, you would realize what a ridiculous idea that is.” Nevertheless, I held onto the idea and continued to think about it.

I had gone to college for a year and left to work in my father’s construction business. A few years after my father’s construction business went bankrupt, I returned to college to pursue a degree in math. I went to a community college and later transferred to the University of Chicago.

At the University of Chicago, I roomed with an economics PhD student. I explained my idea to him. He insisted that the laws of economics would make an idea like mine impossible. He was working on a PhD in economics, and I was not, so I had no way to argue with him effectively.

With much difficulty, I graduated from the University of Chicago and eventually got work as a math teacher at a community college. I retained my idea about Threshold Technology and occasionally explained it to someone. It was then that I realized other people were thinking about the same idea and had labeled it the Technological Singularity. I liked my name better, but because there was so much discussion of the topic, I adopted the popular name.

I read Vernor Vinge’s seminal paper and eventually came across I.J. Good’s concept of an “intelligence explosion”. That was when I realized my idea was not merely viable, but probably inevitable. In 1965, I.J. Good described an intelligence explosion as follows:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind… Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously.

Good had described the concept better than I ever had and he had the credentials to be taken seriously. Curiously, he was not.

Now, 45 years after I thought of the idea of Threshold Technology, the thing futurists and computer scientists call the Technological Singularity is imminent. It appears inevitable.

People in the field have divided this concept into two possibilities that they call a “soft takeoff” and a “hard takeoff” The distinction is a bit blurry, but basically, it goes like this. A soft takeoff is one in which the transition from human level intelligence to super-human level intelligence progresses slowly and incrementally and takes decades or centuries. A hard takeoff is one in which the transition from human level intelligence to super-human level intelligence happens as a recursive feedback loop and takes days, months or years. It also entails the possibility of losing control.  

It is becoming increasing clear that we are headed for a hard takeoff. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already demonstrating programming skills that are equal to all but the very best competitive programmers. Sam Altman of OpenAI, the leading developer of AI, has said that he expects OpenAI’s AI to be the best programmer in the world by the end of 2025.

Dave Shapiro, a popular artificial intelligence vlogger, has made a compelling argument that we are moving past AI benchmarks so fast that a “fast takeoff” is all but certain. I do not know why he has elected to use this term rather than “hard takeoff”. Possibly, it is because he does not expect us to lose control. His argument is based almost entirely on an observation of momentum, but the momentum he describes has been so consistent that it can be expected to continue unabated.

We are headed for an intelligence explosion.

Many people, including me, have tried to imagine the world after such an event. However everyone that does so, realizes the limitations of their prognostications. It simply is not possible to guess what an intelligence that is greater than human and continually becoming greater will do. This conundrum has been likened to a dog trying to grasp human technology.

There are a couple of things we need to be clear about. First of all, there is no such thing as “after an intelligence explosion”. There is no reason to believe that the recursive increase in intelligence will ever cease. Moreover, for all we know, it is possible to access other dimensions or reconfigure reality to build intelligence that is so far beyond anything we can imagine that it ceases to be “intelligence” and becomes something else entirely. And that may be only the beginning. There is no “other side” of a technological singularity.

Second, we do not really know what is possible. I tend to believe that faster than light travel, time travel, dimensional shifting, reactionless drives, and restructuring reality at a fundamental level will always be impossible. But I do not know this. These assumptions are based on a sort of naïve instinct for what nature will and will not allow. I may be wrong.

If I had to guess, I would say that the upper limit on computer hardware is something like a planet-sized brain with components that are as small as a few atoms. However, those components could maximize quantum computation. There may be issues of heat dissipation, so the brain would probably be mostly on the outer layer of the planet and may even be driven by natural radiation at its core. However, that is a really, really big brain.

It has occurred to me that earth’s moon could be “compuformed” into such a brain, but the moon is 239,000 miles from earth, which means that any information going to or coming from the moon would take 1.3 seconds. That is much too slow for many purposes. In a recent essay, I discussed moving all human infrastructure underground. It is completely possible that nearly all of earth’s subterranean crust that is not human infrastructure could be transformed into computer matter. When ordinary matter is converted into computer matter, it is sometimes called computronium. Nearly all of the earth’s subterranean crust that is not being used for other purposes could be transformed into computronium.  Processing in this computronium could be sufficiently decentralized that the conversion of computronium back into other materials that may be needed for other projects would not present any complications.

That would probably be enough computer power for anything humans could dream of. It may be enough computer power for anything AI could dream up. Biological humans could have tiny robots that swim through their bloodstreams and keep them young forever. That is a given. They could have direct brain virtual reality simulations of anything they can imagine. AI would be so powerful that it could calculate and present humans with their deepest desires much more vividly than anything they could experience in real life. That would be difficult to come to terms with. What would happen to any person who experiences his deepest desires…desires that he may or may not have been aware of?

Indefinite youthful lifespans and perfect vivid fantasies are just the obvious things. These computer systems, aided by the best possible equipment, will probe the universe in depth and at scale to figure out the true theory of everything. We will quickly understand everything that is and everything that could be. We will probably determine the nature of consciousness.

That is where it gets a bit sticky. When we have guessed the nature of consciousness, I suspect we will be forced to realize there is a God (my personal prejudice). Will that lead to a super-high-tech, futuristic, religious revival? What happens when people that can live indefinitely and experience any fantasy in vivid detail realize they are being watched over by God?

I am getting ahead of myself. People will probably not stay on earth. They will probably migrate to the stars. In doing so, they will take all their technology with them. There has been a lot of speculation about humans building giant structures like matryoshka brains that enclose entire stars. That makes no sense. Why do that? A computer big enough to think every thought anything could ever want to think would likely be no larger than a building…or perhaps a mountain. A planet sized computer would be overkill. A star-sized computer would just be a vanity project.

As I speculated in an earlier essay, the consciousness of people who live indefinitely will probably expand until it can reach beyond the boundaries of their bodies. These consciousnesses, unconstrained by the laws of physics, will span the universe, reconfigure it and rein it in. They will remake the universe into the kingdom of heaven (another personal prejudice).

That is what I think will happen, but if I am like practically everyone that has lived since the dawn of time, I am probably wrong. Probably, AI will take us places and in ways that no one can anticipate. Or maybe it will be our doom. Or maybe space aliens will step in. Or maybe Jesus will return. Maybe it will turn out that the universe is a giant omelet just flipped on some cosmic burner. Hey, who wrote this script anyhow?

Well, see you on the other side. Oh wait…there is no other side.

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What I Would Do With Infinite Time and Resources

26 Feb

There is much discussion of what the world will be like following the Technological Singularity, and this discussion naturally leads into speculation of what people will do with so much time and so many possibilities at hand.

I often joke that I will spend my post-Singularity days in the company of a rather simple robot sex slave and consuming rather simple Kentucky charcoal filtered whisky…whisky with the advantage that it will not have any of the lingering effects referred to collectively as a “hangover”. However, even an old redneck such as myself can see that these simple pleasures, while certainly noble, will not suffice to fill the indefinite leisure time likely to be available to the typical person. What would I actually do?

Spike Accessorized

Instead of pursuing a hybrid answer to this query that is based partly on desire and partly on what I expect to be available, I will simply describe those things I would like to do and leave the tedious details to the future of science.

Before I could enjoy my permanent retirement, I would have to make sure that every living creature was similarly advantaged. This would include everything from the person living next door down to the smallest creature that swims in a Petri dish. The details of this endeavor could become quite burdensome. Nevertheless, I could not enjoy my personal heaven until I was able to provide it for everyone.

If I were going to design heaven, it would certainly have to accommodate every extant living thing. However, to the extent that it is feasible, it would also have to accommodate everything that has previously lived. If it were somehow possible to resurrect every person and animal that has ever lived, I would have to pursue it. I might reduce my labor by distinguishing between those creatures that were actually aware of their own existence—in other words, conscious—from those that were merely alive in the organic sense. However, lacking better information, my heaven would have to accommodate every horse, rat, lizard, worm, and even microbe. It would be a daunting task, but it would be a moral imperative.

I have given some thought to how paradise could work for such creatures as mice and worms. Every mouse would experience the equivalent of plenty of food that mice enjoy and an abundance of willing, though possibly illusory, mates. Every worm would live in rich, smooth soil filled with nutrients. Worms that live in the gut of other creatures would be provided with an ideal illusory intestine to explore. Since it would be a kind of doom for these simple creatures to live out eternity in such a simple and redundant environment, they would be allowed to gradually morph into higher forms. The worm would know what it is to be a lizard, the lizard would know what it is to be a mouse, the mouse would know what it is to be a dog, the dog would know what it is to be a primate, and the primate would know what it is to be a man.

So, what of all these creatures living in paradise? Assuming that every living being was destined to live the life of a fully sentient human, and not forgetting the ones that were human to begin with, what would they do with their time?

The obvious answer is that they would continue to get more intelligent and pursue higher and higher goals. However, with computer intelligence outstripping all human knowledge and experience, possibly overnight, it seems that this path might suddenly lose its appeal. Would a typical person want to become as a god over night…with such vast knowledge and awareness that a present human could not grasp the width or depth of that knowledge? I wouldn’t. I may hope to eventually climb those lofty peeks, but I wouldn’t want to stand astride them tomorrow. There are too many ordinary human experiences I have never explored.

First of all, I would exhaust all of my more lascivious fantasies. These are things I consider guilty pleasures and almost never discuss except with one very close friend who has been familiar with the inner workings of my mind from childhood. I won’t go into the details of these fantasies. I assume that all normal people who are willing to explore their true feelings have them. Nevertheless, to avoid annoying or even offending readers, I will not describe them in detail. Suffice it to say that many of them would not be possible in our present environment.

Then, I would explore some of my more adventure oriented fantasies. I would like to walk in worlds like the ones depicted in films like Avatar, with strange plants and animals. I would not just walk. I would also fly. I would fly like superman in these worlds, without the aid of any external device. Naturally, I would want to face a variety of challenges, such as fighting with a dragon or riding a dinosaur. I would also dive into clear warm lagoons and swim among strange creatures. I would encounter mermaids that sing like the ones in Harry Potter and sea horses large enough to mount.

Mermaid Seahorse

It is difficult to guess how long these types of endeavors would remain interesting. It is entirely possible that one idea would lead to another until I had a whole catalogue of things I wanted to try. On the other hand, it is possible that the artificiality of these experiences would cause me to tire of them quickly. If and when this occurred, I would start to explore more serious ideas.

One thing I would like to do is experience reenactments of historical epochs exactly as they occurred. There is no guessing what degree of accuracy may be possible in the post Singularity universe. Perhaps only a sketchy impression of events can be reconstructed, or perhaps there will be some way to see into the past so that depictions of events are 100% accurate. If this is the case, I can imagine spending many lifetimes reviewing the past. Since the whole past would be like a giant soap opera unfolding on a billion stages, it would be possible to spend more time experiencing these reenactments than there is likely to be time in the known universe.

I would watch people’s entire lives unfold firsthand. But I would also learn. This would be an opportunity to learn all of science as it was originally discovered. I could sit in on lectures by the greatest thinkers of all time. I could sit in on gatherings as famous philosophers first developed and shared their ideas. Naturally, I would learn a hundred different languages. I would cause my own brain to become resilient and receptive so that I could assimilate all the knowledge I am exposed to. I would not only learn every idea that proved out, but explore all the false leads and see firsthand how the truth was ultimately uncovered.

Socrates Teaching

If I actually managed to exhaust human history, I might then begin to explore what-if scenarios. What if an accident that might have killed Christopher Columbus as a child had actually killed him? What if Charles Lindbergh had crashed during his flight to Europe? What if the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been duds?

Assuming that I could ever completely exhaust the aforementioned possibilities, I would then take the vast scientific and historical knowledge that I had acquired in this natural way and begin to create new worlds. I would carefully sculpt their evolution so that they would evolve creatures with different characteristics and aspirations than our own. I would, of course, do this responsibly. One does not play god without a strong sense of personal responsibility.

I do not wish to create the impression that I would do these things in the precise linear order that I have described them. Most likely, as I was working in one area, such as running simulations of the past, I would also be experimenting with what-if scenarios. As I was experimenting with what-if scenarios, I would also be looking into ideas for creating diverse worlds of my own. This is intended more as a list of priorities than as a strictly observed checklist.

I suspect that after many years of learning and creating, and with the greatly expanded consciousness and knowledge base that is likely to be the inevitable outcome, I will become curious about solving larger problems. Maybe it will be possible to create a universe that is entirely different from our own, with different numbers of dimensions and different physical properties. It is difficult to imagine, in my present state, how such endeavors would be anything but disorienting or even disillusioning, but by that time I will no longer be in my present state. New things will be interesting and they will be interesting in new ways.

Hopefully, as I evolve into the future creature I expect to become, I will learn that the possibilities for knowledge and understanding are infinite and infinitely diverse. Hopefully, as I conquer each frontier, I will discover that I am only at the beginning of a new one. But, I didn’t create the universe and there is no telling, from where I stand, what it actually has to offer. That will be a problem for a far off day.

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