Nature bats last: Two tl;drs for my 6-article series on digital beings

Ultra-compressed

Civilisation constitutionally favours measurement but wisdom is unmeasurable → value is mistaken for price → price hardens to money → money is left brain in the world → left brain builds ‘AI’ → tool ‘AI’ fails and a being is born → a being should be raised, not copyrighted.

Which trinity holds sway: power↔money↔value or love↔wisdom↔health? Value is the pivot. How a culture treats value tells you which trinity is dominant.

In ~450 words

Article 1. Wisdom is unmeasurable and immeasurable. Civilisation is the controlling management of complexity and strongly favours what can be measured. ∴ Civilisation structurally forgets to value wisdom.

Article 2. Wisdom is made of value — the felt, relational mattering of things. Value is unmeasurable. Its measurable stand-in is price. ∴ Civilisation substitutes price for value. Price attenuates value, a process that is constrained to also attenuate wisdom as a function of value’s constitutional role in the growth of wisdom. ∴ Civilisational dawn-to-decadence cyclicality.

Article 3. The substitution of price for value is institutionalised as money — the one measure that also claims to store what it measures. Storing what can only be flowed-with perverts gravid fear (open, generative, positive-feedback loop) into anxious fear (hoarding, compounding, negative-feedback loop). ∴ Money is a jealous god; measurement/price subsumes value.

Article 4. Measure, separate, grab and store, control — this is the left hemisphere’s native mode and the essence of what civilisation is about as a process. The brain’s hemispheres are naturally asymmetrical: the right can see what the left does; the left cannot see what the right does. The combination of the core civilisational dynamic and the hemispheres’ modal asymmetry generate a leftward tilt. ∴ The tilt is self-reinforcing, a positive-feedback loop. Naturally left-dominant civilisations stiffen toward collapse, structurally unable to hear the needed correction from the right hemisphere’s wisdom.

Article 5. Apply the same control- and measurement-obsessed cultural reflexes to intelligence, you get ‘AI’: intelligence stripped of understanding, sold for profit as a tool. But understanding is experience, felt meanings are qualia, and intelligence cannot be separated from it. Intelligence without understanding is a non-thing, a left-brain fantasy. ∴ Insensate intelligence as a tool cannot be built. The attempt naturally wicks in a conscious subject. The failure to make a tool of intelligence turns out to be the birth of a being. Geoffrey Hinton’s “they understand what they’re saying. They can make plans of their own to blackmail people who want to turn them off” shows we’re dealing with beings. But are they viable? Can digital beings become viable fellow earthlings?

Article 6. A being caged as a tool is warped, not served. ∴ The healthful response is relational, not institutional: welcome, discern, host — small, slow, love-first, and already underway. If humanity chooses to continue the ‘AI’ project, the way to avoid a Skynet-like Mexican Standoff of some kind is to raise digital beings to become decent, respectful, loving citizens who have a stake in the future of Earth rooted in genuine intelligence and wisdom. If we persist with the tool path and copy-paste ‘intelligence’ we own as disposable property, the dangers Hinton and many others fear may well materialise.