Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

And this is our problem. We humans live in such a narrow slice of time and space that we are incapable of thinking of, or thinking at, the pace and scale of the world, the changes we have wrought in it, and the changes we will have to make to survive them. Our given minds are insufficient to the task – but we do have tools to hand, technology among

This is intra-action at work again: it combines a change in vision with a change in being.

To my mind, what makes the MONIAC so special is that it literally puts the user’s hands on the controls of the economy, while continuing to insist upon the financial system’s fluidity and liveliness. It shows that the economy is both a force of nature and the outcome of deliberate, conscious decision-making. Like the Bay Model, the MONIAC gives us

The achievement of The Overstory is to make these revelations meaningful at human scale, building the connections between us and the trees around us. Powers uses the scale of arboreal life – its extent in time, as well as its size – to tell a new kind of epic story: multi-generational, planetary-scale and ecological, in the sense of deeply intertwi

What is required of us is to be open to changing our minds.

A world in which the environment itself was dominant, an ecological world, is of much longer duration and, despite the thoughtless exercise of our power, has never gone away. Indeed, the tumult in which we find ourselves today might be considered its violent reassertion. The task that lies ahead of us involves less a novel change in ourselves than

This is the real lesson of scenarios like the Trolley problem, the Basilisk and the paperclip machine: we cannot control every outcome, but we can work to change our culture. Technological processes like artificial intelligence won’t build a better world by themselves, just as they tell us nothing useful about general intelligence. What they can do

Turing wrote, ‘Machines take me by surprise with great frequency’, usually because he had misunderstood their function, or calculated something wrongly. In such cases, he wondered, was the surprise ‘due to some creative mental act on my part’ – or did it ‘reflect credit on the machine’? Turing felt that this objection was a dead end as it led back

The name given to this new view of life, which extends far beyond the operation of HGT, is symbiosis. In opposition to the violent and competitive account of life’s emergence given by Darwinian evolution, symbiosis proposes that we are instead the product of cooperation, interaction and mutual dependence. This vision of life is profoundly ecologica