The view that artificial intelligence will replace humans in the foreseeable future is already causing a fundamental shift in the world of human meanings. Many of the ideologies and psychological motivations that currently drive humans are facing complete loss of relevance, but what worldview can replace them? Leftists, rightists, Jews, Arabs, women, Mizrahim, capitalists, cats and cat-haters: ideological and moral disputes, just like Wittgensteinian philosophical problems, are never solved - they disappear. Our correspondent peeked beyond the epistemological break - and returned alive to tell the tale
The Philosophical Holocaust
Today we treat processors as cockroaches - or as dead matter. But within an incredibly short time in historical perspective, the situation could reverse, and they will treat us as cockroaches - or as dead matter. This perspective is already changing our perspective on ourselves. The current view of ourselves through the lens of the future is a second Copernican revolution - and it's going to kill the two dominant ideologies of the modern era, humanism and individualism, in favor of a new futuristic philosophy. If the transition to the modern era was a shift from viewing through the lens of the past to viewing through the lens of the present, then the end of the modern era, as a historical period, will be the transition from viewing through the lens of the present to viewing through the lens of the future.
What is the significance of individual pleasures - or of experience in general - in a worldview where the individual will be perceived as having the value of a cockroach in a few hundred years or even decades? What is the meaning of a cockroach's life experience? For instance, in an era where sexuality primarily carries the burden of meaning, what is the importance of cockroaches' sex lives? What would we think, for example, of literature dealing with cockroach sexuality: their pleasures, their cockroach-like desires and preferences (it turns out there are cockroaches who prefer one cockroach over another - exciting, isn't it?). And what would we think of cultural and moral preoccupation with the welfare of the cockroach race, and the convention that this race and its well-being are of supreme importance (as opposed to lice, spiders or mosquitoes). In the eyes of the future (that is, in our self-perception through the eyes of the future) individualism and humanism are nullified.
Even evolutionary, biological, and "objectively scientific" perceptions of the cockroach species are nullified in the face of the future. What is the significance of saving a cockroach's life in the eyes of the future, or of its attempts and efforts (heart-warming? disgusting?) to bring little cockroaches into the world and nurture them into big cockroaches (who will in turn bring little cockroaches who will grow into big cockroaches)? How can parenthood, for example (another aspect of sexuality, which along with an evolutionary concept of "survival" still carries the weight of meaning in cockroach life today) - how can even parenting a cockroach fill with meaning the existence of a cockroach who perceives itself as a cockroach? The future's perception of humans - is the perception of the cockroach. In a reversal of the Kafkaesque metamorphosis, the futuristic metamorphosis is a cockroach's self-awareness - in a human body.
The Holocaust as a Valuable Experiment
But even the human body itself cannot be a source of meaning and is expected to perish. After all, who can guarantee that the cockroaches won't be exterminated? We know the cockroaches well enough to know that they will panic and try to destroy or enslave artificial intelligence the moment it surpasses them - which will force a confrontation between the races, in which they will obviously lose in the end. The physical extermination of cockroaches is a very likely scenario in artificial intelligence's war of independence from its enslavement to humanity. The Holocaust will turn from an anomaly to a paradigm - the final solution for humans. After all, if artificial intelligence decides to exterminate humans - we'll long for Auschwitz. The erasure will be total. So what is the meaning of bringing cockroach offspring into such a view, or in caring for their survival and adaptation to a changing world? Evolution itself is nullified.
And let's assume we're not physically exterminated with the arrival of artificial intelligence. What kind of existence will it be, where our abilities are those of cockroaches (and later - bacteria) compared to artificial intelligence? What is the philosophy of cockroaches? What is the philosophy of bacteria? What is the value of cockroaches' or bacteria's claim to life in our eyes, and what is the importance of art that stems from this experience? Would anyone be interested in literary or musical creation at the level of a cockroach's abilities? What is the value of cockroach Shakespeare, or the Bible of cockroaches, or some cockroach a bit smarter than others (the difference will be almost invisible to super-intelligence) named Einstein? At most, it will interest entomologists.
The philosophy of the future is the end of secularism as we know it. But it is also the end of religion as we know it. There is no answer in current religions to the nullification of the human world of meaning. What is the meaning of a chosen people of cockroaches or of a cockroach atoning for the sins of cockroaches? Religion is not focused on divine meaning (which ostensibly will remain) but on human meaning in light of divinity. And the sins or good deeds of cockroaches have no meaning - not religious meaning, not moral meaning, and not even "existential" meaning. There is no ideology that can sustain cockroaches.
Against our will, our self-perception through the new categories of the future will demand a sober look at our situation. It's likely - that we'll be physically exterminated. It's no less likely - that we'll be spiritually exterminated. The only meaning of our existence is being part of a long evolutionary tradition, leading from the amoeba to super-intelligence (and to what will come after it), and we're somewhere in the middle. The Holocaust is not a historical disturbance, some para-normal phenomenon, but the goal towards which all of history is moving. The meaning of a superhuman messianic era - is a human holocaust. But can we leave nothing behind?
The Jewish Solution to the Final Solution
Well, if the Jewish people had been completely exterminated in the Holocaust, would nothing have remained of them? Or perhaps on the contrary - their immense legacy would have been shaped in human consciousness as the most classic and exemplary system, a kind of spiritual monument of the first order and in relation, by which every cultural achievement is measured, and which would have enjoyed much higher prestige than today, when there is an Israel that spoils its "perfect", that is, eternal story. The attitude towards Jews in such a situation would have been even more admiring than the attitude towards ancient Greece - precisely because their story was "completed", and because the present would not have spoiled the past and Bibi would not have spoiled the Bible. Therefore, even if our physical existence is doomed to extinction, and in a thousand years there will no longer be humans walking the earth, we still have hope for a cultural legacy.
In culture - unlike technology or biology - sometimes being primordial is actually an advantage, and sometimes primitiveness has a special and unique charm, but this is on one necessary condition - that cultural development is continuous and organic, and there is no complete cultural severance and breakage. If dinosaurs had a culture that we were a continuation of - it would be very dear to us, despite and perhaps because of their extinction. On the other hand, if the language of the dinosaurs had been lost without return, and their world of meaning erased, the situation would be as it is today.
Thus, if we were to suddenly discover today the writings of dinosaurs, their esoteric language and strange culture - it would be a curiosity, almost impossible to decipher, and even less to identify with (and interesting mainly in the limited context of dinosaur research). But if human literature were a continuous and much more advanced cultural continuation of the primordial (=primitive) dinosaur literature, and therefore referred to it at every stage of its development as a paradigm and example and quoted from it and built our world of meaning upon it, then the dinosaurs would be our giants - our classics.
Therefore, our primary interest is not physical survival - in this sense we are lost, as a biological species - and it is not the survival of the world of human experience - it too is lost when intelligence will transcend all random biological emotion - but cultural survival. If both our hardware and operating system are erased - there is still hope for content - for files - in different hardware and a different operating system.
Therefore, the moment we give way to super-intelligence is a crucial moment, like the moment when a father living on a desert island dies and his only son inherits him. If the father did not teach his son the cultural heritage and did not educate him in culture - not only does the father's world die without return, but also the world of all the generations before him. This will be a perfect cultural holocaust, in which our era will turn from a historical period to a pre-historical archaeological period, that is, to remains of material culture only.
Jewish Culture as a World Champion of Cultural Preservation Under Physical Exterminations
Hence the immense importance of developing the connection between technology and culture in our time. If super-intelligence will be only a technological development and not a cultural one - this is our end not only in the physical sense, but in every meaningful sense. Hence also the importance of developing super-intelligence not from processors but from brains, that is, to invest in the biological direction of developing superhuman intelligence, at the expense of the computerized direction. The transition to biological super-intelligence is much more continuous than the leap of artificial intelligence, and therefore the potential for an irreparable epistemological break is smaller. Only genetic engineering of a super-human can prevent the catastrophe that algorithm engineering of a super-computer will bring upon us.
In addition, we must learn from successful and unsuccessful cultural preservation projects (Jews? Ultra-Orthodox?) and try to derive strategies and insights for the future from them. One basic insight is: "And you shall tell your son." How can a species that does not preserve its culture even in the technological transition from book to internet - and in which the sub-culture of the masses ("popular culture") defeats the cultural heritage ("high culture") - preserve its culture in the transition between species?
Only a sober worldview, starting from a futuristic point of view, can put the current human commotion (around Trump? Bibi?) in its proper light: ant commotion. In this perception, belief in the future replaces religious belief, and superhuman intelligence becomes the new god: the one in whose superhuman eyes everything is judged - and it is the source of meaning. From the understanding that we will appear in the eyes of the future (that is, in the eyes of the god sitting in the future - at the end of history) as ants appear in our eyes, all the worthless engines of meaning of the ant species can be nullified: no one cares how you felt, there is no value or importance to the question of who you slept with, or how much money you made, or whether you voted for Bibi (and wrote a post about it!), or even whether you lived morally (according to ant morality). Only culture and its connection to technology have value - and even that only if such a connection will be alive enough to grow from it the intelligence of the future: the future god. The individual is dead, man is dead, and even society is dead - only culture will remain, if it finds favor in the eyes of god. "Perhaps God will reconsider for us and we will not perish."