Some people wonder what will happen when we have super-intelligent AIs… Will we lose our purpose in life? Will life be worth living? Or do we need to stop working on AI immediately? If you are afraid of losing your purpose in life post-AI, then it might be time for you to re-evaluate it pre-AI.
The Illusion
It is easy to think that we have a purpose in our lives, each person fighting for their flame of life. One quick way of finding purpose in what you are doing is by turning to a religion and accepting your mission as you are told in the book. Many people would be satisfied with such an approach to life – that’s how the ancient religions survived through the history of human evolution. Old religions somehow were capable of clawing into the large groups of human brains. However, let’s put the religion aside and make a case for people living their lives without believing in one. How do these people live? Do they have a purpose in life? Well, if you think religious people can live because it is the religion that gives one a purpose in life, then your view of life is not absolutely right. A purpose, my friend, is the greatest illusion in life, even greater than the religion itself. A purpose can be anything, including the things brought by your religion. If you don’t believe in any religion, then you find a non-religious purpose in your life; you create your own purpose, your own religion in a sense. You may think your grand purpose in life is to become a millionaire, or to make a great scientific contribution to be remembered by, or to have a family, or something else… Whatever your purpose might be, it is an illusion… an illusion that gives a meaning to your actions… that helps you to judge and improve in your own terms. If every action you take in life were utterly meaningless and incomparable to any other, then why would you take any? The word “meaning” carries a heavy load here. So, let’s break it down. A meaning is something that emerges after you question the reasonableness of an action you take toward your purpose. If an action you take helps you get closer to where your purpose demands you to be, then it is a meaningful one; otherwise, you will get the feeling of wasting time on a bunch of nonsense. That means, when people ask about the meaning of life, they are actually asking about the purpose of their lives. Because without a purpose, there is no meaning to anything. This is not to say that after having a purpose, you get the true meaning of things in life. If your world model is not good enough to make accurate predictions, the true meaning of your actions may be different than what is revealed to your first-person experience. This much being said about the meaning, let’s get back to the illusion part once again.
Should we be worried because our purposes are illusions? How would I know? Whether your worry has a meaning to it or is a complete waste of your time depends on what your purpose is, remember? So, if you find yourself meaningfully worrying about whether your purpose is an illusion or not, then somewhere in your “purpose” paragraph encoded in your brain, there is probably a sentence telling you that it needs to be real. Some people would worry if they have a real purpose in life because of this sentence, and some people would not worry at all because their world model told them the purpose they have is as real as it gets. What happens underneath is still to be speculated about. Do they internally inject bias into their world models to believe that their purpose is not an illusion, so that they can live a worry-free life (from this aspect at least)? Or have their world models just evolved to believe this? Who knows..? However, they are not the ones who live without bothering if their purpose is real; there is another group of people who are also not bothered by this. It is the group of people who think that their purpose is an illusion and always will be, regardless of the thing(s) they choose to pursue in life. They don’t have to bother because their purpose tells them it doesn’t need to be real… at least more real than their lives are. Besides these people, there are others whose purpose tells them it needs to be real, but their world models predict “nothing is real”, and these people may usually end up getting depressed or killing themselves eventually. This is such a serious matter for people because our brains tend to constantly overwhelm us with questions that we are incapable of answering.
Are we better off dead?
Let’s assume that all the things you could have ever done are already being done by some entity called a super-intelligent agent. What would you feel? You read a book, the agent can also read a book… faster than you. You are a good drawer, the agent can also draw pictures… with finer details. You are an F1 racer, the agent can also drive a car… with more accuracy and control. You are a programmer, the agent can also write code… with no bugs and more efficiency. You are a TV news propagandist, the agent can also make propaganda and grift… with more social engineering and deceptiveness. If this kind of future is what awaits us ahead, a lot of people may get upset when they realize what they been considered very good at doing is now stolen away from them or when they realize their purpose in doing those things was not the purpose they thought they followed. Humans being humans, you know: the paradoxical nature of humans. We want two things to happen simultaneously, but one of the things cannot coexist with the other. Yet we fail to understand it; if it sounds good enough, we want to have it no matter what… even if it is literally impossible sometimes. So, let’s continue with our imaginary “super-intelligent agent making us obsolete” thing.
It is time to ask yourself to what extent you love the thing you love doing. Would you still be doing it if it weren’t profitable? Would you still be doing it if you worked in a different job? Would you still be doing it if it made you lose sleep at night? Would you still be doing it if it meant losing some of your relationships? If you answer “yes” or something that goes in the line of “I would try doing it”, then the super-intelligent agent will probably not break your will. It may make you broke, but it will not be able to blow off your flame easily. The thing about our purpose is that many of us want to live a life with good earnings, and we sometimes lie to ourselves by telling ourselves that what we are really passionate about is the job we are doing. Underneath, many of us may not have ever witnessed what poverty feels like, what starvation feels like, what suffering feels like… There is a dark face of this world that many of us haven’t faced. It is these dark times that show what one is really passionate about. If you are working in a job you hate because you don’t want to starve to death, but you are trying to do the thing you really love whenever you find a chance in the madness of life, then that sounds like a passion. You may want to get a better job to earn more and live more comfortably, but if this is your whole identity and purpose in life, then the agent may wreck you pretty easily. Why? Because all you care about is the external material instead of the pursuit of what lies within. There are some things that no amount of money can buy… I will give an example to illustrate my point: you can earn a billion dollars a day and still not have a good physique and a healthy body; you can earn a billion dollars a day and still be dumb and ignorant. There are things that you have to put your effort into in order to possess them. Even if it were possible to literally buy anything with money and you were still broke, then you would still need to do something to get what you want, unless you decide to kill yourself. The middle ground between life and death is pathos; it is not quite like living and not quite like dying.
Are you still afraid of the agent? The agent can earn vastly more money than you ever will, but it cannot improve on your behalf. You can improve on your own behalf. It cannot enjoy doing the thing you love doing on your behalf. You can enjoy doing the thing you love doing on your behalf. Chess players have turned into little kids playing chess against chess bots. Winning the bots may have become impossible at this point. Do we see lots of chess players hanging themselves from bridges all over the world? No. Why? Because they are probably after the pleasure they get from playing chess, discovering something new about themselves, as well as the game of chess, by playing. If you are not doing the thing you highly speak of when crowded, when you are alone, then you do not really highly think of it, neither when alone nor when crowded.