Thoughts of a Possible Future Utopia
It is the act of over-thinking which makes humans special. That blanket statement does ignore the many examples of non-human consciousness or sentience which are being discussed by other scientists and naturalists, whom I support wholeheartedly. However, for my argument here, we are the over-thinkers. Our realm is the stars, we look at the universe and seem to be captured by the incomprehensible. My recent research on bats has shown me that we vastly underestimate the relationship between ourselves and our flying relatives. For example, bats are responsible for the genesis and future feasibility of the tequila and durian industries in Mexico and Malaysia respectively.
Often, we do not acknowledge the role wild animals play in human societies of their own accord, to the benefit of both species. However, in the realms of the mind, it is beyond doubt that we humans are a rare and profoundly intelligent sort of being. The places we have been able to get to have not been solely determined by biology, but instead based on our ability to turn innocuous, often inanimate parts of surroundings into tools designed by and for the human enterprise.
Tools are a thing we need to think more carefully about in the wake of a technological revolution which will re-shape the way humans operate, and what the landscape we operate in looks like. In Andrew Yang’s recent election campaign, the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) caused a stir, perhaps because people are finally becoming aware of what automation means. Car manufacture revels in the idea of taking humans out of the production line, and in the wake of a pandemic where Amazon has done so well, dismantling factory floor dependency on humans is a business model which makes sense. Even though it could be said that hand-crafted is a desired element of the production, those avenues of manufacture are being replaced by faster machine-based alternatives. It is all well and good to say that handmade Kashmiri rugs are the best available, and quite another to dismiss the bargains provided by factory-made Chinese alternatives. The model of human endeavour will likely continue to become based more on the cheapness of labour, or in other words; whether humans can do the job for less money than an automated alternative. The idea of a handcrafted item is becoming more and more expensive in the face of commercial factories with a profit-driven agenda. In the wake of the Andrew Yang presidential run, which was largely focused on labour dispossession by machines, discussions in New Zealand have also included UBI leading up to the upcoming election. Perhaps current discourses signal a alteration in public consciousness in regard to altering economic systems, although it is unclear what that a UBI means for the future of humanity.
Human ingenuity has historically been based on the ability to create an alternative reality out of the resources at hand. In the beginning, when we were afraid of the dark, we learned to smash rocks or rubs sticks together, and thus we tamed fire. Point of notice; the flame was not man-made per se, but it can be described that way for my purposes. There was no need to create fire, because no other animal within human proximity had done so (the fire hawk facilitates fire for its gain but does not produce it through tool use). Evolution had provided no mutation which exclusively demanded fire use, and it is imaginable that humans could have persisted without fire, although our culture and society would have looked entirely different. History has shown us that there are various ways of thinking about ourselves as human, but that not many of them boil down to the initial biological demands of our species. The society that we often consider inevitable in hindsight, has never been predicted in its actual form.
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People of the middle-aged persuasion may remember the film Blade Runner, and that we were supposed to be flying around in cars by 2019. Although it is a glib example, based on fantasy, it serves the purposes of this essay, because science fiction can be prescient. However, even when it is not, plots serve the human imagination. Fans begin to expect the technological advancements witnessed in fantasy realms to appear in the real world. Undoubtedly, the technological advancements made by humans are astounding, but we can only look back to our predecessors in hindsight and imagine that they were thinking about our present. People like Alexander Graham Bell or Ernest Rutherford could only guess how their achievements would manifest in the future.
The future is always going to be reliant on interactions between different elements, especially in the case of humans. Our future, to discount the animals such as sperm whales that will live on in our futures (some whales can live to the ripe old age of 133), is going to look vastly different to our present. The way it changes will come down to how we interact with other species, including the technology we create.
I am stretching the biological definition of speciation beyond breaking point to describe the type of future I think we should work towards. A machine is algorithms with the delusion of grandeur, and I do not think we will create a machine consciousness equivalent to that of humans. However, the world we are creating will not need machines to be conscious for robots to take over and leave human destitute. I am hopeful that the machine-human interactions available to us in the future of generalised artificial intelligence will include mutually beneficial versions. In the words of the AI analogue character created by Terry Pratchett; “I think, therefore I do sums.” AI will not have thought in the way we understand it — even if we still do not understand human thought. The task ahead of humanity is to create AI which values the autonomy of other species, including us, so both societies reap the benefits provided by productive interactions.
The future is still up for grabs, and how we drive the technological movement is up to humans, so predictions can seem rather pointless. However, I will end on a proposition. If we can establish an inter-species philosophy of reciprocal utilitarianism, then humans can improve the way we interact with other animals — such as bats, saving billions of dollars in the process. We can design futures where our value is not sentimentalised and lost in conservation plans, but fully integrated into societies where generalised AI exists. A society which places positive interactions at its centre will likely perform optimally. While I would argue that bats are not treated appropriately in the present by humans, I am hopeful that the algorithms humans are designing can be trained to think about the world differently, perhaps facilitated by the fact that they will not have biological imperatives imprinted on their minds.
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