Happy Sunday friends,
It has been an exhausting week for all of us. Watching Trump and Musk sabotage Ukraine to help Putin has been infuriating. The non-stop displays of sadism and mental illness from the American government, including the White House and Pentagon, are nauseating. And the behavior of the AI industry is deeply alarming.
My last article on Anti-Humanism was the result of more than a hundred hours of trying to work out what connects all of these feelings—anger, disgust, alarm. It was the byproduct of six years of research and 57 years of experience puzzling through what these wildly different groups could have in common. And it built on the work of countless people who came before me.
I say this not as a boast, but as an example of how a human works. I am a motivated, independently regulated system of physical matter. I had an emotional, “gut” reaction to my environment that I wanted to understand more. I used the tools available, including my own knowledge interfacing with others’ to produce an artifact that I hope can help living humans.
No chatbot can replace me. Or you. Or anyone. Intelligence is about existing in the physical world and adapting to your environment in a way that makes you—or your environment—more viable. It is never going to be matrix multiplication in an Nvidia chip.
Human Superintelligence (HSI): a theoretical property of humanity in which higher-order intelligence can emerge from increasing human connectivity.
I believe the idea of “artificial superintelligence” (ASI) will be seen historically as a fad, a fancy pet rock. The real superintelligence remains human.
HSI > ASI
Please join me and our weekly human superintelligence meeting, where real living human beings try to learn things from one another! I will give a short talk on what I found writing about Anti-Humanism and open the floor to questions and comments on any topic. It’s always a great conversation. Hope to see you! Details below.