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How We Misunderstand AI
We keep looking for AI that looks like us and missing what’s right in front of our eyes
We define AI so narrowly that we miss it, all around us already. Artificial Intelligence means both as smart as us and as dumb as us. As big as us and also as small. We are looking for ourselves when we should be looking for something else.
Self
The biggest problem is our conception of the individual self. Thus we look for individual AIs, but as the Buddha told us 2,600 years ago, even the human self doesn’t really exist. I spent years in Western Philosophy classes going over the contradictions in this assumption which just go away if you don’t assume it.
The truth is that evolution doesn’t act on the individual level much at all. The individual man is about as relevant as the individual scrotum. Evolution happens at the species level, where our code is mixed together. Yet we fixate on the brief moments where it’s separated, like a baseball player clutching his balls.
If you start from the assumption that there’s nothing sacrosanct about the self, you can start to see other selves…
