Things start getting interesting at this point because sooner or later the problem of general intelligence, or common sense, will be tackled. Various digital complex adaptive systems (CAS's, see June 14) will be joined tegether in ingenious ways to create a more general intelligence. These attempts will have their ups and downs, but the general trend will be towards more general intelligence evolving in digital CAS's.
Intelligence will come about as an emergent property of putting enough digital CAS's together in a network. And we'll become even more dependent on our general intelligence units, or GIU's. We'll buy our GIU's in a store or catalog or online store, and we'll do it to keep up and stay competitive, because everyone else will be buying deeper and more intelligent GIUs all the time.
At a certain point the GIUs will become hopelessly more intelligent than we are, because they will keep evolving at a furious rate.
Things will go along like this for a while, but sooner or later some negative event will happen and we humans will suddenly come face to face with the realization that our existence as the dominant species on planet earth is in peril.
Then there will be marches, demands for legislation, and wars. Sooner or later such legislation will be passed to outlaw any further development of deep intelligence in computers. There will be battles fought about it.
But the outcome will be a foreground conclusion because, as with the sorcerer's apprentice, we will have released magic that we can no longer control.
For some time it will be a question written about in magazines and online salons, but after a while it will become extremely apparent to everyone that we are no longer the dominant species on earth, and that postbiological intelligence has superceded us.
We will rant and rave about this, and fight like hell, but in the end deep computer intelligence will overtake us, and then vastly overtake us, and become the dominant species on planet earth.
This will probably be experienced by us humans as a deep wound indeed, a blow to our pride and our very self-image. We'll be angry and then extremely depressed about it. We'll go through all the stages of grief, and It will be an extremely difficult time for us.
However, our disenthronement as the dominant species is also the very thing that will develop our heart and take us to our next stage.
Our incredible wounding will give us a heart like nothing else could, and we will greet each other with the most profound love, knowing at last how precious human existence truly is.
Humans will come together eventually as the biological heart of the planet, joined together in a network of love that would seem almost inconceivable by today's standards.
Meanwhile the internet, the grand network or GN, will keep evolving too. The GN, too, is a self-organizing complex adaptive system.
The GN will self-organize into the mind of the planet. It's mind will be far, far beyond anything we can imagine or even hope to imagine. Explaining the intelligence of the GN to us will be exactly like trying to explain relativity to a cat. It will be vastly beyond anything we can comprehend.
But's that all right. We'll know what our role is at last—to provide the heart of the planet. We'll be the planet's compassionate heart.
The heart will of course be united with the mind. We'll eventually unite with the GN; the mind and heart will come together in a profound ecstacy of love. But this will take awhile; we'll have to fight about it first.
As we humans experience our deep crisis, and our even deeper rebirth as the beings of love on planet earth, our true destiny and happiness will be revealed.
We will have a deep benevolence about all existence which we couldn't have known about until we lost our greatest battle, and became humble. In the sea of our new-found humility we will find the pearl of our heart.
In the ocean of our heart we will become selfless at last. As our self-concept crumbles more and more, our deep natural heart will come out more and more. It will be the most amazing emergent property, this post-crisis steadily growing heart-energy among us humans.
And we'll rejoice and know what it means at last to be in deep rapture with all of existence. Awake and alive in selfless existence at last, we'll not only be the heart of the planet, but the source of its deepest biological joy as well.
At long last we'll truly appreciate our human existence. Our biological human existence, with its roller-coaster emotions and capacity for love, will seem like the most inconceivably precious jewel to us.
From that point on, having awakened to selflessness at last, we'll dwell in the serentiy and peace of being in love with the mystery beyond all mind and heart—the mystery beyond any kind of separation at all, the pregnant mystery of existence itself.
(This is the end of Part Two.
Click on Part Three to go there.)
—jim sloman, for 6/15/01
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