The Next Great Divide

A news story caught my eye a few weeks back. I’ve been meaning to write to you about it.

In a recent blog post, brain-machine interface startup Neuralink gave an update on its second implant recipient. His name is Alex, and he got his implant in July. Alex has no use of his limbs due to a spinal cord injury.

Neuralink says the implant is working well. So well, in fact, that Alex is using it to play the video game Counter Strike 2. He can control a mouse cursor, and so take aim inside the game, with his mind.

As you all know, I’m pretty obsessed with the idea that humans are about to merge with our machines. Specifically, I’m obsessed with the implications of that merging.

I want to share more of my thoughts on this subject. To that end, below is an excerpt from a recent essay I wrote for The Exponentialist, my technology-focused research service.

Amid the technology revolution now unfolding around us, a new polarity is emerging. It’s between those who would accelerate that revolution, and those who want desperately to slow it down.

Of course, this division in various guises is far from new. There have always been people who are keen on technology and those who are not. And those propensities have helped fuel broader social and political movements, such as the Luddite movement in 19th-century England.

But now, we’re amid a shift on this front. The increasing dominance of technology as a world historical force means that this division is becoming both more acute and more consequential. You can see it happening across so many of the big issues we face. The world is dividing into two parties: those who want to lean into technology, and those who want to lean out.

Look at energy. On one side are those who are pushing for vastly more energy production, including the introduction of next-generation nuclear technologies that, they say, can accelerate us into a world of near-free electricity and material abundance.?

On the other side are those who say we should reject nuclear. And if doing so means using less energy, say these critics, then maybe that’s for the best. At the more radical end of this group are the degrowthers we’ve already touched on: those who say that we in the Global North should execute a planned scaling back of our energy use in order to avert a looming and existential environmental crisis.

These views don’t fall neatly across the traditional conservative vs progressive spectrum that we typically use to make sense of our political choices. They’re best understood as manifestations of a new governing polarisation: accelerate vs deccelerate.

Where is all this heading?

Augmented and Organic

Across the coming years, accelerate vs deccelerate will become a faultline through our societies.

In all kinds of ways, social and political tensions will start to agglomerate around this division. The mainstream political parties will have to respond. We may even see the birth of new popular parties — something like the Acceleration Party — as a result of all this. After all, the current mainstream conservative and progressive parties were born in the wake of the first Industrial Revolution and the tech-induced disruption to which it gave rise.

My working theory is that over time this will become the defining split in our societies. In all kinds of ways, people will order their lives and make choices according to the relationship they want to build with the exponential technologies emerging around them.

But the end game here goes even deeper.?

Ultimately, this polarisation will revolve around those who repudiate the technologies now taking shape around us, and those who would not only use intelligent machines but become one with them. Become, as they will see it, something more than human.?

What’s coming, then, is the emergence of two radically different kinds of humans. Those who are augmented by powerful technologies, and those who are not.

This is the future that Ray Kurzweil points to in his new book The Singularity is Nearer, published a couple of months ago. It’s the sequel to the iconic 2005 book The Singularity is Near, which brought news of the technological singularity into the mainstream.

Kurzweil believes that we’ll eventually build ultra-sophisticated brain-machine interfaces, that allow people instant and direct access to the cloud. And when humans merge with superintelligent AI, he says, that will amount to a definitive breakpoint in human affairs. A fresh start for history. It’s an analysis he adheres to in his latest work, too.

Kurzweil isn’t the only superstar futurist to have written about this. The idea that humans will soon merge with AI is at the heart of Yuval Harari’s 2015 smash hit Homo Deus.?

Harari’s vision of human-AI merging aligns with Kurzweil’s. When humans merge with AI, says Harari, that will mark the end of human history as we know it and the start of something new; a post-human era.

When Homo Deus was published, these speculations seemed a little fanciful. Today, not so much. And that’s not down only to the great leap forward we’ve taken with AI. Technologies of machine-brain interface are also advancing fast.?

As I wrote about briefly last month, Elon Musk’s Neuralink recently put its first brain implant into a living human. The chip allows 30-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who is paralysed from the neck down, to control a cursor on a screen, and even to play video games, using his mind.?

The results have been far from perfect; since the implant was inserted its performance has degraded. But this is day zero. The technology will only get better from here. And eventually we’ll develop other forms of brain-machine interface. Kurzweil says they will take the form of nanobots that we’ll ingest. They will, he says, travel to the brain and connect to hundreds of thousands of neurons, allowing for complex communication between our brains and the cloud.

What am I driving at here?

Once brain-machine interfaces of this kind become safe and affordable, everyone will face a choice. To augment my brain, or not? To become one with the machines, and with silicon-based superintelligence, or to remain an entirely organic human creature?

This dilemma, and the choices people will make around it, will become the most acute and final incarnation of the accelerate vs deccelerate split.

And it’s this dimension of human-machine merging that is so often missing from the most famous accounts of it, including those by Kurzweil and Harari.?

They see human merging with AI as a definitive breakpoint — a singularity — in human history. But they tend to talk as though human-machine merging is a universal future that will encompass every person on Earth, and that brings with it a clear before and after. As though, that is, one day we will all wake up and find ourselves in a definitely new era, with the Before Times now only a distant memory.

In reality, of course, it won’t be like that. Even when brain-machine interfaces are safe and affordable, only a minority of people — at least at first — will opt to use them. The result will be a splintering of our societies into those who are augmented by superintelligence and those who are not.

In the end we face the emergence of two radically different kinds of humans. Two parties, with different approaches when it comes to superintelligence, and with different and often opposing sets of interests. Far from a definitive post-human era, then, this development is likely to be characterised by something all too human: conflict between people with radically different outlooks, value systems, and ways of living.

Rewind 50,000 years, and the world was populated by two different species of human: we homo sapiens and our neanderthal cousins. If you accept that some people will eventually merge with AI, then you accept we’re heading back towards a world of multiple human species. Where does it all lead??

Should augmented humans be allowed to hoover up all the best jobs and positions of power, or should some be held over for organic humans? What is the best way to run our education system when some children are augmented by AI and some are not? What constitutes truly beautiful art? Who should we elect as President, an augmented or organic citizen?

Where will this natural tension between the interests of the augmented and non-augmented lead? Social tension? Political debate? Violent conflict?

Our conventional political analysis, and the conservative vs progressive framework, is still founded in the language of class difference. That is, in the language that defines the relationship of an individual citizen to the broader techno-capitalist machine: owner, manager, worker, and so on. But that language is now largely redundant. Instead, we’re moving towards a socio-political world not shaped by class difference, but by a deeper division around technology. That division is accelerate vs deccelerate, and in its final and most acute form it is augmented vs organic.

So what does this mean for the societies we live in? How will we negotiate this conflict? These are deep questions, and I’ll have lots to say on them here in future. But let’s bring this to a close with some first thoughts.

Infinite and Embodied

My thinking on this is informed by the work of the great philosopher Isaiah Berlin and his doctrine of value pluralism.

Berlin was driven by a unique and compelling vision of human life. He believed that our lives are shaped by core values — think values such as security, freedom, status, and meaning — that are equally legitimate but often incompatible with one another. This means that any single person is a nexus of constant and unresolvable conflict, as they find themselves torn between the competing demands of these values.?

All of us, for example, feel the inherent tension between freedom and security. If we want to be totally free to do whatever we want and go wherever we please, that means accepting that we will be less safe. The two values often oppose one another, and each of us is constantly trading one off against the other. Crucially, there’s no single right answer when it comes to the balance we should strike. There are many legitimate accommodations, and each of us has to find one that works for us today.

Life is full of values that compete with one another in this way. And just as with freedom and security, there is often no single right answer when it comes to how to balance one value against another. I will find an accommodation I can live with; you will find a different one. This, said Berlin, is a deep and inescapable truth about human life. And what’s important, said believed, is that we build societies in which people are free to construct, and live by, the accommodations that they choose.

My point here? Value pluralism has important things to tell us about how we deal with the coming age of augmented vs organic humans.

First, we must understand that this division — and the broader accelerate vs deccelerate polarity — are founded in two eternal and mutually opposing sides of human nature. That is, the side of us that is infinite and the side that is finite and embodied.

An AI is a kind of infinite information processor. An ape is an embodied creature destined to live within the bounds of its given self. We alone — alone, that is, as far as we know — are both. This gives rise to a tension in us that can never be resolved, because it is born of two opposing but equally valid sides of our nature. That tension is, perhaps, the best definition we can offer of what it is to be human.

There is the part in each of us that wants to transcend, to do more, to be more. Then there is the part that wants to lean into our creaturely and embodied selves. Both are equally legitimate parts of our nature. And the augmented vs organic division that is coming is founded in this deeper and inescapable tension.

That means that, just as with freedom and security, there is no single right answer when it comes to accelerate vs decelerate, or augmented vs non-augmented. Instead, many different and equally legitimate accommodations are possible. People will find endless ways to live out their own views.

What we need to do, then, is construct societies in which people are free to make and live by their own choices. Free to construct their own kind of relationship with exponential technologies and intelligent machines. Whether that means becoming one with AI and upgrading their personal intelligence to superhuman heights, or living off-grid with not even an internet connection to their name.?

Some people will want to inhabit those extremes: of total embrace or total repudiation of tech. Many others will want to live somewhere in between. The key challenge will be to create societies in which these groups, with their radically different outlooks and priorities, can live with one another.

And here’s the thing: we’ve faced this kind of challenge before.?

At the birth of modernity we built a socio-political system around the primary source of conflict of the age: religious belief. The ideology that underpinned that system was liberalism. I’m not using the word liberal, here, in its contemporary, primarily north-American sense to mean left wing. I’m tapping back to the much deeper roots of the word, to signify a system that prioritises the freedom of the individual to worship and live as he or she wishes, free from interference from government or any other power.

This was the fundamental idea of liberalism. It was about allowing groups of people with radically different outlooks (driven primarily, at that time, by different religious beliefs) to live together peacefully.

But today we’ve allowed a zombie liberalism to take hold. Our liberalism has lost touch with its roots in the management of radical human difference. It has instead, and perversely, set its sights on a single destination for every person: a Universal Civilisation founded in parliamentary democracies, markets, and maximum technology for all.

If we’re going to navigate the coming Exponential Age, we urgently need to evolve towards a new system. We must build a post-liberalism founded in the need to accommodate not differences in religious belief, but differences in outlook when it comes to the fundamental shaping force in our societies now, which is technology.?

We need a multi-speed modernity, in which people are free to choose their own kind of relationship with intelligent machines. And in which the many tensions between augmented and non-augmented humans can be settled peacefully.

This is a challenge hardly anyone is talking about. But I’m ever more convinced that it is the central collective challenge we face. The AI revolution is only gathering speed. Technologies of human-machine interface are coming. People are so awed by the scale of the change — it will be the end of history as we know it! — that they’re missing what won’t change, and that is the human propensity for group conflict.?

Conflict is the eternal constant of human history. In the so-called post-human era, it’s not going to disappear. In fact, it will be amplified by the enormous new differences technology opens between us.

That is a core, and bracing, truth of the coming Exponential Age. And one we’ll be diving much deeper into in future, in all kinds of ways.

As ever, I’ll keep watching.

Go Exponential

Thanks for reading this instalment.

Remember, it was an excerpt from an essay first sent to subscribers of my premium research service, The Exponentialist.

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