I have set out to write a new book about the onset of artificial intelligence that I hope will be published in the near future.
For more than twenty years, I have been interested in a question that is both simple and extraordinarily difficult: why do human beings continue to repeat patterns that we know cause suffering?
Long before artificial intelligence entered our daily lives, I wrote about personality, power, fear, control, consciousness and our capacity to interrupt the patterns that govern so much of human behaviour. I also spent much of my working life trying to lead from a different set of principles—trust, honesty, compassion, courage, accountability and respect.
AI has not created the human condition.
It has illuminated it.
We have now created an intelligence capable of learning from our extraordinary curiosity, creativity, knowledge and generosity—and from our greed, domination, tribalism, deception, violence and fear.
The question may therefore be less about what artificial intelligence will become than what part of ourselves we will teach it to become.
For much of my life, these ideas seemed to belong somewhere beyond the horizon—Oceans Beyond, perhaps.
And now we have arrived at a very different point.
A Critical Condition.