Viewpoint — Digital gods and human extinction: Will we be the first species ever to design our own descendants?

artificial intelligence brain think illustration md
Credit: Creazilla (CC0 1.0)

[Sam] Altman said…in a 2016 interview with The New Yorker. “We need to level up humans,” he declares, “because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever.” He elaborates: “The merge has begun — and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the AI or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud,” to which he adds, “I’d love that.”

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But would merging with AI actually guarantee “our” survival? No. If humanity were digitized, we would become an entirely different species — the same kind as [artificial superintelligence]. Altman is thus saying that the only way for humanity to avoid extinction is to go extinct. Either the ASI “will kill us all,” or we will “uplevel” by abandoning our biological substrate and become something fundamentally different from Homo sapiens. Both cases will result in human extinction.

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