Human Exceptionalism

Could AI be a diversion rather than our Magnus Opus? we are all so hyper-fixated on our inevitable usurping from science that we do not see the rug pulled from beneath our feet. But, by what? Epistemic dependence, AI encourages us to externalise our own epistemic authority. An inversion of a technological singularity, an irony of AI’s final winter and all the science fiction that fear-mongered. We end up less capable of independence through our own autonomy, AI is an Ouroboros of dependency. This leads to a question of how exceptional are humans if our own divine spark could end up being our dependency?

Is human consciousness actually the pinnacle of not just the animal kingdom, but anything at all? Or, is it the perspective from which we have mistakenly and delusionally claimed ourselves so. Humans create systems in which they assign the value, be it intentionally or not. We are simultaneously the measuring instrument and the object being measured. Maybe consciousness is entirely the Cartesian demon (a devil that misdirects us of what we perceive true) of anthropomorphism. Our lived experience is so superfluous that we assume they must represent something profound, exceptional, unique in terms of metaphysically. Put another way, we get so hung up on our divine spark that we call it divine when it’s merely a spark. Consciousness is cosmically significant because subjective experience gives rise to the feeling of significance.

Humans are messy biological affairs, we function parasitically at times, inherently primal and self-destructive to some form or other. There’s no doubt we rule this planet, but we have made Frankenstein’s monster from it and it is inadvertently killing us. Humans are strange even biologically, our life spans are extremely unremarkable, we have to breathe oxygen yet it slowly kills us, rather paradoxically. We have evolved elaborate antioxidant and repair mechanisms to mitigate this damage, but they are imperfect. Our ageing succumbs to entropy worse than turtles and plankton, trees, and worst of all we feel the sensations of it more than all others. Admittedly, biological longevity is not synonymous with evolutionary sophistication, but we are more of an experiment in nature than an efficient design. We are cursed Gods, assembling on one another in hopes of creating this singularity.

A kind of technological singularity that cannot possibly be achieved with the human still intact. The problem with transhumanism is it becomes the ship of Theseus. Our Qualia may be less of a key and more the ultimate gatekeeper, a kind of flame fanning until our work is done and we have become the stepping stones for whatever next. It’s hard because our evolution is compared to things vastly less technical, the dinosaurs had a massive amount of time more, 165 million years to 300,000, yet, built no rockets. What if there are species that have done what has taken us thousands of years in what we call a minute? Then our divine spark is a spark compared to a fire, and that to an inferno, or Hell itself. Time itself is a biological constraint to the human. Our fictional mind is our golden egg right now, it’s the thing we lord over AI and the rest of the animal kingdom, but even fiction has limits, especially in a biased mind locked into an eternal human centric reality. Like Baudrillard, it’s endless echoes from a source, a slow deformation of what was once close to novel.

The mass of us are also taking credit for the achievements of few. Humans claim we created relativity, but Einstein and Newton before him and so on along with a team of physicist’s did that, not me or the man across the road. Newton understood this as standing on the shoulders of giants, but a giant is only tall when relative. Our success rate per capita of the total population is more than likely painfully tragic, which ends the whole efficiency of the human rather embarrassingly. The individual is not the complete intellectual unit, but we are no hive either. Cognition becomes distributed through systems, then the technological singularity, the assembling of all human effort, falls into a rather dark potentiality, irrelevancy to what ever transcends. The irony is not lost on me that I have cried human made value, then judge us by merit and life-span.