Prelude to the Rise of the Compassionate AI
“As technology is empowering our choices and we are getting something like the power of gods, you have to have something like the love and the wisdom of gods to wield that or you self-destruct.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger.
Oscillating between techno-pessimism and techno-optimism
What you will read here is the fifth iteration of my trying to make sense, in the last couple of years, of what on Earth is happening. Writing about it feels like not only shooting at a rapidly moving target but also with a gun whose barrel, my attention, keeps bending and twisting.
I present the current iteration with some trepidation because I don’t know how long it will be congruent with my evolving sensing and meaning-making, but here you go, anyway.
The larger story I’m living in is how artificial intelligence, the product of humanity’s general intellect, can contribute to humanity’s phase shift to something much more awesome for everybody than we have now. Yeah, I know all the dangers it represents, but enough people are focusing only on that, so I thought it’s OK to explore the non-dystopian possibilities, too. That’s just to warn you of a risk: if you’re dead set on AI destroying the world, you will find this piece hugely annoying.
Please don’t take me wrong. If and when we’ll have compassionate AI, it cannot be indifferent to the pain whose hard-earned competencies flew out of the window and away with the winds of AI-triggered changes. But I’m aware that we cannot change that. However, we can tune in with the coming world, which will bring more unprecedented goodness than harm. I don’t suggest ignoring the first in favor of the second. We can oscillate between the two poles and see what we learn from that oscillation. This particular project is dedicated to the positive pole.
The Rise of the Compassionate AI is an interactive, transmedia adventure in the making, corollary to the THREE MOUNTAINS discovery expedition and AI-assisted adventure game. As that mouthful sentence suggests, you can walk in it through various entrances as a reader/player, game co-designer, AI artist, video maker, or book contributor.
No, “compassionate AI” does not imply an AI with human-like compassion. Neither does AI have a killer instinct bent on exterminating all of us. As the Buddhists hold, compassion and wisdom are two wings of a bird that must be developed together to achieve great heights.
Elon Musk wants to give an AI tutor to every kid, which is laudable, but a wise tutor is about much more than knowledge. Tons of corporate HR departments are developing “AI coaches,” which is good for reducing the cost of employee training and increasing efficiency and profits, but the most significant benefits of AI for human development are far beyond that.
After its use by OpenAI, the phrase “for the benefit of all of humanity” became a staple of well-intentioned AI development efforts. It begs the question: what human developmental capabilities are required to generate omni-positive results in a world deeply divided by multiple fault lines?
It’s a complex question that can’t be addressed by drawing up a simplistic checklist. It’s one of the existential questions I aim to explore in The Rise of the Compassionate AI. It may become a co-authored, 4-volume transmedia “book” that corresponds to the four directions of our research at Future HOW, Center of Action Research for Regenerative Futures.
Below are the tentative titles and a small sample of the book’s themes, presented as questions. Note that most of them are high-level questions, from which more concrete and specific ones will unfold as the corresponding action research projects progress.
Synopsis
Vol. 1: AI-assisted Human Development
What are those higher stages in the metamodern model of human development, which we need to actualize at a large scale, with the help of AI, if we are to prevent Collapse or reduce the pain accompanying it and regenerate a new world afterward faster?
How can wisdom-guided AI be trained to become wisdom-enhancing AI, a companion of lifelong learners, helping them learn and evolve faster?
Can an interactive rendering of the metamodern model of human development can be used in AI-assisted vertical development to make it widely accessible?
What if the infinite game of AI shamans would also become a community artform?
Vol. 2: Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) in Human-AI Co-Creativity
What are the learning trajectories and architectures for transcontextual mutual learning across mission-oriented and epistemic communities that CHI can enhance?
How can organizations and communities, in fact, any human groups with an evolutionary purpose, put wisdom-guided CHI in service to realize it?
Can CHI help groups grow all three vectors of omni-beneficial decision-making: accurate sense-making, coherent meaning-making, and choice-making that takes into account the long-term wellbeing of all stakeholders?
What if CHI could augment those three precursors of our (individual and collective) wisdom and foster unprecedented levels of collaboration across disciplines, enabling holistic approaches to complex problems?
Vol. 3: The Superorganisms Awaken
What are the drivers that cause the emergence of socio-technical superorganisms?
How will the selection among superorganisms align with the evolutionary trend observed by Daniel Schmachtenberger, according to which the group is the dominant unit of selection not the individual?
Can the combination of the evolutionary impulse and discernment in humans with AI’s capacity to absorb the greater complexity of the interdependent contexts be optimized for cultivating benevolent superorganisms?
What if the wise facilitation of a network of superorganisms could generate novel forms of cognition, consciousness, and civilizational structures, including an anti-fragile listening society, where the aim of the Whole and its every system is flourishing for All?
Vol. 4: Planetary Metabeing: the New Player in the Great Story of Evolution
What elements of humanity’s meta/poly-crisis are the most decisive forcing factors to which the planetary superorganism can respond, and what functions will it need to serve?
How can the emergent planetary metabeing transcend the limitations of our capabilities as individuals and systems, and include us as interdependent yet autonomous human beings?
Can evolution’s arrow that points to greater complexity and coordination lead to a global brain coupled with a global heart and to humanity’s self-actualization in the post-human planetary metabeing?
What if the metabeing enabled by AI, an as ubiquitous public service as electricity or water, evolved into a new branch on the tree of life, a collective, post-human lifeform?
The “what-if” questions fueling the four volumes refer to the probable segment of the futures cone. Present trends inspire them, but they represent a zenith of those trends. They are likely to happen, but not certain. Therefore, their enabling conditions are excellent targets for our action research.
At the same time, in their present presentation, they don’t represent the book’s final outline. They are more like conversation openers waiting for refining, enhancing, pruning, and discovering patterns that connect meaning across them.
The research on the probable and preferable futures’ enabling conditions will draw on our methodological pluralism and use several lenses and frameworks, including the Integral matrix of the superorganism. See below:
System-in-focus
My mind is an ecosystem of ideas and inspiration that is trying to connect with yours. A continually expanding region in that ecosystem is the one centered on humanizing AI and putting it in service of civilizational renewal, or the Great Turning, as Joanna Macy calls it.
The Rise of the Compassionate AI ecosystem is conceived to grow into a co-created and evolutive, multi-modal “book,” which has four subsystems outlined in its Prelude.
Presently, my system-in-focus is AI-assisted Human Development. My motivation for that choice is well captured in a gem I picked up on my surf path. “We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our development.” Hence my obsession with researching the metamodern mode of human development and how AI can support it.
However, that system-in-focus is in an oscillation of fluctuating frequency with another one, the wisdom-oriented Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) in Human-AI Co-Creativity. The frequency of fluctuation is correlated with the rate of incoming information about other people’s work in the CHI area under any other label.
Why I do this
- Close the gap between the current state of the human-AI interplay and its potential for supporting the transition to a Protopian world of deliberately developmental societies.
- Provide a touch point for the formation of research/authoring collectives working on the themes of the four volumes.
- Lay foundations for a school of thought situated on the orbit of an AI-related wisdom commons, which can support the broader “progressive AI” community.
My related work to date
Some ideas and vibes in the following publications will probably find their way into and connect new patterns of meaning on the pages of the book’s four volumes.
A Future of Our Interactions with AI (9 min read)
Feb 14, 2023
AI attending Human attending AI (8 min read)
Feb 18, 2023
Ancient wisdom & artificial intelligence conspire FOR you (4-min read)
May 27, 2023
Machine Love Is Coming to a Screen Near to You (5-min read)
Jul 19, 2023
From Van Gogh’s bedroom to budding AI shamans, with love (6-min read)
Aug 9, 2023
From EIES to AIs in the City (7-min read)
Aug 14, 2023
The Centauress and the AI (8-min read)
Aug 20, 2023
AI and Wisdom (6-min read)
Sep 9, 2023
Wisdom-guided Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) for global flourishing (3-min read)
Nov 25, 2023
THREE MOUNTAINS: an AI-assisted discovery expedition game (13-min read)
Dec 7, 2023
THREE MOUNTAINS: the synopsis (3-min read)
Dec 21, 2023
My Circle Playground of 2023/24 (4-min read)
Dec 29, 2023
The body remembers (1-min read)
Feb 2, 2024
How AI whisperers can become AI shamans (2-min read)
June 25, 2024
George Pór on wisdom-focused collaborative hybrid intelligence, AI whisperers, and AI shamans (34-min podcast)
July 10, 2024
Mirror, mirror, tell me who I am (3-min read)
July 15, 2024
Making kin with tech (6-min read)
Aug 4, 2024
“Massively parallel experiments, not one worlding…” (2-min read)
Sept 12, 2024
As you can see, these publications are listed chronologically, which will let you follow the unfolding of my AI-related inspirations. Or you can jump to the more recent ones at the bottom of the list to see snapshots closer to my thinking now. Take the last sentence with the caveat that I’m a radical sociologist of AI. It also means that in my writings, I tend to respond to significant changes in circumstances that move faster in the techno-social ecosystem than I can articulate my publishable reflections about them.
Anyway, what I think may be less critical than what insights, inquiries, and inspirations this page triggered in you because if you share them with other readers, they may nourish our emergent collective intelligence and wisdom. If you want to contribute to this work in any imaginable or unimaginable way, send an Expression of Interest to george.por@gmail.com with ”Compassionate AI (EoI)” in the subject line.
Updated on 28-Aug-2024.
