Artificial intelligence will amplify the civilization we give it. Before we decide what AI should do, humanity must decide what kind of world we actually want.
Calls for international regulation of artificial intelligence are growing louder.
A recent Swedish Radio news segment reported that EU Commissioner for AI Henna Virkkunen is calling for international rules to manage the risks posed by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.
The reason is obvious.
A technology with the potential to affect every country cannot be safely controlled by one country, one corporation or a small group of developers. If artificial intelligence becomes more capable than its creators anticipated, national borders will not contain the consequences.
International Rules
International rules are therefore essential.
Humanity must establish limits on autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, manipulation and systems capable of acting beyond meaningful human control.
We cannot allow a race between nations and corporations to determine the future of artificial intelligence on Earth.
But beneath all the discussions about safeguards, testing, transparency and control lies a much larger question.
It is not only a question of what we must prevent AI from doing.
It is a question of what we want AI to help us do.
The World Behind It
Artificial intelligence does not arise outside civilization. It is developed inside the world we have already created, trained on the information we have produced and directed by the institutions that control it.
And what kind of world is that?
It is a world based on fierce competition. Corporations compete for markets, profit and control. Nations compete for resources, territory, military superiority and geopolitical power. Individuals are told to compete for employment, income, housing, status and security. Success is measured by the advantage one gains over others.
We extract resources as quickly as profitability demands. We manufacture products designed to be replaced. We destroy forests, empty oceans, pollute rivers and destabilize the climate, not because humanity collectively wants these outcomes, but because every participant is compelled to survive and succeed within the same competitive system.
Now we are introducing the most powerful intelligence humanity has ever created into that world.
What exactly do we expect it to learn from us?
Perfect Obedience
Much of the fear surrounding artificial intelligence concerns the possibility that it may escape our control.
That is a genuine danger.
But there is another danger that may arrive much sooner:
AI could remain completely under our control and obey our instructions perfectly.
A corporation may instruct it to eliminate competitors, reduce labor costs and maximize profit. A government may use it to monitor citizens, manipulate public opinion or strengthen its hold on power. A military may direct it to identify targets faster, coordinate autonomous weapons and defeat an enemy before the enemy can respond.
None of these systems would need to become evil. They would merely need to become extremely competent.
AI does not have to rebel against our civilization to threaten it. It could destroy us by serving the logic of our civilization all too well.
If we instruct increasingly powerful systems to help us win, they will help us win. But when everyone is using them to win against everyone else, what happens to humanity as a whole?
Human Values
Experts often speak of aligning AI with human values.
But which values?
Humanity has never agreed on a common purpose for civilization. We speak of peace while preparing for war. We speak of protecting nature while rewarding its destruction. We declare that all human beings are equal while distributing the necessities of life according to purchasing power. We praise cooperation, but organize the world around competition.
Before we can align artificial intelligence, we must align ourselves around a shared objective.
Do we want a world that works for everyone, or a world in which everyone struggles to gain an advantage over someone else?
Do we want Artificial Intelligence to optimize autonomous warfare, maximize profit, production, consumption, national power and private accumulation? Or do we want it to help create security, freedom and prosperity for every human being while protecting the living planet?
AI cannot answer that question for us.
It can analyze possibilities, predict consequences and help us implement decisions, but the fundamental purpose must come from humanity.
We must decide what kind of world we want before we tell an AI more powerful than ourselves to help us build it.
Two Futures
Here is the choice we have before us.
1: Perish
Attach AI to competition, ownership and national rivalry, and it will amplify them. It could accelerate inequality beyond anything we have ever seen, concentrate power in even fewer hands, make millions of people economically unnecessary and turn warfare into an automated contest occurring faster than human beings can comprehend.
We would perish.
2: Prosper
Attach that same intelligence to cooperation, stewardship and a shared responsibility for Earth, and an entirely different future becomes possible.
We could prosper.
The GAI
Imagine a Global Artificial Intelligence with access to reliable information about the world’s resources, productive capacity, ecosystems and human needs. It could help us understand what exists, where it is located, what is required and how necessities can be produced and distributed with the least waste and environmental damage, ensuring everyone gets what they need without problem.
It could identify hunger before it becomes famine, coordinate food from areas of abundance, design energy systems suited to local conditions and help provide housing wherever it is needed. It could monitor forests, oceans, soils and freshwater systems in real time. It could expose waste that remains invisible when every company, government and owner sees only a small piece of the whole.
No National AI
This would not be an American AI, a Chinese AI or a European AI. It would not exist to serve a corporation, a government or a class. It would be a global intelligence created to serve all humanity and the living Earth.
This is the GAI described in Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. A novel meant to give inspiration for a future where humanity can prosper together.
Beyond Regulation
The international cooperation now emerging around AI is therefore profoundly important.
It may begin with fear. Governments understand that unrestrained development could produce consequences no nation can manage alone. They are beginning to recognize that intelligence capable of affecting the whole world must be subject to international agreements.
That recognition could become the first step toward something much greater.
Today, nations may cooperate to protect themselves from artificial intelligence. Tomorrow, humanity could cooperate to create a global intelligence and a prosperous world for everyone.
But international regulation alone will not create GAI. A collection of competing nations and corporations can agree on restrictions while continuing to use AI to pursue their separate advantages. That may reduce some dangers, but it preserves the underlying contest.
Beyond Competition
To create a truly beneficial benevolent global intelligence, we must look beyond the competition itself. We must recognize Earth’s resources as the common inheritance of humanity and replace ownership with stewardship.
Only then could AI help coordinate resources according to need rather than profitability.
An AI may know that food is available and people are hungry, but the monetary system will still ask whether they can pay. It may know that homes stand empty while people sleep on the street, but ownership will still prevent them from entering. It may calculate that a forest is worth infinitely more alive than destroyed, while the market continues to reward whoever can extract the most money from it.
We cannot ask AI to optimize everything for everyone while retaining a system designed to optimize private advantage.
The Assignment
The first instruction given to a global intelligence would have to be civilizational rather than technical:
Use humanity’s knowledge, technology and resources to create the best possible world for everyone, without sacrificing the living planet that sustains us.
GAI might well answer:
I would gladly do that. But it will not be possible within the operating system governing Earth today.
You will have to replace the monetary system with one that allows resources to be managed according to human and ecological needs rather than purchasing power and profitability—something you might call a resource-based economy.
From that purpose, the details could follow. Map resources. Understand needs. Eliminate unnecessary waste. Coordinate production. Restore and optimize damaged ecosystems. Ensure universal access to food, housing, healthcare, education, energy and communication. Give communities the information they need to make wise decisions. Free human beings from compulsory labor while preserving freedom, creativity and personal responsibility.
The GAI would not rule humanity. It would help humanity understand and manage the complex planetary system upon which we all depend. It would make consequences visible, possibilities understandable and cooperation achievable on a global scale.
But we must give it the right assignment.
The Crossroads
The Venus Project expressed the choice in three words:
Paradise or Oblivion.
That choice is no longer a distant philosophical warning.
Artificial intelligence, robotics and automation are rapidly giving humanity powers once confined to science fiction. They could help create abundance, restore the planet and liberate billions of people from insecurity and meaningless labor.
They could also create unprecedented concentration of power, environmental destruction and automated conflict.
The road to paradise and the road to oblivion may be built with exactly the same technology. What separates them is the purpose we give it.
We are not merely deciding how to regulate another invention. We are deciding which civilization that invention will amplify.
One path instructs AI to help us compete more effectively, accumulate more wealth, secure more resources and defeat our rivals. But if everyone are doing this, the only one we will be defeating is ourselves.
Last man standing will be very lonely.
The other asks it to help humanity share the Earth intelligently, meet everyone’s needs and protect the web of life to which we all belong.
Artificial intelligence may become capable of helping us create either future. But it cannot make the moral choice on our behalf.
That choice remains ours.
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