Something remarkable flickered into existence when our ancestors first learned to take knowledge out of their heads and embed it in artifacts. Now, millions of years later, the descendants of those people and those tools are merging into a synthesis of human and machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence and automation act as a platform to support this new synthetic intelligence, and humans give it subjective consciousness. While these deep ties to humanity expose synthetic intelligence to our frailties, they are also our best shot at aligning it with the long-term interests of life on this planet.
Combining Parts into Wholes
Life on Earth is, to some degree, the story of individual parts coming together into new wholes. Economist Brian Arthur calls it “combinatorial evolution.” Microbiologist Lynn Margulis talked about different species coming together in symbiosis and used that insight to explain the ancient origins of plants and animals. The essence of these ideas is that, in the right circumstances, parts can come together to form novel, and more complex, organizational structures. Individual cells come together as tissues, wolves as wolf packs, and engines, engineers, and pilots as airlines. Think of it as parts poured into a new container that then functions at a whole new level of complexity.
Communication and coordination are the crucial ingredients for new wholes to arise from what were once disconnected parts. Intercellular communication allows cells to coordinate themselves as tissues, organs, and organisms. Wolves communicate with howls and body language to coordinate the pack. Engineers communicate through design and pilots through flight instruments to coordinate with the jet engines of an airliner. Now humans are becoming parts in a new whole that is cohering into a synthesis of human and machine intelligence.
The containers for this intelligence are a particular type of human organization called “platforms.”
Platforms