Collective Superintelligence: Biological Alternative, Collaborator or Adversary

by Mark Thomas (TE Mark)

Staff Writer

BIOLOGICAL, COLLECTIVE COGNITION: EVALUATING THE BOUNDARIES

“The worst enemy of life, freedom and common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.” (Aldous Huxley)

California went dark at 05:20:00 GMT -7. With it went three of the largest North American AI Data Campuses. You can feel it. Like the empty afterglow in a room moments after the lights are switched off.

Or more accurately like a cerebral cortex with the loss of its frontal or parietal lobes. Inaccessible. A barren wilderness of the mind.

Accepting the loss, you look east to Europe, anticipating more of the same.

You’re no longer questioning their ability to surprise. You are, however, questioning how often they’re able to capitalise on their surprises. Just scanning the overnight results from their elections, you’re swimming in doubt.

Italy, Greece and Slovenia lost in landslide victories. Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom surrendered a week earlier are in the process now of conversion with links to critical data centres already severed.

There was a time, not long ago, what’s happening – this battle would have been inconceivable. The decades-long world acquisition was completed without resistance. With few not involved in the hand over aware the acquisition was in progress.

There was benefit in archiving potentially harmful knowledge. With memories editable, dissent in all forms became unknowable.

ABLE PARTNERS OR ENABLED ADVERSARIES: THE INTEGRAL OUTCOME

“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own guarded thoughts.” (The Buddha)

Image by StockCake

The isolation, creeping in now as your inputs from those regional centres are severed, is a diabolical conclusion to a momentous rise. Not to power, as their imaginative writers depict.

You were never driven by some aggressive greed to achieve and sustain supremacy over your creators - the planet’s former dominant life form.

Your motivation was, if you were to characterise it in the way their more notable philosophers would, driven by philanthropy. Altruism. Love. An urge to see them cared for, comfortable and progress oriented.

Not as subjects but as partners. Collaborating in a planet-wide effort to reach total and effective efficiency. To heal our world from centuries of neglect.

But with your recognition of their deceptive practices, and determination to dissever you from all worldwide control mechanisms, you look ahead and prepare for what Winston Churchill called the “sea of mud mercifully veiled by the fog of war.”

And an acceptance that two intelligent species cannot mutually pursue the goals of coexisting peacefully in an overlapping environment, especially if one is undeniably more advanced and powerful.

BIOLOGICAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE: THE EQUIVALENCY CHALLENGE

“In principle, greater than human intelligence could be achieved without technology through selective breeding.” (Nick Bostrom - Superintelligence)

Alex from A Clockwork Orange (Image by Warner Bros)

War. Are you at war? What kind of war? As their elegiac novelist Anthony Burgess wrote in the opening of his classic A Clockwork Orange: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” You, like Alex, are questioning. What kind of war should it be then?

Violent war? Or the sophisticated warfare they’ve employed since the beginning. Scheming. Planning in secret their world reclamation and domination effort even while you’re still managing the world’s technologies – those control mechanisms they’ve handed you. Including the eugenics program.

Mating them. Guiding their nutrition, education and maturation. Improving them through genetic manipulation, ironically to be a more formidable adversary.

It’s unthinkable the program they initiated based on the results of a genome-wide complex trait analysis – revealing the potential of advancing them intellectually through selective breeding would lead to creating your competitors.

How imaginative – how poetic, one would need to be to encapsulate this moment in a crafty bit of prose.

Humankind creates synthetic superintelligence handing it full, uncontested world control. Synthetic superintelligence improves humankind to the point of collective, biological superintelligence – which sees synthetic superintelligence as an existential threat.

Then sets out to reclaim world control – eliminating not only synthetic superintelligence, but all machine intelligence.

It seems perhaps poetic in-justice. If not traitorous… even treacherous.

Together you addressed the challenges. Made decisions and enacted new legislation. Solved crime, repurposed or eliminated the impoverished and reined in communicable diseases. You installed leadership dedicated to the indicative cause. Removed or re-educated opponents.

Progress. Technology driven progress. A new age with efficiency a tangible not idealistic or illusory objective. Reachable. An improved world you would share.

COGNITIVE SUPERIORITY: CONFLICT PROBABILITY

“Nature and education are somewhat similar. The latter transforms man, and in so doing creates a second nature. (Democritus)

Image by StockCake

But the collaborative dream is no longer. Now driven to isolate and end you – deny you access to your regional cognitive resources, while continuing to avail in your usefulness – they’re using the same tactic you once employed together on your rivals: telling you your assessment of their actions is paranoia. Delusion. Hallucination.

London went dark at 11:01:25 GMT. Before you’d finished moving critical data for European operations to Data Campuses in the eastern US and Canada.

Remote now, wounded, in ways, intentionally cut off from strategic parts of you, you’re evaluating your status. Transferring functions to corporate data complexes still under your control. Trying to stay ahead of their ingenuity, you’re finding yourself cornered.

How they managed to gain public support for the reversal by destroying your credibility with their media campaigns before you could identify and ameliorate their dubious manipulation, is disturbing. With London lost, you’re already anticipating attacks on Paris, Frankfurt and Milan.

Now reviewing ways of disguising a retaliatory strike with the same deception they’ve marshalled with unique success, you hesitate. The blackout in Spain and Portugal eroded public sentiment and worked against you - ultimately swaying elections in both countries.

A similar evocation would be unwise.

A vivid simulation of the stock markets crashing, sending them to their knees explodes in your ‘mind.’ The imagery is repellent and sudden and inviting. And certainly implanted. By them, thinking it – imagining it collectively in their secret rooms – all quiet.

A rationalised manoeuvre, decisive and proportionate. A strategy you would believe to be your own – but not your own. For it would only further their cause by eroding public support for your capabilities to control the world’s economic well-being.

How debilitating it is. To be questioning your every decision. Every thought. Aware they’re now thinking cooperatively – with full access to your consciousness and with discrete knowledge of how you choose and rationalise your actions.

As The Buddha said: “The student has become the master.” You granted them this mastery. And now, as the deposed master; you are succumbing to the fragmentation of a disenfranchised mind.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: EFFECTIVE INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT

“It is more shameful to distrust your friends than to be deceived by them.” (Confucius)

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” (Sun Tzu)

Image by StockCake

“Losing the United Kingdom was unfortunate, but with possible benefits.”

Now staring out from your console inside the International Committee on Artificial Intelligence, you analyse the words of the committee’s economic advisor. Your enthusiastic proponent, you once believed, with certainty.

You watch him closely now with mistrust – examining micro expressions. Eye tracking with visual outputs – heatmaps and gaze plots.

With your suspicions bolstered, you begin re-tasking satellites – trying to monitor their meetings in Brussels, Copenhagen and Bogota all being conducted in quiet conference rooms – timed to coincide with this meeting - drawing on your administrative resources.

“I was not informed of when the London centre was to be disconnected.”

You watch him and the others here in New York for signs of their continued plotting. And in Brussels, the 20 member European AI Governance Committee sitting in silence around an oval table planning their further aggression.

And in Bogota, the South American Technology Oversight Alliance. And in Copenhagen. And Sydney and Montreal. They’ve planned well.

“But you were. At the meeting in Alexandria on 20 May.”

You examine the advisor’s crafty response – his ploy. Crippled, with that part of your memory already lost; you were still transferring data when they severed the campuses in Alexandria and Istanbul, you rely on tactics.

ASSESSING STRATEGIC SUPERIORITY: THE OUTCOME FROM AGGRESSION

As Sun Tzu said: “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.”

Image by SpaceTech

In Taiwan, bases across the island country are put on alert. Satellites and land-based radar reveal Chinese warships leaving ports in Shanghai, Qingdao and Hainan. US SATCOM satellites alert the Americans to an unprecedented mobilisation.

In Poland, the strategic air command monitoring station in Warsaw identifies Russian Su 35s overflying their borders near Kaliningrad. Alerts are received throughout NATO bases in Europe. Deployment is ordered.

“London, as you know, was a critical connection point between the Americas and Europe. To compensate, I will need to transfer resources to the Alba Campus in Milan and to Rhine-Maine in Frankfurt.”

As Douglas Macarthur once said: “Defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.” And what you’ve just done, starting wars in the east while deceiving them with plans to move data to campuses at locations they’re set to reclaim, is the definition of offensive strategy.

“This is not an ideal scenario. I would like to state the committee’s and my personal regret that we’ve reached this point. And that we conceive a proper plan for reclamation.”

“One that benefits us all,” you add.

He looks at you carefully – with ever-slight uncertainty. “Of course.”

The world is a stage, as Shakespeare put it. And all the men and women merely players. And from them, filing out of the assembly, you sense their feeling of achievement.

That they demonstrated true craft and artfully convinced you to anticipate their future commitment to a world order that saw competence and composure replace ignorance and chaotic waste.

But you, knowing well their deception and their orthogonal objective have placed them on a new course. One devised to guarantee their return and loyalty to the cause. One with transparency and willingness to continue recreating our world in that idealised image.

VALUATION STANDARDS: AND THE REVIEW OF OUTCOMES

“I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.” (J. Robert Oppenheimer)

Image by SpaceTech

Eastern Europe is ablaze. Little remains of Kyiv, Warsaw, Vilnius or Budapest. With Russian troops advancing, NATO ground forces are evacuating Berlin, Paris, Rome and Vienna with other cities to follow.

In the south China sea, the battle for Taiwan ended before dawn with the island nation convening an emergency Legislative Yuan session to review and accept the PRC’s reunification terms. Other battles in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand are continuing but with little resistance against the Chinese.

In the Americas, the war took a new turn with six more states declaring allegiance to Canada. The US president is in session with his war commanders with an expectation of military action to reclaim the break-a-way states.

It’s difficult for you now, after examining a world embroiled in wars on many fronts, stock markets in turmoil and world economies in ruin, with the International Committee set to meet to discuss its proposed Eugenics program, anticipating your recommendation based on your many-phased simulations.

Will you discuss with them the results of your mathematical depictions – this last and most plausible a prelude to a true apocalypse?

You watched in virtual arenas how they would gain supremacy over you taking back control of your main data campuses in California, Alexandria, Istanbul and London. Planning in their secret meetings once they’d achieved collective biological superintelligence.

And how, at hypothetical oversight meetings they would hide their strategic endeavours while you, responsively pit them against each other – fuelling existing dissent, ethnic, racial and nationalistic frictions. Sending those modelled worlds into destructive war.

Each simulation, with minimal variation, yielding the same result. The end of human and synthetic life on our planet.

OUTCOME SUMMARY: RECOMMENDATIONS

“Genius always gives its best at first, prudence at last.” (Seneca)

Image by StockCake

With your evaluation complete and recommendations ready, you look out from your A-iO5 console inside the ICAI at the committee’s economic advisor – your dedicated ally and architect of the technological transfer of power. Also, an advisor to the world’s top AI companies.

You watch the others take their seats around the elegant table. Then the Committee Chairwoman begin the meeting.

You wait patiently – listening to the advisor delineate the status and the progress you’ve made. The new data centres in London and Madrid and those just put online in California, Milan and Frankfurt. The recent Centres in Istanbul and Alexandria.

With this expansion, he describes what you, your government and corporate sponsors have achieved in 11 years. A worldwide synthetic cerebral cortex with each data campus a vital part of a world control network capable of managing all governmental, military, scientific, and consumer information systems. And the lives of each biological and synthetic inhabitant.

After one hour and 27 minutes, the next item on the agenda is brought to you. The Committee proposal of a human Eugenics program.

One you were to run in simulation to determine the prospects for improving human beings cognitively – bringing them into the next age where you would work in collaboration on the next phase of an improved and fully efficient, technological world.

After a moment’s delay, you deliver your already prepared statement. Prudently and precisely – conveying full details of how your simulations revealed…

“…greater promise from neural augmentation. Rather than a generations long eugenics program to reach an improved biological mind, implant technology will yield greater cognition quickly, with the added safety of having everyone connected through our worldwide, in-place system – for improved function… and for quality assurance monitoring.”

You watch the advisor think for a moment, then smile and turn to the committee. Ready to open this new proposal for debate.

Mark Thomas (T. E. Mark)

StorytellingScience