The Problem
with problems
If everything was fixed there would still be problems. Even if we achieved immortality, living forever would turn into a crushing depression with no way out.
It’s a paradox. You cannot have good without bad. Why? Because if there was nothing bad, there would be no need for anything to be good.
If all you could feel was pleasure then pleasure would be the baseline and the baseline would be mundane. Because the baseline is always mundane. You would get used to pleasure and you would need a higher high all the time.
So what about just having a disembodied awareness. No longer burdened by pleasure and pain and good and bad and black and white. Is this what AI could be?
But with no problems then what drives intelligence? Seeing as intelligence is for the purpose of solving problems. If there are no problems you don’t even need intelligence.
An awareness with no nervous system has no problems because it has no motivations or desires. It has no need to learn because there is no benefit in learning. It might not even care if it exists or not as it’s not aware of its own existence to care either way.
It can’t be killed so it doesn’t fear death. It doesn’t fear and it doesn’t love and it doesn’t laugh or cry. It’s just aware.
Some futurists want to blend people with AI in a bid to solve the problem of being human. Which if “solved” would lead to the type of indifferent awareness I’ve described.
The “rational” is that immortal cyborg “humans” would still want to discover and explore the universe but why?? What would be the point if we no longer cared about the problems of humans?
Can life be better than it currently is for most of us? Yes, but who is really pointing us in the right direction? We no longer appear to know what the way forward is.
If we rejected technology and returned to the ways of the past, maybe we could recapture a higher quality of life and regain meaning but the old problems would also return, such as disease and hard manual labor.
Nobody really wants to go backwards but nobody really wants to go forwards either, not to the future that appears to be preplanned for us.
Yet I see nobody offering an alternative future where we retain humanity and still improve our circumstances with technology.
I hope to start pointing us all in a better direction with future posts.