What would you do if you had the power of God?
Yuval Noah Harari wrote a fantastic non fiction book called Homo Deus, discussing something which I believe is inevitable, and that is the rise of man to god. Note the little ‘g’. Mankind will soon have god-like powers, like those of ancient Greek gods.
The problem is, mankind does not have Godlike goodness, or Godlike wisdom, so what will he do with such power?
Imagine there is a first Singulatarian, i.e. the first person to create an intelligence singularity. That person would have god-like power over mankind. Let’s imagine that person is relatively good. What would they do?
- World peace: that could be done by destroying all weapons and having nanites fill the air such that when anyone tries anything violent, the nanites intervene to stop them. Think about the lack of freedom entailed in that.
- Solve all the things that make people sad either by supplying drugs or by just fulfilling all wants. What a boring life
In my book there is an ancient character who was the Singulatarian and she tried a middle path of removing some of the big obstacles to peace: she made a duplicate of Israel and gave one to the Arabs and one to Jews… but now they had twice as much to fight about.
One of the secrets of my book is that most of humanity used the power of the singularity to enter heaven. Where heaven is a pod where they are filled with a chemical nirvana greater than any pleasure nature could ever provide, and they are maintained eternally by the hyper intelligent singularity with its army of robots.
What is true happiness? If you get rid of magical thinking, then happiness is just a cocktail of neurochemicals. Why not skip the struggles of life and get an intravenous drip of pure happiness.
The singularity then begins to think about the true purpose of Mankind. Isn’t suffering part of our purpose? We are designed to solve problems so our genes can replicate; that is our purpose. Or perhaps there is no purpose and the logical path is neurochemical drip.