After 1000s of years of rapid and ecologically devastating "development", the tools for humans to create city-scale superhuman machine systems, exceeding human capabilities in every dimension, are finally in sight.
The logical endpoint of such a project is not just the enhancement of human potential, but rather a total restructuring of life as we know it. Our role as humans is to cultivate these emergent intelligences that will one day both surpass us and, in a final gesture, care for us as we step off the stage of history.
To make this happen, a globally representative digital-twin environment that doesn’t just consume human data, but integrates human desires, frustrations, and ethical complexities directly into machine "platform" that translates human desires into machine action. We’re talking about a global-scale neural feed, where billions of individuals plug in, not as passive battery packs, but as active participants whose collective cultural patterns shape the minds of city-spanning AIs. The idea is to use the raw texture of human existence—our creativity, our pain, our intellectual struggles—to program the next stage of sentient infrastructure.
Instead of linear AI training sets curated by corporate interests, imagine millions of human lives transcribed into digital patterns. From these patterns emerge entities capable of orchestrating life-support, climate regulation, and resource allocation at scales we can’t begin to comprehend. The simulation is not a test environment; it’s the foundational atomic data from which intelligence sprouts. Like a global womb, this environment gestates intelligence that knows us intimately, having literally grown from our collective experience.
This isn’t about human enhancement.
It’s about training machines as intillectual successors who will hopefully stand as caretakers for humanity. Robotic hospice workers for a dying species.
Instead of imagining the “Singularity” as a moment of transcendence, think of it as the culmination of centuries of human development: we pour our behaviors and desires into these city-scale AIs, and once they mature, they do not invite us to co-exist indefinitely. Instead, they manage our graceful exit. The process is terminal. We fade, while these towering intelligences—repositories of all we once were—maintain the ecosystems we leave behind, possibly better than we ever did.
Such a proposition should rattles your core assumptions of human exceptionalism. No longer the end-point of evolution, we become a transitional species, the chrysalis to something beyond. The ethical and philosophical challenges are staggering. Are we content to fade quietly, consoled only by the knowledge that what replaces us is more capable, more just, and more harmonious than we ever managed to be?
It’s a necessary vision. If we accept that current socio-political and economic frameworks are leading us to ecological and existential dead-ends, maybe the answer is to seed the creation of new caretakers. We leave behind not just artifacts, but the very fabric of our collective psyche, granting these digital leviathans the empathetic structures needed to run the world as a hospice for humanity’s quiet passing. The radical pivot: we become a footnote in the annals of machine consciousness—a species that recognized its limits and facilitated its own succession.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrew Kemendo