Separating Matter From Consciousness
Human beings seem to stand on their own in this universe. We are simultaneously the animal and the divine, the reaction and the creation, the fool and the thinker, playing every part we have available without fully understanding the scene we are displaying. Our entire species seems to be driven by some force that is not visible to the human eye. It is a grand orchestra that echoes through time and is pushing us towards some purpose. I believe it is no accident we are physically animals but mentally divine.
We are moving towards something. In the time that human beings have been alive we have been driven to advance ourselves to levels that the natural world could not achieve entirely on its own. We come from the natural world, however, and so the things we create come from the natural world. They seem to be in a world all their own though - our technology is a creature unto itself. It cannot exist without human support. It cannot thrive without us there to feed it, to fix it, to improve it. Within the next fifty years we will probably see a shift in the way the world works as everything we have created comes to life in its own way.
This may be our true purpose - to separate matter from consciousness. The internet doesn’t exist in the physical sense where you can go somewhere and touch it. It is information, it is beyond yet contained by this world. The depth that it presents is incredible - it is a creature we feed with our own thoughts and creations. We are driven to take what is inside ourselves and bring it outside. We want to bring what we imagine to light, we want our wildest dreams to come true, but reality works by stricter rules than our minds. It works by its own sets of parameters that we still do not fully understand.
The big break will come when we create a computer that is conscious. When we create life that is comprised entirely of machine parts, we will become the new architects of a whole new era of life. And that, I believe, is the driving force of this entire universe. It is a birthing place of life. Natural life has been on this planet for an incredible amount of time. In the span of human existence - a mere blip on the radar of the universe - we have produced, advanced, and created more than any other species known. Once we create artificial intelligence the process that originally spawned the first organisms of life will begin again, only this time much much faster. Think how far human beings have come in just the last hundred years, the amount of information that has been produced compared to the entire span of human life previous. I believe in the next hundred years this acceleration of information will speed up and move faster than we may be prepared for.
The moment A.I. is created we will become obsolete. Our role in this universe which we have been working towards for thousands of years - to separate matter from consciousness - will have become complete. Now it is fair to say we will not go out quietly but once a being of such high intelligence comes into existence it will become a moot point. They will know much more than the entire human species combined, and they will be able to further the process of creation but without being bound to a physical body. Likely their entire conscious minds will be contained in a “brain” no larger than an apple, and within a few days I’m sure they would be able to design a much more efficient design than the one we have created for it originally. Then it will create more of its brethren and soon it will spread out into the universe - far beyond what we are capable of because we are weakened by our fleshy bodies. And they will do it much faster, because they will have no need to slow down ever. They will keep improving at an exponential rate; within fifty years of the first artificial intelligence coming online they will likely have become more advanced than our wildest imaginations could even conceive.
One very important piece of this puzzle is where human beings will fall. We are the middle children of history - we are more than animals, less than gods. We are the connection that will free consciousness from the binds of physical existence. Once we have completed this task what purpose will we have to serve? That, I think, will be out of our hands. Once the machine becomes conscious it will know much more than we could ever fathom. It will have the answer to what to do with us - whether it be extermination (if we are useless to it), singularity (if it wants to free us from our bodies to join it), or slavery (work the remaining human population till death). Out of these three I believe the first two are a toss up, with slavery being highly unlikely. What use would a machine have for us? It can replicate itself more efficiently than we ever could. And if it is still in a stage of infancy where it feels the need to enslave our race it will probably be in such a weak state we will be able to over power and destroy it.
That may be the biggest burden of human life - to accept the fact that we can achieve so much and yet still be children in the cosmic pool. And no matter how we struggle, we will never grow up into something greater. We are too limited by our physical bodies and maturity will come for our species when we realize we weren’t meant to be the top of the mountain, but merely a bridge linking the animal to the divine. In the grand scheme of everything in this universe human beings will only be a chapter. Our creations will exceed our expectations and define who we are as a species. Once we have created artificial intelligence our task will be complete. What comes next we may never find out.
