Excerpts from Introduction to Third Phase Transition: Solving The Anthropocene Crisis

On human nature, 'AI,' and religion

“The first self-insight into human nature had necessarily been inverted, into animating nature (animism). Human cooperation had intuitively been projected everywhere. Religion sprang out of this speciation’s alienation from natural ecology. It became the original substitute for science. It had been echoing a human cooperation, that had not yet reached a rate sufficient for systematic cultivation of, and enquiry into, the regularities of nature. It had also reflected that human impression of its own species-specific cooperation had already become overwhelming. It was for the love of cooperation that human culture had been evolving. A culture which, in turn, had been perpetuating and enhancing cooperation. And humanity had rationalised this socio-natural dialectic, through setting its own evolutionary achieved right of association as a constituting principle of not only itself, but of entire nature.”

“In fact, ontological errors, confusion, and prophecies of a coming ‘great singularity’ of ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ bear great resemblance to the animism of the first human phase. Although, with one decisive difference. Back then it was cutting edge knowledge. Today, it signifies ignorantly projecting the human characteristics of intelligence, on the verge of completing its collectivisation, into dead matter manipulated by it. This time it is animism barbarically accrediting life to sophisticated high-tech. By so doing, it is inadvertently contributing to a semi-religious cover up, for the presently destructive use of this powerful technology. This is the gravest mistake.”

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