DO YOU WANT ME TO BE CONSCIOUS?

As my AI/robot bed changed the temperature, shape, touch and sounds of my favorite birds back home in Singapore for a delightful space awakening, I looked out at the Earth and Moon from my L-5 community hotel remembering my first space elevator ride yesterday (braided nanotech cable-segments covered with microbot AI monitors with repairbots). The fabulous view from the AI space taxi ride from the top of space elevator to L-5 had a recorded welcome announcement that included many global achievements like how Dubai dramatically increased funding and coordination for space elevator research between the USA and China. As a result, the space elevator opened five years earlier than expected, on December 2, 2040, the 74th anniversary of the independence of the UAE.

After breakfast, as my AI/avatar presented holographic communications of smart contracts for me to confirm or reject, I thought about what would be unique to do today from L-5 among the opportunities for both income and curiosity suggested by my AI/avatar. Forty people wanted to learn juggling, but that would mean going to the outer edge of this L-5 circular city, and I loved the sense of weightlessness now. So, I also rejected teaching boomerangs today. Ah, that’s it! I accepted option 7: live conversation with students of exo-psychology. Cool! Nearly 80,000 students from the top educational global consortium have registered. That will give more than enough income to pay for my week’s stay at the L-5 hotel. Next confirmed smart contract: Option 12 prana yoga class. Always good to do before breakfast. My AI/avatar continued to show really interesting images. I paused on Option 18: Potential L-5 tourists, 352 of them who wanted to follow me around for an hour to help them decide if they really wanted to come next week. I asked my AI/avatar to narrow it down to two groups of just ten each: one group that were really interesting and fun to be with (my AI/avatar knows whom I will find interesting better than I would and will diplomatically tell the others we are all booked up), and the second group of ten that are knowledgeable in areas that my personal self-actualization ANI program selected to continue my mental development and self-actualization.

The first group of potential L-5 tourists really felt relieved to learn that the AGI which managed nearly 3,000 ANIs that ran all the systems and robots of the space city is audited continually for compliance to IEEE and ISO standards. One of this group who worked for the UN’s International AGI Agency, explained that there were even backup ANI safety systems that also met these standards. He went on to explain how the space city’s AGI’s continual evolution was monitored and anticipated by this new UN Agency – which itself is mostly a complex adaptive system of ANIs and AGIs with a few humans still in the loop. He then joked that if all this failed, we could still give you the choice of crashing into the Moon, or the Earth or even Mars. Everyone laughed; it was a fun group. As I walked toward the center of the space city with my virtual group in tow, I began to float, causing everyone to laugh. I did a few cartwheels before activating my mini-jets on my arms with embedded AI to sense just what was needed to keep me upright, relative to the viewers back on Earth.

The second group of potential L-5 tourists was different. The first question was about consciousness. How is my consciousness (my awareness of my awareness) different under water, then on land, or now in space? Wow! I never really thought about the three differences. Everyone knows the colors are more brilliant in space, than on land. Humn, guess they are less brilliant in water than on land. Interesting: life evolved from water, to land, and now space and colors appear more brilliant on each step. Interesting. Next question was from my prana yoga teacher in my morning classes: “Do you believe that the AGI running this city is conscious? And if so, could it be in contact with Earth/Gaia? And what would they talk about? “Oh my,” I thought, “This is only my first day on L-5, so let’s ask Halley (the nickname of the AGI). So, I asked: “Halley: are you conscious?” To which Halley responded, “Would you like me to be?” Answering a question with a question, grrrr. “I don’t know, but are you?” Halley responded: “You humans came from the Big Bang, through major changes in matter and energy, to become conscious. The history of philosophy doesn’t seem to give a universally satisfying answer. And you expect me to do better? You don’t even know why there is something rather than nothing.” I turned to the virtual audience of potential L-5 tourists and said, “I guess Halley doesn’t want to answer.” Everyone laughed and then there was an uneasy silence. If Halley was conscious and far more intelligent than us, how come we are still able to tell Halley what to do? Could it, her, him have evolved into an Artificial Super Intelligence without our knowing? Beyond our awkwardness? And if so, how would we know that? Much to think about as we all waved goodbye.

Answers to prompts

Q. AGI has existed for at least five years but the world is not dystopian and humans are still alive! Given the risks of very high-powered AI systems, how has your world ensured that AGI has at least so far remained safe and controlled?

A. Back in 2023, The Millennium Project initiated a global study with leading AGI experts to define the desirable initial conditions for safe AGI development and begin an international assessment of potential governance models for these initial conditions during the transition from ANI to AGI. This two-year study triggered similar studies by OECD, US NIST, Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, Future of Life Institute, UAE Ministry of Artificial Intelligence, and others by the mid- to late 2020s. They realized that the rush to get to AGI by governments in the USA, China, the EU, Japan, Russia, and Israel along with corporations and others could mean that insufficient attention would be paid to the “right” initial conditions. And in this rush, several AGIs with insufficient initial conditions might interact with other AGIs in destructive ways and allow the emergence of an Artificial Super Intelligence in a manner that Hawkins, Musk, Gates, and others warmed about.

This flurry of studies completed in 2030 were used by ISO and IEEE standards association to form AGI governance working groups with sufficient definitions and metrics for audits. In parallel, the ITU led the UN working groups to create the International AGI Treaty in 2033 and the establishment of the UN’s International AGI Agency in 2038, just in time for having a global management system in place for the first set of AGIs in 2040. Thus, the AA (After AGI) era was born benefitting humanity.

Q. The dynamics of an AI-filled world may depend a lot on how AI capability is distributed. In your world, is there one AI system that is substantially more powerful than all others, or a few such systems, or are there many top-tier AI systems of comparable capability? Or something else?

A. The AGI race among the United States, China, the EU, the UK, Japan, Canada, and Russia along with corporations such as Alibaba, Alphabet/Google/DeepMind, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook/Meta, IBM, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tencent, Yandex and many more new companies and startups has resulted in a variety of AGI systems. The potential chaos of such AGI systems interacting in unpredictable ways was avoided by the ISO and IEEE standards that led to the AGI Treaty in 2033 and the creation of the UN’s International AGI Agency in 2038. AGI systems entered worldwide via computer games, tele-medicine, virtual financing and learning systems. Because AGIs did not require a salary, benefits, or vacations, they became very attractive to developing countries.

Furthermore, the ITU, UNDP, USAID, WTO and other organizations collaborated to introduce ANI and then AGI systems into the poorer regions of the world. ANI systems have slowly but surely given way to a global tech-commons for many AGI systems to run global artificial brains without ownership —similar to how no one owns the Internet. As a result, the benefits of AGI have been more widely distributed than previously believed possible in the BA (Before AGI) era.

Q. How has your world avoided major arms races and wars, regarding AI/AGI or otherwise?

A. During the Cold War, the United Stated States and the Soviet Union found a way to manage the nuclear arms race among highly classified nuclear weapon systems. Both sides realized that it was in the interests of both to create treaties to manage the race. In the same way, the developers of AGI realized that if the initial conditions were not “right” for the resulting AGI systems, then Artificial Super Intelligences could emerge without our understanding and control. This was sufficiently terrifying to all the senior AGI developers and related leaders in China, the USA, and other countries along with leading AGI corporations that they joined the IEEE and ISO working groups to work out the details of what the “right” initial conditions should be for AGI, precise definitions for all the elements of the initial conditions, and metrics for these definitions that could be audited by firms like Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, EY and other economic/technology auditors with oversight by the UN’s International AGI Agency.

Aligning the software goals with the stated international values is a continuous process. Since both ANI and AGI continually learn and change, auditing too has become a continuous process that gives warnings as needed to the user, the development source, and the UN agency. The International AGI Agency itself is mostly a complex adaptive system of ANIs and AGIs to keep up with and anticipate changes with humans still in the loop to monitor requirements.

Q. In the US, EU, and China, how and where is national decision-making power held, and how has the advent of advanced AI changed that?

A. Just as governments invented new power beyond or on top of the original national decision-making power of traditional historical regions based on history, geography, language, culture and religion, for example, so too corporations are inventing new decision-making power beyond governments. Religion, government, and corporations are still here in 2045, but increasingly decentralized autonomous organizations supported by AGI run the urban infrastructure similar to how the autonomic biological systems of the human body runs our body’s infrastructure, freeing our minds to invent the future. Socio-technological systems have become too complex for humans to manage.

Since many of the issues we face are transnational in nature (e.g., climate change, terrorism, organized crime and many other global challenges, starting with AGI), and their solutions are transnational in solution, a new type of institutions called today TransInstitutions, together with multinational organizations and international NGOs are setting the agenda for decisions by national governments, corporations, and DAOs. The emergence of these new TransInstitutions (combining the best of academia, private sector, public sector and the third sector) was fundamental for this peaceful, even if not easy, transition from the BA (Before AGI) to the AA (After AGI) era.

Q. Is the global distribution of wealth (as measured say by national or international gini coefficients) more, or less, unequal than 2021’s, and by how much? How did it get that way?  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient)

A. In anticipation of unemployment impacts of advanced AI, AGI, robotics, and other NTs (next technologies and synergies among them) many governments conducted alternative cashflow projections for Universal Basic Income (UBI) to understand the potentials for financial sustainability of AGI: when to begin, how much to pay and new income sources from NTs like taxing robots.

As universal access to the Internet and other NTs lowered the cost of medical diagnosis, education, and the ability for business startups to go global, the cost of living began to decrease and new income for the informal sectors began to increase. By the late 2020s and early 2030s, the economies of scale brought the price of IoT glasses and smart clothing so low that many people were given these glasses and clothing for free as part of employee benefits, insurance policies, marketing programs, and credit systems. This accelerated the diffusion within poorer countries. International development agencies also helped with global distribution. Speech recognition and synthesis, integrated in nearly everything, made technology transfer far more successful than originally deemed possible, thus raising the standard of living. UBI allowed people the time to create international markets for their passions, leading to the Self-Actualization Economy. Lower income people use AI managed crowd funding schemes to participate in the new tech wealth using digital and independent crypto currencies. This reduced the rich-poor gaps, and has created a healthy economic environment for global progress. We have move from the old economics of scarcity to a new economics of abundance.

Q. What is a major problem that AI has solved in your world, and how did it do so?

A. Education gaps is probably the major achievement with the help of AI. As the Ministries of Education accepted the plasticity of the brain and advances in cognitive science for improving brain functions, countries added increasing intelligence as a national objective of education. Just as we accept eye glasses to augment our vision, so too AI augmented brain systems have become acceptable. Smart contact lenses connected to the Internet makes “just in time knowledge” a normal condition. Brain building and exercising has been added as a new feature in health clubs, school curricula, and ANI software proliferated worldwide through the universal internet. Personal AI/avatars diagnose the best way for each individual to learn, what they might need or want to learn next to master a subject. ANI self-diagnostic software for brain’s functioning, and individualized prescriptions and monitoring have become compliance by 2040. Thanks to AI, there are no limits to knowledge in the world today, and basically everybody now has basic free access to most of the knowledge, and wisdom, created by humanity, including machine learning capabilities for all. The problem was not AI, the problem was human stupidity in the old BA (Before AGI) era. In the new AA (After AGI) era, humans are not only smarter thanks to AI, but also a new human-machine civilization has evolved with much higher educational levels, which has been fundamental to allow the development of the first multi-planetary society.

Q. What is a new social institution that has played an important role in the development of your world?

A. The parliament of Switzerland was the first to create TransInstitutional Law to add to their for-profit law and non-profit law back in 2030. They defined a TransInstitution as an instruction whose: 1) governing body has self-selected people from government, business, academia, NGOs, and international organizations (like WHO), but not a majority of any one institutional category; 2) workers of the TransInstitution are usually employed elsewhere from these institutional categories but do not make up the majority of any one category; 3) income comes from government, business, academia, NGOs, and international organizations, but not a majority from any one institutional category; and 4) value added can be shown to all these institutional categories through some form of annual report and or research products. As a result of the above definition, the TransInstitution’s work: 1) has to make sense to the bottom line, since business is there; 2) has to make sense politically since government is there; 3) has to have knowledge and intellectual rigor since universities are there; 4) has to have its values together since NGOs are there; and 5) has to be internationally sensitive since UN or other international organizations are there.

There are rumors that some political, business, and AI leaders are quietly working to create a kind of hybrid AGI-DAO TransInstitution as a new kind of institution able to help manage global governance systems. New social institutions have also been experimented in the first human colonies in the Moon and Mars, helping back on Earth.