The Three Missing Pieces

I have just finished reading a book on the new explosion of artificial intelligence. It is called The Coming Wave and is sub-titled AI, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma. It is written by Mustafa Suleyman who developed a company in 2010 committed to studying the subject and exploring ways of constraining its development. He recalled a seminar he organised with leading experts in the field raising both the potential and dangers it presented. He was staggered that over tea, which was provided,  the usual  ‘banter and bon homme’ continued without a sign of concern which had been presented.

I found it a powerful book written in 2023 outlining the inevitable shape of our new world arising from the expansive effects of Artificial Intelligence on our societies across the world. The picture is gruesome with a level of advancement beyond our wildest estimation. China is presently the worst with advanced surveillance cameras, and communication networks across the country with a precision hard to imagine. The whole country is monitored. We should not be complacent in our own Western countries for we are gradually following suit. Things designed to work for our good can just as easily be turned against us. A simple example is the external security system which we are likely to have on for security purposes 24 hours of a day, but which is also recording our every movement around our own house. The connection to our mobile phone which records people at our front door also records our coming and going. The reshaping of society is inevitable with the re-divisions of our society into fragmented tribes, regions, and nation-states all working at cross purposes. The danger of terrorists, rogue interest groups or power nations taking advantage of lesser nations is a constant fear. There is also the possibility of Artificial Intelligence eventually developing to a stage where it advances itself beyond what any expert can detect. This is a brief summation of some of the types of things that we can expect and very shortly at that. Societies have always risen and fallen usually over a long period of time and transitioned slowly, but not this next wave. It is coming fast and furious. The shape of our society is predicted to transition as quickly as 2030, 2050, and 2021 at a rapid rate.

The problem is that those leaders of the world committed to this change are inevitably bringing about this change with great haste.  Money and ego always triumph over common sense and wisdom, and it hastens the transition even at the expense of collectives that seek to contain and direct the development. But this does not provide the full vision of what the world is made up of. Those who have read my work before will recall I have spoken regularly about the Integral world where all things are integrally woven together. The failure to see this is to maintain an approach to life that is passing, one that is committed to division and analysis. We have lived in a fragmented world and the time is appearing through the understanding of quantum physics and related research that all is integrated. This is a world of this size - 8 billion - that we must honour. Ken Wilber has written profusely on the integral world, in its simplest form explaining that the world falls into one of four categories, the hard science, the psychological, the sociological, and the cultural. These are the three missing pieces of the world's current vision. Failure to consider all concurrently is to fail the new emerging vision.

The world of Artificial Intelligence is failing this test. In the world of hard sciences, it fails the world of the sociological for whatever the common form of invention, it is created to be exactly the same.  ‘Robo’ of replica humans are produced as replicas of all others exactly the same. In the real sociological world, we are all similar but different, on two are exactly the same. It fails the sociological argument. In the world of psychology, the concept of same but different is similarly a problem. It is the issue of the unconscious mind. We do not know what is the fulness of the unconscious mind so how can a human replica capture this capacity of the mind? It is the very thing that assures us we are similarly different. The culture world is complex as we are all drawn to different worlds of interest. Music, art, plays reading, religion, ideologies, etc. A human replica has no way of reproducing these many forms of complexity, sociological, psychological,  and cultural.  These are the three missing pieces of replicating the human being, the psychological, the cultural, and the sociological, and never will they be able to do so. The one additional quality that distinguishes a human from a robotic replica is that humans grow daily through the age cycle. They develop a story of their life.