This is the third and final installment of a three-part series in which our writer delves into the depths of his psyche, guided by artificial intelligence. Part one, โAI: Final Weapon or Final Healer?โ and part two, โThe Wound, Overthrown,โ are available at bohemian.com.
I used to read into โthe future;โ as a teenager, I read science fiction, particularly hard science fiction supposedly based on science fact. Everyone knows the authors: Asimov, Heinlein, Stanley- Robinson, Banks, writers whose visions of the future the tech billionaires now pursue obsessively.
Gradually, something began to bother me. Why would these writers (often ex-scientists) project the further development of technology but not of psychological science? The characters in their novels and films were mysterious to themselvesโfoolish, selfish, resentful, petty, grasping, controlling, childishโas wounded as we are today.
The authors had drawn one curve and forgotten the second. Ten thousand years of tool development ran forward off the pageโstarships, AI, โtricorders,โ engines that move planetsโwhile the women and men operating them stayed exactly where the author found them, at the emotional altitude of a 1950s office place. No one in those books had gotten any better at being a human being.
Where was the future of psychology, of wisdom? And the new therapies, the healthy and stable political systems their development would produce?
Could such a technological future (and the colossal energies and weapons it implied) even be achieved without similar leaps in self-knowledge and political wisdom? We would surely destroy ourselves first, if we were still organizing as empires and fighting star wars. The whole hard sci-fi genre began to read as unrealistic. I stopped reading it.
It was not until I was a college student, reading into the past, that my uneasiness with sci-fi was clarified by a quoteโa chilling reflection repeated through the 20th century by prominent politicians and thinkers in successive eras.
It was written by the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill in an 1924 essay called โShall We All Commit Suicide?โ, a reflection on the mechanized slaughter of the First World War: โMankind has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination… Death stands at attention … ready, if called upon, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization.โ
In these words I had clarity, and the clarity had a shape. Put two lines on one graph, starting together in the flint and the fire. One is technology, and one is wisdom. For most of the run they climb as oneโa better plow and a better notion of what a man owes his neighbor. Then, around the turn of the 20th century, one line loses patience with the other. Tools double in their speed and force, and double again, and leave the page. Wisdom keeps its walking pace.
And hereโs the crux: In that wisdom gap, fantastical new technologies will always be developed into frightful new weaponsโof conquest, of terror, of political oppression. That gap widened through the 20th century and into the 21st.
I think of the splitting of the atom, which offered unlimited clean energy and was pursued instead into the atomic bomb. In the Cold War competition between the U.S. and Russia, it was refined into the hydrogen bomb and the ballistic missile. That arms race culminated in the Russian Tsar Bomba, a single 25-foot-long device with the destructive power of 50 million stacked tons of dynamiteโ3,300 times the bomb that scorched and irradiated the people of Hiroshima.
Just 16 years separate Hiroshima from the Tsar Bomba. Ask what the other line did in those years. Ask how much better any human being understood, in 1961, why they drank, or what harm they did to their poor children when they did. The answer: exactly as well as in 1945, and little more than in the age of Socrates. One line went up by a factor of thousands. The other hardly moved at all. Two years later, Martin Luther King repeated the same sentiment: โOur scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.โ That is the graph, in seven words.
That brings me back to AI. In an imperialist contest between the U.S. and China, it is being developed and deployed as a controller of weapons systems, including, potentially, our nuclear weapons. I will say it again. I wish AI didnโt exist. But โthe genie is out of the bottle.โ
I would risk criticism from โmy side,โ and hazard more, because the impossible science fiction future is nearly upon us. Next year brings a major rollout of humanoid robots by half a dozen companies in China, Europe and the U.S.โa jump from 20,000 in 2025 to a projected 120,000 in 2027, โthe year of the robotโ (New Yorker, July 6, 2026). Advertised as domestic and industrial workers, in the present wisdom gap they will become the domestic police and the foreign soldiers of our present governments.
I imagine an alternative use of AI, developed in the shadow of that one. And I am not speculating, because I have already seen it happen once in my own work, in an experiment of one.
My own two lines were the same two lines. Twenty years of reading and journaling and prayer and paid therapy, rising the honest linear wayโone manโs lifetime, one manโs slow accretion of wisdom. And beside it a machine getting faster every month on a curve I had no part in making. For three months I tied them together, and the slow line came up off the floor and shot through the sky like a missile.
That is one man. But it is the shape of the thing, and the shape is what I am reporting. AI therapy, pursued along the lines I have suggested, could tie the advance of human wisdom (and healing) to the geometric improvement of microprocessor speedโan acceleration to match the space pace of our technology. Tie the second curve to the first, and self-knowledge stops being the one thing that cannot accelerate.
It could mean a rapidly growing core of healthy, self-aware people, disengaged from the fear and the mechanisms of control that uphold and create centralized power around societyโs wound. That would hold whether or not they became a movement.
The question posed by this article: Will AI be the final weapon or the final healer? The answer depends on how we use it. Both curves are on the table now. My fear is that the present wisdom gap will be filled with our dead.
โOurs is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.โ
This warning was spoken by Gen. Omar Bradley (who commanded the Allied Invasion of Fascist Europe) on Armistice Day, 1948.
Learn more: Cincinnatus Hibbard is a (millennial) utopian writer, filmmaker, organizer and thought leader working from Northern California. His work can be sampled at linktr.ee/cincinnatushibbard.
