How AI Might Bring Humanity Together

Simply being human will differentiate us from the machines

Mookie Spitz
3 min readOct 26, 2024

The duality between mind and body has been evident since the Greeks and likely before, on the one hand making consciousness mysterious and special, on the other knowable and ubiquitous. If the Universe isn’t entirely spiritual or material, then physical reality can be described as an expression of the mind, and mind an expression of the physical body.

Artificial intelligence, by way of philosophers René Descartes to Daniel Dennett, and engineers Alan Turing to Marvin Minsky, has sought to describe and then design machines that could emulate and even surpass the human mind’s capabilities. The advent of digital technology formalized the goal in the 1950s, a tipping point reached in the 2020s with OpenAI.

Minds as machines and machines as minds is thrilling and terrifying, complex and conflicting emotions that have flaired since ChatGPTs electrifying and exponential launch. Evangelists from John McCarthy to Sam Altman, alongside doomsayers from Arthur C. Clarke to Geoffrey Hinton, have generated considerable hype and hysteria. What’s true?

Nobody knows — further fueling the excitement and anxiety. Self-driving cars are already on the roads, startups are blossoming, and NVIDIA has just surprassed Apple as the world’s most valuable company — while AI is also guiding devastating bombing campaigns, further threatening privacy, and already being used by autocracies to expand their interests and control.

Akin to any transformative technology, AI is and forever will be a double-edged sword. Arguably the biggest fear of this latest and likely greatest revolution is not merely the inevitable job losses and societal disruption, but the feeling that humanity will be — to use the English euphemism — made redundant. If machines can do everything better, what’s the point?

In the 2009 movie District 9, any vestigial racism of apartheid South Africa vanishes when Johannseburg is forced to deal with thousands of extraterriestrial refugees. Regardless who you are, what you look like, where you’re from, as a human at least you aren’t a walking and chirping shrimp-like alien. Hatred of the Other is transposed, bringing us peace.

Drawing an analogy to the world being forced to deal with AI, and inevitably the development of Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI) — a brain in a box—we can perhaps take solace in our human-to-human kindship. Taken a step further, the exponential evolution of machines with minds might help conquer our ongoing challenges as minds with bodies.

We evolved within a vast but indifferent Universe, and on a fertile but unforgiving planet. Our bodies far ahead of our minds, genetically programmed instinctive behaviors were naturally selected based on our environment, enabling our species not only to survive, but flourish to the point of dominating the entire ecosystem. We are Earth’s apex predator.

Many foundational behaviors that were effective for thousands of generations in pre-technological human tribes are now anachronistic obstacles to a global, and hopefully interplanetary, advancing civilization. As primates with big brains boosted by the accumulated knowledge and expertise of our ancestors, we are restrained by the savagery of the past.

My so-called “District 9 Effect” could be one of the least talked about but most significant benefits of the AI revolution. Rather than fear the future, we can embrace the advent of AGI as a reminder not of what makes us disposable, but what makes us special. When machines becomes minds, let’s celebrate our minds in whatever bodies they happen to be born.

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Mookie Spitz
Mookie Spitz

Written by Mookie Spitz

Author and communications strategist. His latest book SUPER SANTA is available on Amazon, with a sci fi adventure set for Valentine's Day 2025...

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