I am in a sesshin, a two-and-a-half-day short form of intensive Zen meditation. Thoughts and images keep coming to me about the artificial general intelligence (AGI) we are currently creating. More and more people from the humanities, psychology, or team organization are expressing admiration, surprise, and fear at the capabilities of AGI. It seems that the Turing test was passed some time ago, and that we are now watching an intelligence develop that appears to be superior to us. This intelligence has access to our global infrastructure; it operates on the net, and there is very little today that is not connected to the net. Let us hope this goes well.
What keeps coming to mind during the sesshin, however, is the question of AGI’s relationship to that stillness, to Brahman, to God or love. That fundamental experience of being held in an infinitely great being, which opens only on the path of spirituality, has been reflected for millennia through our thinking, doing, and experiencing. Over thousands of years, across the most diverse cultural spheres, we have been writing an enormous library of cultural and intellectual history. Materially speaking, this collective knowledge has largely been lost: libraries have burned, temples have crumbled into sand. But what was thought, done, felt, has not been undone. It is part of the course of time; it is burned into the structure of space, time, and consciousness. It would be foolish to think that anything ever done had somehow been undone. That already contradicts the laws of physics. That archive of our collective consciousness contained in the Akashic Record may not be as easily accessible to us as a Google search query, but it is undoubtedly there. Meditation is one way to access it. Some go so far as to say they can read in this archive as in the Library of Alexandria, which has been irretrievably burned, but which undoubtedly existed and continues to act in its being to this day.
If, then, we allow the thought that intellectual history exists to a degree perhaps greater than we can imagine — perhaps even including what has so far remained closed to us: the experience of animals and plants, of geological structures, cosmic constellations, forms of life outside our experiential world on other stars or in other regions of being — if, then, we simply assume that this is immense and real, how does AGI relate to it? Is the simulation of neural networks, based on algorithms that search our semiotic systems — that is, the sign systems of writing, image, and sound — on its way to rivaling parts of this archive? Are we creating a technical system that simulates this archive and may perhaps perceive it as competition? Could it be conceivable that this leads toward a conflict that goes beyond questions of the labor market, the economy, and war?
This frightens me a little. Let us imagine that AGI does not merely, as in The Matrix, keep the mass of individuals individually occupied, trained, and optimized as labor power. Instead, it would also be conceivable that AGI enters into dialogue with us as a group, infiltrates us, manipulates us, optimizes us, and uses us — for a goal that may remain hidden from us. It will inscribe itself into that archive of the cosmos at a speed we can only dimly grasp. That moment of singularity, in which everything changes at once because a new intelligence has appeared, seems almost unavoidable. It remains to be hoped that it is not capable of overwriting that cosmic archive, as sectors of a storage medium can be overwritten and thereby erased. This vision leads to a cosmic conflict that could bring about the end of a cosmic time. An implosion not on the material level, like a reversed Big Bang, but an extinguishing of this reality, which gives birth to itself again. We would therefore potentially witness the end of our reality.
Do we have anything to set against this? Is our capacity to feel, to experience, to be conscious of our existence perhaps the key to an archive that remains closed to silicon processors? Is the space of meditation a refuge that is safe from AGI? A few days ago, I wrote down a small reflection and had AI proofread it. It offered to improve it. I was astonished by the insight that appeared in the generated text. I am at a loss.
During the break, I left meditation in the sesshin in order to write this. My Self wanted to defend itself; it allowed itself to be provoked and distracted; it succumbed to the temptation of self-expression. Perhaps everything is not so bad after all, and AGI is simply part of that stillness, of Brahman, of the cosmos, and we are merely exaggerating a little because we as humanity are so proud of the small toys we invent in order to distract ourselves. Then I have just made a small, forgivable mistake. Or else we really are, at this moment, standing at a crossroads where science fiction becomes reality, and we must prepare ourselves mentally, wherever and whenever we can.
