The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into an Existential Opportunity
by
Marta Lenartowicz 1,*,†
, David R. Weinbaum 1,*,†, Francis Heylighen 1, Kate Kingsbury 2 and Tjorven Harmsen 1,3
Marta Lenartowicz 1,*,†, David R. Weinbaum 1,*,†, Francis Heylighen 1, Kate Kingsbury 2 and Tjorven Harmsen 1,3
1
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition Group, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Ixelles, Belgium
2
Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2R3, Canada
3
Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, 15537 Erkner, Germany
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
Marta Lenartowicz and David R. Weinbaum contributed equally to the paper.
Information 2018, 9(5), 113; https://doi.org/10.3390/info9050113
Received: 4 April 2018 / Revised: 30 April 2018 / Accepted: 3 May 2018 / Published: 5 May 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Community Informatics Design for Digital Social Systems: The Ultimate Tool for a Human Digital Age)
We propose a venture into an existential opportunity for establishing a world ‘good enough’ for humans to live in. Defining an existential opportunity as the converse of an existential risk—that is, a development that promises to dramatically improve the future of humanity—we argue that one such opportunity is available and should be explored now. The opportunity resides in the moment of transition of the Internet—from mediating information to mediating distributed direct governance in the sense of self-organization. The Internet of tomorrow will mediate the execution of contracts, transactions, public interventions and all other change-establishing events more reliably and more synergistically than any other technology or institution. It will become a distributed, synthetically intelligent agent in itself. This transition must not be just observed, or exploited instrumentally: it must be ventured into and seized on behalf of entire humanity. We envision a configuration of three kinds of cognitive system—the human mind, social systems and the emerging synthetic intelligence—serving to augment the autonomy of the first from the ‘programming’ imposed by the second. Our proposition is grounded in a detailed analysis of the manner in which the socio-econo-political system has evolved into a powerful control mechanism that subsumes human minds, steers their will and automates their thinking. We see the venture into the existential opportunity described here as aiming at the global dissolution of the core reason of that programming’s effectiveness—the critical dependence of the continuity of human lives on the coherence of the socially constructed personas they ‘wear.’ Thus, we oppose the popular prediction of the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’ with a call for action: instead of worrying that Artificial Intelligence will soon come to dominate and govern the human world, let us think of how it could help the human being to finally be able to do it.
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Keywords:
governance; social systems; personware; communication; cognition; cognitive dissonance; symbolic order; human emancipation; Artificial Intelligence; good enough world; existential opportunity
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MDPI and ACS Style
Lenartowicz, M.; Weinbaum, D.R.; Heylighen, F.; Kingsbury, K.; Harmsen, T. The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into an Existential Opportunity. Information 2018, 9, 113.
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