in our entire lives.
But in a globally networked economy of billions of people, stocked with
thousands of nukes and Facebook privacy violations and holographic Michael
Jackson concerts, our algorithms kind of suck. They break down and enter us
into ever-escalating cycles of conflict that, by the nature of our algorithms,
can produce no permanent satisfaction, no final peace.
It’s like that brutal advice you sometimes hear, that the only thing all your
fucked-up relationships have in common is you. Well, the only thing that all
the biggest problems in the world have in common is us. Nukes wouldn’t be a
problem if there weren’t some dumb fuck sitting there tempted to use them.
Biochemical weapons, climate change, endangered species, genocide—you
name it, none of it was an issue until we came along.^13 Domestic violence,
rape, money laundering, fraud—it’s all us.
Life is fundamentally built on algorithms. We just happen to be the most
sophisticated and complex algorithms nature has yet produced, the zenith of
about one billion years’ worth of evolutionary forces. And now we are on the
cusp of producing algorithms that are exponentially better than we are.
Despite all our accomplishments, the human mind is still incredibly
flawed. Our ability to process information is hamstrung by our emotional
need to validate ourselves. It is curved inward by our perceptual biases. Our
Thinking Brain is regularly hijacked and kidnapped by our Feeling Brain’s
incessant desires—stuffed in the trunk of the Consciousness Car and often
gagged or drugged into incapacitation.
And as we’ve seen, our moral compass too frequently gets swung off
course by our inevitable need to generate hope through conflict. As the moral
psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, “morality binds and blinds.”^14 Our Feeling
Brains are antiquated, outdated software. And while our Thinking Brains are
decent, they’re too slow and clunky to be of much use anymore. Just ask
Garry Kasparov.
We are a self-hating, self-destructive species.^15 That is not a moral
statement; it’s simply a fact. This internal tension we all feel, all the time?
That’s what got us here. It’s what got us to this point. It’s our arms race. And
we’re about to hand over the evolutionary baton to the defining information
processors of the next epoch: the machines.
When Elon Musk was asked what the most imminent threats to humanity
were, he quickly said there were three: first, wide-scale nuclear war; second,
climate change—and then, before naming the third, he fell silent. His face
became sullen. He looked down, deep in thought. When the interviewer asked