What if humanity's future alongside superintelligent AI isn't extinction, but irrelevance? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson dropped this mind-bending perspective at a recent New Zealand panel, comparing our potential future to microscopic creatures living in our eyelashes.
"The mites just 'know' that food magically shows up in their environment all the time," Stephenson says. "They don't know humans exist." In his view, we might end up similarly thriving on the "byproducts" of vastly superior AI systems — neither threatening nor important to them.
Stephenson thinks we're already stumbling toward a different kind of irrelevance. Citing Marshall McLuhan's warning that "every augmentation is also an amputation," he points to students who've surrendered their mental muscles to ChatGPT, "using it for everything, and in consequence learning nothing." We're breeding what he calls "mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies they don't understand."
Think of future AI varieties like different animal species, he suggests. Some will be like attentive dogs, others like indifferent ravens, and some like dragonflies — completely unaware of our existence. The question isn't whether we'll share our world with these new intelligences, but what niche we'll carve out for ourselves when we do.
Previously:
• Neal Stephenson's Some Remarks, a remarkable essay collection
• Interface: Neal Stephenson's underappreciated masterpiece
• Talking with Neal Stephenson about his latest book, 'Fall; or, Dodge in Hell'
• Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's DODO novel mashes up D&D, time-travel and military bureaucracy
• Neal Stephenson's next book is a science fiction novel with a fantasy novel stuck inside of it
• Neal Stephenson's System of the World concludes the Baroque Trilogy
• Neal Stephenson's new novel, Anathem: sneak peek at glossary
• Neal Stephenson's Seveneves: five thousand years of apocalypse and rebirth
