Sam Altman: Human Extinction Is Our "Best-Case Scenario"

Yesterday, I published an article for Truthdig on Sam Altman’s pro-extinctionism. “Few people in the media seem to have noticed Altman’s pro-extinctionist agenda,” I wrote. “The public is largely unaware.”

I think this piece discusses an extremely important issue. Altman is a billionaire who’s actively trying to bring about the Singularity, and he’s explicit that the only way humanity can “survive” is by merging with ASI. Those who resist this “merge” will be enslaved by ASI, and our species will then die out.

That’s his best-case scenario! Absolutely outrageous. Here’s a key passage from the article:

… In a 2017 blog post titled “The Merge,” he writes:

We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.

In other words, we can die out once ASI arrives, or we can “survive” by “merging” with AI. This is “probably our best-case scenario” for making it in the post-Singularity world.

…

What Altman is really getting at is far more radical. Elsewhere in the essay, he writes that

if two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it — in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond — they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.

The two “species” here are humans and ASI. Both want to dominate, Altman says, but only one can. Since there’s no way for ASI to become a biological human, the only other option is for humans to become digital beings like the ASI. That’s the sole way for us to form “one team” — humanity becoming the new species to which ASI belongs.

Altman says as much in a 2016 interview with The New Yorker. “We need to level up humans,” he declares, “because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever.” He elaborates: “The merge has begun — and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the AI or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud,” to which he adds, “I’d love that.”

Two years later, he signed up with a startup called Nectome to have his brain digitized when he dies, something he believes will become feasible in the near future. Altman is preparing to become an AI himself.

In a separate New Yorker article published this year, Altman told Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz that his “definition of winning is that people crazy uplevel — and the insane sci-fi future comes true for all of us.” In other words, he wants a world in which we all become disembodied digital minds existing on computer hardware, and sees this as the “best-case scenario” — the one in which we, in some sense, “survive” the history-rupturing Singularity event that he’s trying to bring about.

But would merging with AI actually guarantee “our” survival? No. If humanity were digitized, we would become an entirely different species — the same kind as ASI. Altman is thus saying that the only way for humanity to avoid extinction is to go extinct. Either the ASI “will kill us all,” or we will “uplevel” by abandoning our biological substrate and become something fundamentally different from Homo sapiens. Both cases will result in human extinction.

Read the entire article here. And let me know what you think below.

Thanks for all of your support. Hope everyone is doing well. :-)

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!