And now we'll entertain questions, which is usually much more fun.
So, anybody got a take on that or want to say something completely oblique or moving in?
Last year, we start with last year, human intelligence, giant intelligence,
or person intelligence, I start to ask a little bit.
Can you speak up?
You'll repeat it.
Well, the question is about the discussion about artificial intelligence.
You mean the hierarchy of the relationship of these things?
Well, I don't know.
I guess it's becoming easier for me to be a mystic about the Earth
than to think that we are going to be rescued by the Galactic Federation.
I think that the Earth, that it's a profound connection.
The Earth is the foundation of everything.
It's the foundation of biology, and it's the foundation of machine culture and machine architecture.
So, you know, if you can imagine that a redwood is alive, it's much easier for me to imagine
that there is some kind of slow-moving, telluric intelligence that may have begun as a homeostatic system.
In other words, to stabilize the atmosphere, to create a chemical environment that had a momentum to it
that wasn't driven by the cosmic ambience.
You understand what I mean?
And there was feedback, perhaps.
Yeah, feedback mechanisms.
Feedback to the cells.
And then, of course, people say, well, it's very hard to imagine it because there are no genes.
There is no nervous system.
There is nothing that we can quite...
But I think that, first of all, we don't know a great deal about the Earth.
The ocean currents, its magnetic fields, its 32 nutational and processional motions,
its core dynamics, its distribution of materials.
It is complicated, and that's what's always required for self-referential and feedback systems to evolve.
Life evolved on the surface of the Earth.
Now, in the usual story of this, the Earth is not a major player.
It's just sort of where it happened.
But, on the other hand, what if you took the view that the Earth permitted or coaxed into existence
or made possible or encouraged or enzymatically catalyzed these processes?
And the, you know, the geomagnetic reversals, the glaciations,
the ebb and flow of nitrogen levels in the atmosphere,
all of this has pumped biology.
And it's always been presented as, well, the cosmic atmosphere, the cosmic environment is unpredictable,
and so you get fluctuations introduced from the outside by random factors,
asteroidal impacts, so forth and so on.
But again, this is just a first try with the data.
This is just somebody blowing smoke, basically.
The fact is, you're presented with an extremely organized and coherent situation,
the Earth with its many species and ecosystems,
and you don't know how it got there.
And you don't know where it's headed, either.
Now, our culture is a culture of guilt,
and so the story of civilization is supposedly a story of rape, mayhem,
turning the wrong direction, losing the connection.
To some degree, that may be true.
But I think it gives much too much credit to humanity
in that it actually hypothesizes that human beings, a primate species,
could overwhelm nature's dynamic drive toward order and beauty
and take control of things.
Well, that's our myth about ourselves, is that we can take control.
But we never have gotten control.
All of our societies have been a mess.
All of our explorations have been brutal and negatory.
So, and now comes the machines.
And they are produced by biology, which comes from the Earth.
And what are these machines made of?
Well, glass, crystal, arsenic, copper, gold, all these things.
And they're being hooked together exactly on the model.
Clearly, the machines are modeled on biology.
We talk about connecting them.
We talk about languages.
We use a vocabulary that we previously used for biology.
We talk about these things.
And you see there's a funny thing built in there,
which is we are designing the machines to be more and more intelligent.
But what we don't understand is that they operate in a different universe from us
because we operate at about 100 hertz.
A machine you can buy down at any computer store operates at 400 megahertz.
That means that you can run an eternity of human lives in an afternoon.
It means, in a way, that we are creating a creature
that lives in a different kind of temporal universe than us.
And we are teaching them to design themselves to be ever more intelligent.
And once some kind of intelligence arises, because it's intelligent,
the first thing it does is design a more intelligent version of itself.
Well, at 400 megahertz and with a worldwide amount of processing power to draw on,
you can imagine something coming to embryogenesis in a matter of hours.
Something emerging, recognizing itself for what it was,
and then just starting up the ladder.
And what would this look like to us?
And where is our place in it?
This is the adventure of the future.
We are going to be a different kind of people
because we're going to have to live in the presence of alien minds
that will be manifestly and obviously alien.
They won't hold back.
And they're not going to be, you know, at every moment interested in us either.
In fact, we will become, you know, a footnote in their encyclopedia of being.
And what they become in our encyclopedia of being remains to be told.
But this is all happening and it's just a matter of the coalescence of technology and language
before more and more people recognize it.
As I say, there isn't a speed bump.
There isn't a dramatic moment where everybody gets it.
But when you talk to the people who actually work in these fields,
they know, you know, that this is the Faustian enterprise of all time.
This is the handing over of the destiny of the planet to the companion mind
that our history and our science and our souls caused us to summon into being.
It's pretty interesting, isn't it?
I think it's just a minute.