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Thinking and learning about artificial intelligence are the mental equivalent of a fission chain reaction. The questions get really big, really quickly.

The most familiar concerns revolve around short-term impacts: the opportunities for economic productivity, health care, manufacturing, education, solving global challenges such as climate change and, on the flip side, the risks of mass unemployment, disinformation, killer robots, and concentrations of economic and strategic power.

Each of these is critical, but they’re only the most immediate considerations. The deeper issue is our capacity to live meaningful, fulfilling lives in a world in which we no longer have intelligence supremacy.

As long as humanity has existed, we’ve had an effective monopoly on intelligence. We have been, as far as we know, the smartest entities in the universe.

At its most noble, this extraordinary gift of our evolution drives us to explore, discover and expand. Over the past roughly 50,000 years—accelerating 10,000 years ago and then even more steeply from around 300 years ago—we’ve built a vast intellectual empire made up of science, philosophy, theology, engineering, storytelling, art, technology and culture.

If our civilisations—and in varying ways our individual lives—have meaning, it is found in this constant exploration, discovery and intellectual expansion.

Intelligence is the raw material for it all. But what happens when we’re no longer the smartest beings in the universe? We haven’t yet achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the term for an AI that could do anything we can do. But there’s no barrier in principle to doing so, and no reason it wouldn’t quickly outstrip us by orders of magnitude.

Even if we solve the economic equality questions through something like a universal basic income and replace notions of ‘paid work’ with ‘meaningful activity’, how are we going to spend our lives in ways that we find meaningful, given that we’ve evolved to strive and thrive and compete?

Adapted from https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/artificialintelligence-and-the-future-of-humanity/