I’m sure many of you by now have seen the brilliant midwit meme, examples of which are legion, but this is the generic one.
It’s an IQ bell curve wherein the simpletons on the left, who trust their eyes, ears and instincts, largely agree with the smart people on the right, who discern reality through the noise. But the midwits, who make up the bulk of the curve and are easily misled into believing all kinds of nonsense, rail against both. They look down on the simpletons and see the intelligent as heretics, or worse.*
*In truth the IQ axis is just a stand-in for what amounts more to a wisdom/understanding distribution, as some of those to whom I’ll refer as “midwits” would probably score quite highly on an actual IQ test.
But the genius of this meme is that it speaks to something deep in human nature that predates internet meme-making by at least 14 centuries — in fact it was captured by one of the more famous works of Mahayana Buddhism, The Heart Sutra:
Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form
Emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness
Whatever is emptiness, that is form.
The first idea is that form is empty. This is the part the midwits are able to grasp. I remember being nervous before my high school wrestling matches and thinking, “we’re all just atoms and molecules” to try (unsuccessfully) to calm myself down while facing the prospect of fighting some guy in a tight wrestling singlet in front of a crowd of people I had to see every day. “It’s not real the way I perceive it to be, science shows it’s all just a construct.”
The simpleton doesn’t realize this. He looks at the world of form and takes it at face value. He doesn’t fully appreciate that my match is just atoms and molecules moving around and on the cosmological scale means nothing. But the midwit, thanks to his education, gets it.
The second idea is that emptiness is itself empty. The notion that we’re all atoms and molecules might be true in a narrow, scientific sense, but that concept, that understanding, is itself but thoughts and ideas, electrochemical signals in my brain. Even my describing it as electro-chemical signals is more of the same. That is empty too! And saying it’s empty is also empty — ad infinitum.
This one goes over the midwit’s head. He can grasp the concepts, but not the emptiness of concepts. He can see that gender is a construct, but not that “gender is a construct” is a construct. This is not a debate about who is correct. It’s an understanding that “correct” is empty and emptiness is also empty. All the way down.
The third idea is that because form is empty and so is emptiness, then emptiness is form. Once you understand both that reality is empty and the idea that reality is empty is itself empty, what remains? Form — freed from your abstractions and ideas about it.
That’s why the simpleton who takes form at face value is aligned with the sage who takes form as it is, and it is only the midwit, stuck in partial understanding, who gets lost in, and easily manipulated by, a maze of conceptions.
The 21st century midwit meme, it turns out, is embedded in the 7th century Heart Sutra.
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I wrote about why we should not fear AI, and also that if AI were able to replace your menial-mental labor, it should cause you to reflect on whether you’ve been living to your full capacity. I want to add a third point here: That those most existentially afraid of AI (as opposed to those more sensibly worried about losing their livelihoods on its account) are midwits. And they reveal themselves by their fears. The idea that AI will kill everyone because it will see the atoms comprising our bodies as more useful for other ends — is the quintessential example.
For starters, why would one suppose a super intelligence (of which I am still dubious can be created via the present methods) would see the world conceptually the way he does, i.e., that humans are garden-variety atom-sources? They might answer: “Because we really are made up of atoms!”
But that is just a concept, a particular lens through which to frame reality. Of course, the materialist lens has its merits! Understanding atomic building blocks is useful to us in creating things we want. But it’s not “true” any more than framing reality through a psychological lens is true. We have emotions, desires and fears too. Understanding those is also useful. Why would a super intelligent AI solely gravitate to the materialist frame and not the psychological one? Why would it not mine our far more scarce (in the universe) emotions as much as our atoms?
If the super-intelligence is so dangerous precisely because we cannot predict how it would out-think or attack us, why are we supposing we can predict its needs and wants?
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According to my college philosophy professor, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, believed it was wrong to kill a fly because had a man created such an intricate machine it would be barbaric to destroy it arbitrarily. (Unfortunately I can’t find a link to corroborate this, but if my memory serves me professor Bill Kennick, who died in 2009, did say this one day during class in 1990.)
Leibniz was a genius. He did the work of 10 men! (also per Kennick) Would a presumably even more intelligent AI not see the orders of magnitude greater complexity and sublimeness inherent in human beings? Would it not view our atoms (commonly available elsewhere) as being in a more ordered state than anything it could possibly cobble together via its mechanistic algorithms?
Of course, for the same reason it’s a fool’s errand to assume a vastly superior intelligence would simply repurpose us for atoms, it’s also probably rash to presume with certainty it would revere the creature that sculpted the statue of David, built the Pyramids, split the atom and created AI itself.
But as we go up the evolutionary and intellectual ladder, we typically see more comprehension of what’s unique and precious about life, not less. A deadly bacteria would reproduce itself inside Albert Einstein as surely as it would in a cannibalistic savage. A hungry lion would eat Michelangelo without a second thought. The more meager the intelligence, the less discernment it has for life and its quality. The idea that a super-intelligent AI would be about repurposing human atoms to optimize for say total paperclips runs counter to any notion of “intelligence” of which I’m aware.
What these midwits seem to describe is less a super-intelligent AI and more a midwit like themselves with a narrow worldview but a ton of processing power. Now that kind of naive optimizing fool, sufficiently empowered, could really be dangerous as we saw recently with the covid response and more broadly with 20th-century communism. An AI that could naively optimize for some narrow end might turn out to be a menace, indeed, but it’s a real long shot to be a civilization-ending super intelligence. More like a math calculator that expanded its range of functions to include language and programming, run amok.
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I’ll leave off with a final thought. There is one type of intelligence of which I’m aware that transcends the capabilities of any individual human, does vast computation at lightning speed and can arrange entire societies more efficiently and adeptly than any presently conceivable AI. It’s called the free market.
The French nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat captured this in a question: “How does Paris get fed?” Living in a large city, Parisians do not produce food but still have abundant access to it. The important question is how this comes to be. After all, there is no central plan for what types and quantities of foods are to be offered to Parisians and when. There is no one telling farmers when and what to sow, which land to use for each crop, what tools to use or develop, or in what cities, towns, or market squares to sell their produce and at what prices. All of this just happens. The economy is a decentralized and distributed system where all people—farmers and city folk alike—make their own plans and decisions. They do not simply carry out orders from some central command.
How To Think About the Economy
Per L. Bylund
Free markets are a kind of AI, though just a subset of nature’s larger super-intelligence that similarly governs her non-human ecosystems too. Simple axioms — each individual atom, molecule, cell, animal or person, following its natural instincts, learning and being shaped by its environment — create complex systems, emergent phenomena so ordered and beautiful only a super-intelligence could be behind it.
This super-intelligent AI, that created the forests and coral reefs, the galaxies and stars and also the human being, is known as God to some, the Tao to others. It is already with us, has always been with us and will never be surpassed by these impressive, but ultimately limited machines.
This idea might be disappointing — that our creations are amateur hour compared to Creation itself. That we are neither on the verge of destroying the world nor saving it. But that’s okay. Not only is AI empty, but the idea that AI is empty is empty too.