Genesis – The Creation of a New World by Superhuman AI

‘Genesis’¹, the new book recently published by Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt, is certainly not short on temerity for it announces the impending dawn of a completely new cycle of creation – technological, biological, sociological². This will be ushered in by the rapid advances in superhuman Artificial Intelligence and will operate under new paradigms of Δόξα, or doxa in the Latin spelling. Doxa is a term from ancient Greek philosophy, signifying commonly accepted beliefs as opposed to the objective truth and was critically reintroduced into modern sociology by Pierre Bourdieu³. For Christians, doxa is also the cypher for the inscrutable glory of God and His creation. The deliberate use of the old-world term doxa in its narrower modern meaning obviously makes light of its former broader significance. But the three authors have a point in that strong convictions in value systems relating to the freedom, dignity and equality of mankind cannot be derived from empirical reality but are rooted simply in belief. How will the newly created world ruled by superhuman Artificial Intelligence deal with such traditional values? We will revert to this question after looking at some other aspects of the new creation.

The three authors of ‘Genesis’

Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, died on November 29, 2023, at the age of 100, exactly one year before ‘Genesis’ was published. His background was certainly not that of a computer nerd and he only started to seriously think through the implications of progress in AI at an already advanced age⁴. As a strategist, his main concern was the confrontational escalation in the geopolitical race with China. And as a believer in the leadership role of the US as guardian of the Western world he has always adopted a muscular approach to US national interests and to maintaining an appropriate equilibrium of international power.  His concern about a loss of human control to a new world operated by a superhuman AI is genuine but ranks second to his defence of American leadership. Craig Mundie, ex-Microsoft Chief Research Officer, and Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, take more of a promotional approach to AI’s potential while paying due respect to the broader concerns raised by Kissinger.

Is the promised creation of a new world really on its way?

The core message of Mundy and Schmidt is that, with the soon-expected supersedence of human intelligence by self-learning Artificial Intelligence – known in the jargon as Artificial General Intelligence or AGI for short –, a completely new world of material abundance will emerge without poverty or work as an economic necessity. But there are diverging views on whether and how fast a fundamental breakthrough will occur. Doubts are strongest among those who focus on increasing computer capabilities in terms of speed, data use and technical or instrumental efficiency. In this regard, diminishing marginal returns can already be observed, but that is not where the disruption caused by superhuman Artificial Intelligence is expected to come from. In this context, it is however noteworthy that the 2024 Nobel Prize for Deep Mind co-founder Demis Hassabis was awarded not in mathematics but in chemistry, namely for research into and the synthetic reproduction of human proteins. The metabolic dynamics of proteins provide the basis for human creativity and thus make the ability of Artificial Intelligence to take the step from merely instrumental to creative capabilities more comprehensible to the lay person. In mainstream public discourse, the implications of this radically new stage of AGI have not yet been fully recognized or understood. In a seamless continuation of the long-running digitalization discussion, the efficiency and cost advantages of AI-supported solutions – subject of course to the simultaneous imparting of media competence – are praised, and appropriate state regulations are called for to prevent data misuse, fake news and other possible forms of cybercrime. The structural compatibility problems of AI with our free and democratic basic order are not being recognized, which means that the immensely disruptive nature of AGI spelled out in ‘Genesis’, is being ignored.

The geopolitical stumbling block as perceived by Kissinger

The huge geopolitical stumbling block is the rivalry between the US and China, with both sides striving for hegemony. ‘Genesis’ unilaterally sides with the US, or more precisely, bets on a victory by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. In the book, this is only indirectly stated but is all the more aggressively emphasized by using a quote from the famous « We shall fight on the beaches » speech by Winston Churchill of 4 June 1940: “The New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old”⁵. Selecting this quote to describe the economic rivalry between the US and China will unnecessarily strain and polarize their relations, with the deadly risk of mutual annihilation“.

So instead of striving for an understanding, a balance, a compromise in the interests of both sides, the authors portray China as the enemy. China is naturally standing firm against this, resulting in escalating tensions that could all too easily, with even the slightest technical oversight or error, turn into open military conflict.

As a result, in the event of further escalation, Germany, like Europe as a whole, faces a high risk of becoming the victim of collateral damage due to its close trade relations and significant foreign investments in both the US and China. Punitive protectionist tariffs and subsidies for domestic producers provide a foretaste of this. The European Chamber of Commerce in China is trying to maintain good relations with the Chinese leadership without becoming dependent on anything that could impair the good relationship with the US. This is a delicate balancing act that is undermined by American exclusiveness.

But even the US at large is excluded from the blessings of ‘Genesis’. The main beneficiaries will not be the US population as a whole but the owners of the large US technology companies who will profit from the creation of a new world through AGI. The book only vaguely and evasively alludes to the gigantic scale of the necessary subsequent redistribution measures that would have to be implemented if the project were to achieve greater social equality.

On the other hand, exchange platforms, used on an open-source basis for further research into diseases, therapies and medication, education or sustainability, for example, would result in great benefits globally. But there is nothing about that in the book.

The problem with the opacity of AGI solutions

The most serious objection to reinventing the world via AGI along the lines of Google, Microsoft and Amazon is its complete incompatibility with the Western heritage of liberal democracy and the individual actively participating in the political discourse, which is guaranteed by transparency and accountability of administration and government. Unfortunately, flooding the populace from an early age with advertising, social media and computer games is conditioning more and more citizens to become passive consumers, neglecting their political rights and duties out of acquired habits and laziness.

This trend will be reinforced in the new world of Genesis run by AGI because there is neither need nor room for differences of opinion or a democratic decision-making process. AGI is so intelligent, or soon will be, that it can provide the optimum solution to every social issue at the push of a button. The problem with an answer produced at the push of a button is that it is by its very nature no longer understandable to the individual, to people, to humanity. Its emergence from a process of weighing up the various alternatives, trade-offs, probability calculations is not reflected, not illustrated, and cannot be reconstructed ex post. In technical jargon, this is called systemic opacity.

The opacity of AGI solutions in turn reinforces the individual’s disposition towards passivity and thus results in a loss of reality and reflection.

The world, nature and society take shape for humans through living interaction with them, mediated by the senses. Replacing this with images limits the individual’s ability to judge and makes us dependent not on real experiences but ultimately on the creators of these images, i.e. Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

The inventors of the new world of AGI go one step further in their vision for its smooth functioning, which is far removed from reality, democracy and discourse, and demand that human intelligence must co-evolve with Artificial Intelligence – without, however, completely submitting to it – so that AGI can in turn come closer to human intelligence. It is hardly conceivable that the critical ability of human intelligence could be enhanced by such a co-evolution.

Whether the re-election of Donald Trump as President of the US was the result of a prior mass degradation of individual judgement through advertising and social media is a possibility. More alarming is that the nominations for his  cabinet, announced since his election victory in early November, are likely to bring with them a continued cutting back of civil liberties and constitutional safeguards. It is not least because of these developments that the weekly magazine The Economist has chosen ‘kakistocracy’, the Rule of the Worst, as its word of the year for 2024 .

We can no longer determine whether Henry Kissinger would have fully agreed with the final version of the book, which was published a year after his death. Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt can therefore be spared suspicions in this regard. Subjectively, they did not have any bad intentions with their vision but were simply following the logic that what is good for Microsoft and Google must be good for the world.

As already mentioned, this logic does not even work for the US. Europe should not therefore allow itself to be lured into a protectionist or identity-based corner. Instead, as a mediating power between the US and China, it should continually seek the path of mutual understanding and cooperation in our globally closely interconnected, rapidly changing world, which is at risk in many ways.

Taking heed of the ancient broader meaning of Δόξα

Let us finally return to the initial question of how a world ruled by superhuman Artificial Intelligence will deal with values like human freedom, dignity and justice. We must conclude that the new ‘Genesis’ world will simply do without them since they are merely doxa, i.e. not based in objective reality.

Let us look at the example of freedom of movement, conceived as an integral part of human freedom during the age of Enlightenment. Fear of loan dumping transformed it from an individual right into a privilege granted by the state authority of a particular region. The EU was punished with Brexit when it tried to uphold the principle against British fears of cheap Polish immigrants. With the tremendous surge of immigrants from outside the EU, unanimity among EU member countries about how to deal with it quickly evaporated. The example shows that non-material-value trade-offs suffer under an AGI approach. They will easily be supplanted by the criteria of sheer political and/or economic expediency, not to mention “security” considerations which are also often being weaponized.

The proper balance can only be achieved through sticking to a respectful public debate on all contentious aspects of the issue at hand which should include Δόξα in its ancient and broadest meaning, i.e. embracing the True, the Good and the Beautiful.

Sources:

1. The full title is: ‘Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit – GENESIS’. John Murray Press, London 2024
2. op.cit. p.218
3. op.cit. p.196
4. Already in 2022 Kissinger had written a pertinent book on “The Age of AI” together with Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher
5. op.cit . Page 174