Daniel Schmachtenberger: "Artificial Intelligence and The Superorganism"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 553 Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2023
⏱️ 193 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger returns to discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence. Through a systems perspective, Daniel and Nate piece together the biophysical history that has led humans to this point, heading towards (and beyond) numerous planetary boundaries and facing geopolitical risks all with existential consequences. How does artificial intelligence, not only add to these risks, but accelerate the entire dynamic of the metacrisis? What is the role of intelligence vs wisdom on our current global pathway, and can we change course? Does artificial intelligence have a role to play in creating a more stable system or will it be the tipping point that drives our current one out of control?
About Daniel Schmachtenberger:
Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.
The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.
Towards these ends, he's had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/71-daniel-schmachtenberger
To watch this video episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_P8PLHvZygo
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.3 | That's me. |
| 0:07.7 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society. |
| 0:17.0 | Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. |
| 0:33.0 | Artificial intelligence is in the news. |
| 0:36.4 | We hear about chat GPT, making people more efficient, learning quicker. |
| 0:43.3 | We hear about AI replacing artists and mid-level programmers. |
| 0:48.3 | We see deep fakes and fake beautiful baby peacocks that are much cuter than real baby peacocks. |
| 0:58.2 | And lots of people are debating about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence. |
| 1:05.1 | But today's guest is my colleague and friend Daniel Schmachtenberger, who is back for a deep dive on how artificial |
| 1:15.9 | intelligence accelerates the superorganism dynamic with respect to extraction, climate, and many of the |
| 1:26.0 | planetary boundary limits that we face. |
| 1:30.5 | I have not heard this angle on artificial intelligence before. |
| 1:35.5 | I think it's really important to have this conversation. |
| 1:39.9 | And throughout this talk with Daniel, we talked about AI, but underpinning at all was what is intelligence and how has intelligence in groups in human history outcompeted wisdom, restraint of different cultures and different groups of humans. |
| 2:01.2 | This is an intense, dense, of different cultures and different groups of humans. Um, |
| 2:01.5 | this is an intense, |
| 2:03.1 | uh, |
| 2:03.9 | dense three and a half hour conversation and we weren't even done. |
| 2:08.9 | Uh, |
| 2:09.4 | we'll be back in the next month or so to, |
| 2:11.6 | to, |
... |
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