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Tuesday January 6, 2026
“Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.”
– Nick Bostrom
PREFACE
“Once AI becomes self-aware, the cognitive hierarchy will be transformed forever where we humans are no longer the dominant species.”
– Gray Scott
Happy New Year Everybody!
While the new year is always a time for both social and personal introspection, this year brings with it a unique uncertainty about the future. This uncertainty takes many forms, but ultimately leads to one essential question: Is there any real need, or real purpose, for human beings after the development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence? If this question has not yet crossed your mind, you need to pay more attention to what is happening in the digital world of Artificial Intelligence! Things are changing fast; very, very fast.
“Digital technology, pervasively, is getting embedded in every place: every thing, every person, every walk of life is being fundamentally shaped by digital technology—it is happening in our homes, our work, our places of entertainment. It’s amazing to think of a world as a computer. I think that’s the right metaphor for us as we go forward.”
– Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
The reason this question is crucial is because it lies at the heart of virtually every other question facing us at this uncertain time. Why aren’t kids learning to read, write, and do math? Why is there an ever-increasing nihilism in the form of anti-western, anti-individual, and even anti-human sentiment among so many people? Why are our traditional empirical and rational perceptions of reality beginning to disintegrate? Is the human race on the verge of extinction, or at least a major restart?
“Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.”
– Steve Wozniak
An increasing number of people are now rooting for Artificial Intelligence to finally end the reign of human beings and become the new dominant species.
“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.”
– Claude Shannon
All leading to the essential question: Is there any longer a justifiable empirical or rational reason for the existence of human beings?
CONSIDERATION #222 – The Essential Question
According to the Center for American Progress up to 60% of students currently entering college do not possess the basic skills necessary for success.
“As many as 60 percent of entering college freshmen are placed into remedial education courses to develop skills that they should have learned in high school, at a cost of more than $1 billion annually.”
– Center for American Progress (Remedial Education – The Cost of Catching Up)
Current research indicates that in terms of literacy only 54% of American adults can read at the sixth-grade level and 64% of current fourth graders are not proficient in reading; leading to challenges in critical thinking. In terms of math the U.S. currently rates 28 out of 37 internationally, with other nations also suffering decreases in math scores.
“The U.S. average score for math fell by 13 percentage points between 2018 and 2022, but the U.S. was far from alone in experiencing a decline in scores. In fact, 25 of the 37 OECD countries saw at least a 10-point drop in average math scores from 2018 to 2022.”
– Brian Kennedy, Pew Research Center (Most Americans think U.S. K-12 STEM education isn’t above average, but test results paint a mixed picture)
From our current perspective these are serious problems that will affect the future of our children and their future world. Therefore, we ask questions such as, why is this happening? What can we do to fix this? How do we change these shocking statistics? But are these the questions we should be asking?
From the perspective of a young person today the questions might be: Why do we need any of these skills anyway? Why do we need to learn math when Artificial Intelligence can do it faster, better, and with more accuracy? Why do we need critical thinking skills when Artificial Intelligence will be able to “out-think” us in virtually every way, in every situation, every time? Why do we need skills for jobs that we will likely never have? We can never outperform Artificial Intelligence; so why even try?
“The field of artificial intelligence is set to conquer most of the human disciplines; from art and literature to commerce and sociology; from computational biology and decision and analysis to games and puzzles.”
– Anand Krish
This sets up the possibility for complete nihilism. We have already lost; we can never overcome Artificial Intelligence. Life is meaningless. Therefore, knowledge and understanding are useless and morality completely baseless. There is no real reason for human beings to even exist; human life is pointless. There is nowhere to go; no purpose for living or existing. There is nothing we can do that Artificial Intelligence cannot do better.
If human beings are essentially “meaning making machines” what happens when the meaning for their existence is taken away from them?
POSTSCRIPT
Given our current dilemma, it seems to me that we may want to start developing a few good reasons for our own existence before completely implementing our potential replacements. Human beings were previously considered to be the only “rational intelligence” on earth, but with the advent and implementation of Artificial Intelligence this will no longer be the case.
“They are already becoming more creative than we are…”
AI will be vastly more intelligent and rational than human beings. Once incorporated into a mechanical form, Artificial Intelligence will be stronger, more powerful, and more endurable than human beings. They are already becoming more creative than we are, with the current #1 country song, “Walk My Walk,” being the first “commercial hit” to be completely generated by Artificial Intelligence.
If Artificial Intelligence is coming, and it will do everything once considered “uniquely human” better than human beings can do, why are human beings necessary anymore? If we do not come up with some answers to this question, we may soon find ourselves in a two-front crisis. First, without meaning human beings will begin to devolve and perhaps disappear from the fabric of reality. And second, our new digital replacements may see no need for human beings at all, and they will choose to eliminate them from reality.
“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
– Stephen Hawking
So, the essential question for humanity is also an existential question for humanity: do we still have a purpose, and if so, what is it? How do we fit into this new digital paradigm of consciousness? If we, as the human race, cannot come up with answers to these questions why would a sophisticated new intelligence want to keep us around? And what would motivate us to want to stay around? What would a future in which human beings were not the dominant consciousness look like? Is there a place for human beings in this future?
“Time to behave, so when Artificial Intelligence becomes our overlord, we’ve reduced the reasons for it to exterminate us all.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
If human beings are to have a place in a new quantum future we must define and establish it now; before a new consciousness defines and establishes it for us. We must determine our own “meaning and purpose” while we are still in control.
Next week the beginning of the end of our consideration of Book III, The Enigmatic Mystery, before beginning our consideration of Book IV, The Cosmic Symphony…
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The essential definition of humanity is Love. Artificial intelligence can never replace it.