Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
Kathleen Miles is the executive editor and cofounder of Noema Magazine. She can be reached on Twitter at @mileskathleen.
Noema Magazine’s new print issue will be hot off the press very soon! The theme of this issue is “threshold.”
History is fast approaching an inflection point. Humans are poised to cross thresholds on several fronts: from a planetary awareness enabled by technology that expands the heretofore limited scope of our understanding of the climate and Earth’s ecosystem, to superintelligent machines smarter than we are, to the capacity of synthetic biology to produce life. How we navigate our crossings as co-creators of this evolutionary leap will determine whether or not the outcome will serve humanity, other species and the planet itself. As one reviewer aptly characterized Noema’s perspective, we are “dystopia-aware techno-optimists.”
The Third Great Decentering
The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above or apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.
“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering … then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman write in their new book “Children of a Modest Star.”
As Gilman further argues in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume: “The Earth … is an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration and interaction between various geophysical systems and living beings — both human and nonhuman — that must be understood as a totality. … A holistic understanding of planetary phenomena have been accelerated by new planetary-scale technologies of perception — a rapidly maturing and integrating megastructure of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that together are rendering various planetary systems more and more visible, comprehensible, and foreseeable. This recently evolved exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer for the planet — is fostering fundamentally new forms of what Benjamin Bratton calls planetary sapience.”
The open question is how, and if, human governance in the Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.
Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, which is rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.
While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity. Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground.
While grasping the new condition of planetarity may be a philosophical event, it has not crossed the necessary political and cultural threshold to form a commensurate collective identity and gain attendant legitimacy for effective agency. The primary contradiction, as yet unreconciled, is how to square the weighty centrifugal pull of ingathering with the centripetal imperative of binding planetary association.
This is most manifest where human interaction with the climate has reached a critical threshold. The biosphere is poised between negative and positive tipping points that could move beyond the threshold to climate calamity or remain on this side of the line through globally distributed efforts to ward off disaster, which have stalled due to conflicts over narrow national interest.
The clear and present danger is obvious: If the self-reinforcing momentum toward a positive tipping point is lost, the self-reinforcing dynamic of climate change will take over and push us across the threshold in the other direction.
Artificial Intelligence & Synthetic Biology
“For the first time, core components of our technological ecosystem directly address two foundational properties of our world: intelligence and life,” Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, wrote in his recent book. “In other words, technology is undergoing a phase transition. No longer simply a tool, it’s going to engineer life and rival — and surpass — our own intelligence.”
Prognostications about how all this may play out run the gamut from immediate concerns over deep fakes and viral disinformation destroying democracy to the capacity of AI-enabled modeling to cure cancer by accurately predicting the protein structures that make up gene sequences and that determine health or illness.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman sees AI as the steam engine of a cognitive revolution that will spawn endless innovations by augmenting human genius. Tech philosopher Benjamin Bratton goes even further, arguing that the unknown generative potential of AI should not be inhibited by aligning it too closely to the image of our own limited capabilities.
Elon Musk warns of massive labor displacement as “there will come a point when no job is needed.” In this edition of Noema, economist David Autor argues the opposite may be possible, that AI could create more occupations by helping extend expertise to a larger set of workers.
On the philosophical level, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is alarmed that generative AI has hacked the “master key” of human civilization — language — and thus has the capacity to manipulate and command the stories, narratives, myths and religions that are the basis of social cohesion. “We are being invaded by an alien species that may destroy us,” he has quipped. “Instead of coming from outer space, it’s coming from California.”
In his writing for Noema over the years, the geneticist Craig Venter has laid out a vision of the potential of AI-assisted technology in the medical pipeline:
Recent leaps in the biosciences, combined with big-data analysis, have led us to the cusp of a revolution in medicine. For the first time, humans can intervene in changing our genetic code — and the disease genes embedded in it — that took biological evolution 3.5 to 4 billion years to produce.
Not only have we learned to read and write the genetic code; now we can put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life. In theory, that gives our species control over biological design. We can write DNA software, boot it up to a computer converter and create unlimited variations of the gene sequences of biological life.
Where some see these remarkable advances leading to a new lease on life, others see the eugenic temptation to build a master race. The path ahead, in other words, is far from determined.
The famous rift at OpenAI in 2023 laid bare the core concern over where and when to draw the line at that threshold beyond which frontier technologies designed to enhance human well-being become a threat to it. For the moment, the incentives behind rapid commercialization of AI appear to have won out over precaution. Competition, in turn, will further accelerate the pace of developing ever more powerful capabilities among companies and nations alike.
Intelligent machines latched to the animal spirits of the free market that have already unleashed billions in new investment will likely bring the moment of reckoning sooner than we are ready for. Machine learning through large language models does not advance gradually but in leaps and bounds. In less than two decades, it has rapidly climbed the capability ladder from language, speech and image recognition to chatbot discourse.
In the longer term, as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Noema, we need to know when and how to draw a bold red line that AI development should not cross. “There is a clear danger around recursive self-improvement, autonomy and AI setting its own goals,” says Schmidt. “When this level of AI becomes generally available, it will mean that a computer cluster could become a truly superhuman expert and choose to use its abilities to act on its own.”
He continues: “Companies are beginning to invent some of these more potentially dangerous capabilities in their quest for artificial general intelligence. The ability of the model to engage in ‘chain of thought’ reasoning is a start in this direction.” Such “maximally intelligent systems,” Schmidt concludes, “will have to be fully limited in what they can do.”
Where Gongsheng Meets Katechon
Earlier this year, the Berggruen China Center at Peking University published the proceedings of a symposium that explored the idea of gongsheng as a philosophy of “co-becoming.”
Gongsheng derives from the biological concept of symbiosis in which organisms are not singular entities of defined individuality, but can only live together in codependence, the generative thriving of each conditioned by the other.
Translating this notion into philosophical terms, BI China Center Director Bing Song observed that the traditions of “Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism all contributed to the modern notion of gongsheng, which speaks to the conviction and the worldview of mutually embedded, co-existent and co-becoming entities.” Like planetarity, gongsheng expresses a condition of relationality not only concerning humans’ interdependence with each other and the natural world but also with technology as well.
A corresponding discussion occurred in the summer of 2023 at the BI Europe’s Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, Italy. The theme that emerged from this symposium was that technology is not external to the human condition. Rather, it is technology that makes us human. Unlike other bodily creatures who must adapt to their environment, humans have sought to free ourselves from necessity through the tools we have invented. Human becoming through technology is part and parcel of our evolution. In short, anthropogenesis is technogenesis.
Yet, while the exosomatic quality of inventing tools to escape necessity may be what distinguishes humans, it does not eradicate within ourselves the endosomatic animal quality of adaptation to the environment.
“The fact is that what makes us human cannot be divided,” the philosopher Giorgio Agamben said in Venice. “Anthropo-technogenesis, the becoming human of man, is not an event once and for all achieved. It is a process always in progress, where humanity and animality cannot split. The animal, the living being, continues to exist in the human body, and can never be completely humanized.”
For Agamben, “The exosomatic element will tend to assert itself at the expense of the endosomatic. Technologies and culture will take the form of power and domination over nature and will necessarily end up substituting itself for nature.” But that is not the end of the story. “The human is not a substance that you can once and for all define; it is rather a threshold between endosomatic and exosomatic, between body and technics.”
At that threshold, there is always a caesura, or breakpoint, that is undetermined. “Only at this threshold,” Agamben posited, “can ethics and politics find their right place, ethics and politics that will not simply seek to command and dominate nature through technology, but rather to master the relationship between nature and culture, body and technics. It is in this third space between human and nonhuman, body and technology, that we must locate our investigations.”
And it is in Agamben’s third space that the Chinese notion of gongsheng, or co-becoming, meets the ancient Greek concept of katechon — “the withholding from becoming.” The first embraces the co-creative impetus generated and augmented by the collective intelligence of interdependence. The latter is the endosomatic-protective impulse that recognizes natural limits, not least the health of the biosphere, beyond which transgression is destructive to the purpose of well-being.
As Suleyman has warned, “For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped; the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring that it continues to serve us and our planet.”
Defining that elusive threshold of containment is the ultimate summons to a planetary civilization in the making that has the unprecedented prowess to breach it.
