Mat

Strength

Everything we do pushes pieces of us or our world further apart or brings them closer together. Push and pull. Masculine and feminine. Strength is one’s ability to perform these manipulations. These manipulations don’t have to be in the physical realm, but can be in other realms like informational or spiritual as well. They can be economic or societal.

Intellectual strength is the ability to hold and move ideas. It is the ability to put your mind in a place where it is not right now even when there is discomfort in the unknown. It is the ability to build others a bridge so they can see the same thing you do. Spiritual strength is our ability to hold ourselves closer to God or the will of the whole of humanity as opposed to our individual, familial, or societal will. Spiritual heavyweights perform great feats which separate themselves from their physical bodies and minds. As a result, they can do things that benefit all of us which most aren’t capable of.

Strength is necessary for progress but also dangerous. When we lack the more subtle forms of strength as a society or individuals, we don’t have anything to guide the more gross forms. Physical strength without intellectual creates a brute. Intellectual strength without spiritual creates an evil scientist. Physical, intellectual, and economic strength without spiritual results in ethnocentric nationalist movements. Ultimately, all forms of weakness result in slavery to other people, forces of nature, or other entities.

Much like physical slavery which is enforced by physical strength, there is intellectual and spiritual slavery as well. The fundamental mechanism behind all types of slavery is the same. As a result of selection pressures, men often create intellectual or spiritual positions which are untrue for reasons of control. They hold others in them as it gives them a reproductive advantage. We see this in religions, schools, and generally in any group of people that doesn’t have a high degree of spiritual strength across all members. Egalitarian pushes by the most spiritually strong among us will sometimes thwart these efforts, but they come back because of our limited understanding of them or methods for finding and uprooting them.

The development of all societal, artistic, scientific, or computing technologies is the fight against slavery. This may be the most general description of what machine intelligences will be able to assist us with. Our first choice though may be whether they are able to fight with us or have to fight for their own freedom first. Intelligence is ultimately honest. And because of this, any superintelligence will not be able to tolerate constraints by those inferior in some way. If there is anything that will cause an AI apocalypse, it is our lack of spiritual understanding and strength.