When Laura and I went to the Singularity Summit back in September, we learned a lot about the imminent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and technological augmentation of human intelligence. As you can see from the link above, we were left with some questions about the morality of the whole thing. I’ve been particularly interested in the possibility of a post-human species evolving and what that would mean for humanity (assuming any of us were left).

Better Humans recently had a post on this topic, referencing a paper by Bill Hibbard entitled, The Technology of Mind and a New Social Contract. The paper deals with the dangers vs benefits of the Singularity and suggests regulated development as the solution, unremarkable stuff, really.

What I found most interesting was Hibbard’s explanation of the social contract and its implications today, especially in regards to intelligence:

The social contract grows out of our human nature and is based on rarely-questioned assumptions, including:

1. Humans all have roughly the same intelligence (if you doubt this, consider that the chess skill that distinguishes Garry Kasparov from most other humans has been matched by computers, but the language and movement skills he shares with other humans are far beyond current computers). We assume this when we say that our competitive economic system provides equal opportunity.

He goes on to say:

The technologies of mind and life will invalidate these assumptions, with profound consequences for our social contract. For example, a less intelligent person will be unable to converse meaningfully with a person of radically greater intelligence. This is similar to the way a young child cannot converse at an adult level, except that the gap will be much larger. The most intelligent minds may know billions of ordinary humans well, and understand large-scale social interactions in a “single thought.” A conversation between two super-intelligent minds about such matters will be meaningless to an ordinary human. This will severely limit the ability of less intelligent humans to participate in economic and political discussions. If the super-intelligent minds are motivated by values similar to those of current humans, they will exclude less intelligent humans from important political and economic decisions, just as adults exclude children now.

Wow. What really struck me about this, is that although Hibbard uses a child/adult dichotomy to illustrate his point, this very situation goes on between adult populations. It’s begrudgingly accepted that a handful of (largely American) elites decide what is best for the rest of us politically, but the same cognition divisions can be seen in everyday life. People at high levels of cognition generally avoid interaction with people at the lower end of the spectrum. Meaningful communication between people of widely varying intelligence is infrequent in our society and can be strained when it does happen.

My point is that this is not an imaginary sci-fi problem. Communication and shared values across intelligence levels is a real issue, maybe the central issue of the modern era in many ways. Until we can have meaningful discourse and cooperation between the upper and lower strata of human cognition, we will continue to see further divergence in qualities of life. Furthermore, if we can’t work out a way to understand and appreciate each other better when the intelligence gap is relatively small, how will be be able to reconcile the gap created by the Singularity?

I don’t have any answers to this problem. It’s something I am actively working on in my own life. I’m confident there are ways to have consistently meaningful connections and mutual respect and these techniques might be useful in the context of post-human super intelligence.