by Kyle Munkittrick
We’re on the cusp of The Culture. This Iain M. Banks series has recently replaced Star Trek as the lodestar for The Future We Want. Why? Because it shows us how good the future can be with AI. Critically, both fictions also offer key lessons about the threat and promise of human enhancement: it is coming, it could be amazing, but first it will be contentious, and if we’re not ready, we’ll suffer its worst harms and get few of its best benefits. We want The Culture and to get there, we need to take Star Trek seriously.
In his excellent essay for Arena Dean Ball asked, in essence, “Where are the clearly articulated benefits of a world with AI? Why is it worth all this risk?” The answer to Ball is, “Go read The Culture. Start with The Player of Games.” Imagining a peaceful, prosperous, and pluralistic post-scarcity utopia that is that way because it is run by benevolent ASI (called ‘Minds’) is difficult. Imagining a world where AI has so ‘solved’ biological and medical science so completely that its citizens are fundamentally post-human is even more so. The vision of The Culture is so grand and so alien that it takes a series of novels, following the daily lives of the protagonists, to begin to grasp just how incredible the future with AI could be.
In Star Trek, however, though we can reach the stars, medical technology seems not much advanced beyond that of the 20th century. It’s not due to a limitation of science, but of society. Before reaching the stars, humans endured the Eugenics Wars—a global conflict arising from first the reckless pursuit of, then catastrophic backlash to and banning of, human enhancement technologies. Think, ‘The Butlerian Jihad, but for biology.’
Both pieces of fiction are important because of what is very likely about to happen. In his 15,000-word manifesto Machines of Loving Grace, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei bolds one, and only one, paragraph:
“[M]y basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years. I’ll refer to this as the “compressed 21st century”: the idea that after powerful AI is developed, we will in a few years make all the progress in biology and medicine that we would have made in the whole 21st century.”
Let’s call this ~60% year-over-year acceleration of progress the “BOOM (Biological Orders of Magnitude) Decade” (2025-2035). To ‘feel the BOOM’, imagine going from discovering antibiotics (~1930) to all the medical technology we have today (IVF, MRI, GLP-1s) by 1940. People would freak out, to put it mildly. Society needs frameworks and mental models to be able to absorb and adjust to change at that speed. Just as AI alignment principles guided AI development, we urgently need enhancement alignment principles to guide the coming biological revolution. Without AI alignment, we risked creating Skynet or the Paperclip Optimizer; without enhancement alignment, we risk the Eugenics Wars—either through reckless implementation or through panicked prohibition that prevents beneficial technologies.
In preparation for the BOOM, I propose a set of principles for human enhancement technologies (HETs) as a starting point for the conversation and as fodder for consideration by both the humans and the AI who will be building these biological and medical technologies. Read more »
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.
In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.
A Republican used to be someone like Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate who worked well with the opposing party, even meeting weekly with their leadership in the Senate and House. Eisenhower expanded social security benefits and, against the more right-wing elements of his party, appointed Earl Warren to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren, you’ll remember, wrote the majority opinion of Brown v Board of Education, Miranda v Arizona, and Loving v Virginia. If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today, he would be branded a RINO and a communist by his own party. I suspect he would become registered as unaffiliated. 
If philosophy is not only an academic, theoretical discipline but a way of life, as many Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers thought, one way of evaluating a philosophy is in terms of the kind of life it entails.
One of the more remarkable developments in popular philosophy over the past 20 years is the rebirth of stoicism. Stoicism was an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy founded around 300 BCE by the merchant Zeno of Citium, in what is now Cyprus. Although, contemporary professional philosophers occasionally discuss Stoicism as a form of virtue ethics, most consider it to be a minor philosophical movement in the history of philosophy with limited influence. Yet it has captured the attention of the non-professional philosophical world with many websites and online communities devoted to its practice. 
Among the ideas in the history of philosophy most worthy of an eye-roll is Aristotle’s claim that the study of metaphysics is the highest form of eudaimonia (variously translated as “happiness” or “flourishing”) of which human beings are capable. The metaphysician is allegedly happier than even the philosopher who makes a well-lived life the sole focus of inquiry. “Arrogant,” self-serving,” and “implausible” come immediately to mind as a first response to the argument. It’s not at all obvious that philosophers, let alone metaphysicians, are happier than anyone else nor is it obvious why the investigation of metaphysical matters is more joyful or conducive to flourishing than the investigation of other subjects.