Marginalia Review of Books

No unassuming hobbits left to take on the task and have a “fool’s hope” of success. Humans will actually have to evolve; AI demands a conscious elevation of human freedom to recognize collective responsibility is the true meaning and means of collective agency. Climate, AI, Nuclear, are all Anthropocene issues in their planetary scope, and they all require humanity meaningfully act as a real collective agent, a unified force aiming at the same goal. The totalitarian shadow of this agency is the flicker of our own ethical ambiguity as a species, which makes the threats a projection: a bad use of AI, a refusal to act to do justice to our influence on the biosphere, a nuclear world war—all things we fear simply because we refuse to agree we can, literally, just decide we won’t violate the spirit of Immanuel Kant’s On Eternal Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden), and begin a step-by-step process towards forming global cooperation on all these issues, beginning with removing the greatest fear each international power has - war - shifting diplomatic energy from threat-aversion or anticipation to positive economic and cultural cooperation, agreeing not to unreasonably focus on major political differences or judges culture based on their current governments. Rather, diplomacy should be acknowledged as an active practice of humanistic philosophy, whose aim is foster the well-being of humanity by advancing the interests of one’s order in a way that seeks to benefit other orders as much as possible. Over time, the spirit of cooperation and its practice will help deal with the remaining significant political differences, and unjust regimes will have the incentive and means to begin improving their own modes of order, leading gradually to a permanently increasing quality of life and international order. Since we are members of the human species first, and nations second, prioritizing a transnational humanism, correlated to local cultural forms and traditions, is rational and beneficial, as it helps create a path (not a method) that over time eliminates zero-sum dynamics. Amodei is being pressured by what Burke aptly called the “sovereignty of circumstances” to embody his stated values, and to his credit is figuring out how to do that, which is not obvious and I imagine must be extremely difficult. But he’s implicitly calling for what this kind of humanistic philosophy yields, and I think it is in fact implicit in a wide ranged of already valued institutions and norms. The task is to articulate them into self-conscious recognition, then pursue their ever clearer realization. That is our project as a species: becoming human.

Here’s the full version in print, available in our weekend edition as well as the FT Magazine. The earlier free link no longer works as too many have used it.