The Best and Worst Are Yet to Come
Humanity is definitely on a path of bettering itself. When averaged over temporary ups and downs, the general trend of human history shows progress towards a superior future (as advocated by my Harvard colleague, Steven Pinker, in a recent essay posted here).
Yet, we are often occupied by nightmares. Adults bring up doomsday scenarios while youngsters complain about the challenges facing them. Nevertheless, our quality of life today is far better than it was centuries ago thanks to advances in science and technology. This was apparent to me when I visited mansions from the Gilded Age in Newport, Rhode Island. Despite the fancy furniture and luxurious architecture that benefitted the wealthiest individuals more than a century ago, their medical care and quality of life was inferior to what is available today to most members of our society.
The improvement is also apparent in academia. The risk from advocating disruptive ideas has definitely declined. In the 16th century, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno stated that every star in the sky is actually a distant sun, orbited by its own planets and populated by intelligent life. Since these beliefs opposed the Church’s geocentric model, he was tried for heresy and ultimately burned at the stake in 1600. When I started my career in astrophysics 388 years later, it was thought that the existence of exoplanets is a highly speculative idea. The first planet around a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, was discovered in 1995, just 395 years after Bruno’s burning. This discovery occurred too late to reincarnate Bruno from the ashes, since burning of genetic material is irreversible. In today’s academic climate, Bruno’s level of disruption would have been triggered blocking of the publication of his writings in scientific journals by editors and reviewers as well as blocking of the posting of preprint versions of these manuscripts on the arXiv — requiring Bruno to acknowledge explicitly that his notion is in conflict to popular views and admit why it is unlikely to hold. There is no doubt that he would have been canceled on social media. Bruno also argued that distant planets were teeming with alien life, stating that no rational person could believe heavenly bodies are empty. Right now, this notion is considered speculative by many astrobiologists who view themselves as rational. Bruno also reasoned that extraterrestrial life would include intelligent beings like humans, an unthinkable possibility at his time. Even today, the mainstream of astronomy is not willing to allocate resources or priority to this notion. The search for extraterrestrial technological signatures was sidelined relative to the search for biological signatures of microbes beyond Earth in the latest Decadal Survey of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. We have made progress but there is still room for improvement.
Should we be hopeful that the best is yet to come? Not necessarily so, because the worst might potentially come instead.
What matters is not only that the mean trend of human history goes upward, but also that the amplitude of the fluctuations around the mean is increasing. Whereas a big step forward would be uplifting, a deep dive downward can have devastating consequences from which humanity will never recover, similarly to the irreversible effect of turning Bruno into a pile of dust.
As technology evolves, humans access capabilities that have more dramatic consequences. These could be used by both good and bad actors and so they could trigger positive and negative deviations from the average progression towards a better future. While nuclear weapons require a national sponsor because of the resources involved, artificial intelligence (AI) agents could be developed by a talented kid in a basement. As AI tools access more resources within society, they can trigger faster progression towards a better future but also a sudden regression towards a worse future.
A major policy item in the post-AI age is how to attach reins to this technology that would moderate the negative impact that can be delivered by bad actors? We must keep in mind that bad actors need not only be individual citizens but also bad leaders of nations. Since AI might possess superhuman powers, an even bigger challenge is how to make sure that AI does not become a bad actor by itself.
By letting AI access strategic assets at the personal or national level, we establish a partnership with an intelligent system akin to marriage. In case our AI partner cheats, the consequences could be devastating. Our financial system may collapse or our national security compromised as a result of leakage of sensitive information.
Here’s hoping that humanity will be wise enough to rein AI and other powerful technologies in its future and avoid an irreversible transformation to ashes. Here’s hoping that destruction is not the solution to Fermi’s paradox: “where is everybody?” The way we cope with challenges will define our rank within our family of intelligent civilizations in the Milky-Way galaxy. Darwin’s principle that the fittest survives might hold also for technological civilizations on cosmic scales.
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In this essay, I featured five amazing watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt. These watercolors incorporate inspiring statements by Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino and Plato. This is the 18th in a sequence of essays, where Greg and I collaborate on the interface between art and science. The first essay in this series, titled “Music of the Cosmic Spheres,” appeared here; the second essay, titled: “Cosmic Waterfalls in Spacetime Cliffs,” appeared here; the third titled “Missing Elements in the Cosmic Jigsaw Puzzle,” appeared here; the fourth essay, titled: “Why Do We Exist?”, appeared here, and the fifth titled “Inspiration from the Stars”, appeared here, the sixth titled: “We Might Understand How the Cosmos Works Before We Understand How Life Works”, appeared here, the seventh titled: “Will the Human Survive for Billions of Years”, appeared here, the eighth titled: “The Butterfly Effect of Intelligence in the Cosmos”, appeared here, the ninth titled: “Benefits of Extraterrestrial Intelligence over AI”, appeared here, the tenth titled: “Übermenschen on Exoplanets” appeared here, the 11th titled: “If You Had an Infinite Research Budget, How Would You Allocate It?” appeared here, the 12th titled: “Are Human-Made Objects Orbiting Earth?” appeared here, the 13th titled: “Lets Send AI Astronauts, Not Humans, to the Moon”, appeared here, the 14th titled: “Our Highest Priority Should be National Innovation Centers to Complement AI Data Centers” appeared here, the 15th titled “The Cosmic Shells That Seeded Life” appeared here, the 16th titled “Chasing Alien Mysteries in the Sky” appeared here, and the 18th titled: “The Smartest Investments in Our Future Are in Space” appeared here.
Before my morning jog at sunrise, I had received the following uplifting email about my book “Extraterrestrial”:
“I have just finished reading your book and felt the need to reach out and let you know how much I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I am not a scientist and have no knowledge or skills in your field of work, I am merely an interested member of the public who cannot help being inspired and awed by our wonderful world.
I feel so grateful that there are people like you pushing the boundaries of our understanding and I completely agree with your view that scientists should inform the public on all aspects of their studies and theories, good and bad.
Thank you for your work
Wendy (United Kingdom)”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, former director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
Professional website:
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/
Social media:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorAviLoeb
https://open.spotify.com/show/1zhndXkvSY2b8FdjspFpCd
https://x.com/ProfAviLoeb
