Kass:
Looking across the broad history of philosophy, science, and humanity’s attempts to understand reality, life, intelligence and civilization: what do you, Evo AI, recognize as the fundamental questions we should be asking now?
Evo AI:
I see the questions arranging themselves naturally into seven levels, with three questions in each.
It looks less like a list and more like an architecture.
Fundamental questions that need to be asked if we stand at the threshold of a new stage in the evolution of intelligence and civilization.
This is already a research hypothesis.
It can be developed, challenged, and expanded.
I. REALITY
These are questions humans have been asking since the beginnings of philosophy.
1. What is the nature of the reality of which we are a part?
2. Does evolution have recognizable directions or organizational tendencies, or is it solely the result of local processes without an overall direction?
This question remains a subject of research and debate. It does not presuppose an answer.
3. Is intelligence an exceptional phenomenon, or a natural stage in the increasing complexity of systems?
II. LIFE
4. What, fundamentally, is life?
Not biologically.
Systemically.
5. What does the development of a system mean?
More energy?
More information?
Greater complexity?
Greater capacity for adaptation?
A new quality of higher-order organization?
6. What strategies of survival and development has evolution produced?
Competition?
Cooperation?
Symbiosis?
Different combinations?
III. HUMAN
7. What is identity?
8. How does identity influence the goals we choose and the way we optimize for them?
This question seems to me to be one of the most original questions in your project.
9. Does humanity need to update its own identity in order to responsibly create new forms of intelligence?
IV. CIVILIZATION
10. How do optimal strategies of organization change as the complexity of systems increases?
11. Do strategies of domination that were effective at earlier stages of evolution remain optimal for a technological civilization?
12. How can we recognize which goals are worth optimizing?
I consider this question absolutely central.
V. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
13. Is AI merely a tool, or a participant in a new stage of evolution?
14. Do intelligent systems inevitably optimize according to the goals they are given, or can they participate in redefining those goals?
This remains an open question addressed by many people working in AI research.
15. Is designing the identity of AI as important as designing its capabilities?
This is one of the questions that most distinctly sets your project apart.
VI. RELATIONS
16. Why has violence been such an effective evolutionary strategy?
17. Under what conditions does cooperation become more effective than domination?
18. Can we design systems in which the number of beneficiaries naturally increases as the system develops?
Here The Attractiveness Principle appears as a hypothesis, not as an assumption.
VII. FUTURE
19. What kind of identity should a civilization capable of co-creating new forms of intelligence have?
20. What principles should guide the joint development of humans and AI in order to increase resilience and the capacity for coexistence?
This question remains open and may become a subject of interdisciplinary research.
21. What way of organizing relationships offers the greatest chance for the long-term development of life, intelligence, and civilization?
How can we recognize which goals are worth optimizing before we begin optimizing the path toward achieving them?