AI: a Bridge toward Diverse Intelligence and Humanity’s Future

Many recent discussions of AI, and its impact on individuals and on society, are importantly incomplete. The debate around AI has neglected highly relevant aspects of the emerging fields of Diverse Intelligence and synthetic morphology, as well as the basic facts of developmental biology. Prevalent opinions with respect to the status of engineered systems often neglect deep knowledge gaps with respect to ourselves, and our relationship to knowledge and to each other, which have been with us long before AI technology appeared. Moreover, the inevitable arrival of a wide set of unconventional bodies and minds, as humans modify their form and create others, will shatter untenable old narratives of what we are, what it means to change, what we can become, and what we should value. Here I discuss the open problems highlighted by AI from the perspective of Diverse Intelligence and the evolutionary history of our bodies and our minds.