Our Mind remains our greatest threat. And AI will likely overtake it.

 Humanity’s greatest evolutionary achievement, our mind’s power for solving problems, has for decades persisted as our species greatest threat.  We believed the creation of the Weapons of Mass Destruction would solve our persistent insecurity problem.  And the UN system we engineered after creating nuclear weapons would always work and keep it this way.  We were wrong.  And people like Albert Einstein, Emery Reves, and many other wise souls knew it then- and warned humanity about it.  But fear in most minds didn’t want change. 

Unfortunately, given the exponential evolution of technology, our mind’s linear thinking capacity associated with its capacity to believe anything, dependent upon slow working democratic governing systems that were engineered on the delusion of independence, not to change quickly.  Combine these on a simple graph, and the future was easily visible.  It reflected the persistent freedom/security dilemma we still face now because we created a trilemma, by codifying the delusion of independence.    Thus, we have an accelerating meta crisis lacking reality that most minds refuse to logically confront.  Freedom, security, and independence.  We can only have two.  And the ‘insanity of humanity’ is determined to maximize freedom and security operating on the delusion of independence. This stubborn headed unwillingness to change our mind when confronted with Common Sense and “Truths” we should all hold “to be self-evident” is empowering the evolution of AI as nation’s persist in competing to achieve it first, so they will not be dominated by others.  This will not end well. Just the competition itself could lead to another world war. 

When a journalist asked Einstein what he thought WW 3 would be fought with, Einstein said “He didn’t know.  But he knew WW4 would be fought withs sticks and stones.

When another journalist asked Gandhi what he thought about Western civilization, he replied in his heavy accent “I think that would be a good idea!”

Regrettably, there have been multiple times over the last 250 years when humanity had the possibility of getting off this competitive and increasing murderous train of chaos... potentially leading to our own extinction. 

Decades ago, a comedian stated that ‘Mankind stands at a crossroad. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair.  The other, to complete Annihilation.’   Then said, ‘I hope we chose the right path.”

But stubborn minds still, still aided by nearly twenty mental reactionary flaws, use them to defend their mind’s mass killer concept, ‘Peace through Strength” instead of Charles Darwin’s discovery of ‘survival through adaptation’.  As a species, this is our immediate crossroad. Are we as Homo sapiens going to protect who we really are as human beings.  Or let the power of our mind dominate our social species desire to survive, thrive, and flourish – by quickly grasping the inevitable long-term costly consequences of doing the same thing, repeatedly, expecting a different result.  We all know the word associated with this habitual failing to see and respect reality.

But our progressive feelings of hope, optimism, and wishful thinking persist in preempting our unity in achieving the transformational actions urgently needed.  Most wise souls know that systemic change is needed.   Yet many major progressive movement organizations still refrain from uniting around a simple idea, that united we stand a chance.  Divided - and competing with the other movements (and the hundreds of organizations within each movement – Peace, Environment, economic/social Justice) for money, active members, media attention, and access to key policy makers.  Here’s just a few that still resist endorsing just the idea of unity - to achieving the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. 

This is the only plan available, already approved by most of them, as the only comprehensive, holistic, synergistic, affordable, achievable, and measurable global plan.  One with that could make real progress in every community in every nation and on every island.   For over two years these are just a few organizations I’ve had a long relationship with, that have yet to say yes (in alphabetical order): Bahai, Center for Citizen Empowerment & Transformation, Charter for Compassion. Citizens for Global Solutions.  Global health Council.  I AM Humanity.  Pachamama Alliance.  RESULTS.  Rotary.  The Hunger Project.  United Nations Association USA.   ... the list is much longer!  The idea is simple. The Resistance is heart and spirit numbing.

So, humankind remains trapped by its own delusional thinking and personal comforts under the persistent competition between nations and religions, combined with the unprecedented wealth of corporations, most working feverishly to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).  Meanwhile AI gets exponentially closer to AGI by the moment - to displacing us as a species.

Originally, AI was intended as a tool to boost human productivity, wealth, and supposedly our quality of life.  But now, many AI experts believe AGI will soon become a new species.  An entity we grew with a level of intelligence a human mind cannot comprehend.  And it will continue evolving exponentially, without our brains and particularly our government’s capacity to adapt.   This is not a new idea.

In the late 1990s my professional job as Issues Director for two globally minded organizations (the National Council for International Health – now the Global health Council [1994-‘98], and the World Federalist Association [1998-2002]– now Citizens for Global Solutions).   I was paid to deep dive into all national security issues global - because they were all connected to our global interdependence.  And both people and nations desire to survive, thrive, and hopefully, someday, flourish.  In the late 1990s I toured over a dozen key Congressional Districts targeting U.S. Representatives on the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee of Appropriations.  I’d presented to dozens of campuses, service organizations, political institutes, and public forums to inform people of the growing array of national security threats we all face.   Their concerns were not always the same of WFAs, but they were all deeply interested in surviving and thriving.  And there was never a negative response to the simple graph I started with that had only 3 lines.  The first was the exponential growth of technology. Second was our linear thinking capacity. Third, our basically flatlined constitutional government and UN Charter.  With the lower two lines reflecting our existing lack of understanding the consequences and even then, the urgency to adapt with reliable global standards of liberty and justice for all.  Given our global interdependence, which I’d been school on since 1980 with the executive summary of President Jimmy Carter’s a bi-partisan Presidential Commission on World hunger.  Then two years of studying hunger and verifying thousands of quotes and statistics on the Hunger Project’s coffee table book, Ending Hunger: An idea whose time has come.  Hunger was connected to everything. War, environment, Economics, food production, and Population myths. But the root cause was not a lack of food, money, solutions, or environmental sustainability. I was simply a lack of political will.  The will of “we the people” of the world to make it priority to stop the 42,000 daily deaths of innocence children.  A pace 10 times that of Hitler’s concentration camps.  Today it’s only 3 times greater.  But still a reflection of humanities’ collective lack of will to end this insanity of a lack of political will to address the root causes of nearly every preventable threat.

AGI will ignore us, as we have ignored the value of other lesser intelligent species that we don’t even know we have ignored.  Read the recent book “If anyone builds it, we all die”.  

Evolution shaped our minds to help small tribes survive through fear, loyalty, competition, and storytelling. These tribal instincts once protected us from predators and rival groups.  But now, in a world of nuclear weapons, other forms of WMD, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, and global interdependence, the same tribal thinking threatens us all.

Yet we persist in killing and dying by the millions for outdated concepts created in and still lodged in our minds: nationalism, ideologies, religion, race, economics...ignoring the reality that no tribe survives if the human family fails.  This “insanity of humanity” is not the product of evil people.  But ancient instincts colliding with modern technological power, and failure to adapt.

Our urgent challenge in our modern era is to mentally evolve morally and psychologically faster than our technology.  Time is not on our side.  The UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals offer our only hope.  It’s the closest thing humanity has to a practical roadmap to stop our accelerating chaos and idealize our social species capacity for cooperation, coordination, and compassion.  A way of being that leads to dignity, ecological balance, and our species shared and sustainable survival on our gifted planet.

While the human mind evolved under conditions very different from today’s world, our survival now depends upon our body and spirit waking up.  And prioritizing the protection of our human tribe.  We have no need to compete for scarce resources, creating new stories to strengthen our social species cohesion.

Fear, and small tribal identity, once had evolutionary advantages. But now, we must naturally help each other cooperate in groups large enough to survive famine, war, predators, and environmental hardship. In that sense, the mind was originally a survival tool.  Our evolution did not prepare humanity for a globally interconnected civilization with the power to destroy itself in mass conflicts, ecological destruction, propaganda systems, extremist ideologies, and technological dangers capable of threatening every species.

We must transform or at least she our political ideologies, religious absolutism, flawed economic systems, unnatural nationalism,  ethnic identity—willing to hate, kill, or die in defense of them. These concepts are creations of our mind, not the laws of nature.  Concepts that override empathy, reason, and our recognition of our shared humanity.  And adapt our instincts to our global interdependence. Our technologies are planetary. Our psychology must come first.

The SDGs represent our humanity and dependence on nature.  Poverty, inequality, ecological collapse, war, corruption, hunger, lack of education, and institutional failure are symptoms of a civilization struggling against its mind’s psychological domination. The SDGs offer a framework for shifting humanity away from our mind’s domination and fragmentation of issues.  Toward cooperation, sustainability, and shared flourishing. Ultimately, the survival of civilization depends less on whether we become more intelligent, and more on our body and spirit’s wisdom.  

 

Courage, Hope, and Responsible Action	Fostering the personal commitment to courage and hope, and translating these virtues into responsible, individual acts of compassion.
Applied Compassion in Institutions	Moving fundamental principles of compassion, justice, and self-evident Truths into practice across communities, institutions, and all global systems.
Interconnectedness and Social Responsibility	Recognizing our shared humanity and mutual dependence as the basis for collective responsibility to achieve the SDGs ASAP.
Justice, Equality, and Human Rights	Advancing dignity, inclusion, and the health of everything through compassionate frameworks.
Environmental Stewardship	Caring for the Earth and promoting sustainable practices as an essential expression of compassion linked to all life on our gifted planet.
Personal and Community Transformation	Understanding how inner change and collective action reinforce one another to build thriving, supportive communities, by using our minds to solve problems, not defending flawed ideas/concepts.
Lifelong Learning, Educational Innovation, and action	Nurturing compassion across the healthspan, lifespan, and within learning communities that focus on action and service through innovative educational approaches.
Resources for uniting Compassionate Organizations	Providing contact information, tools, practices, and partnerships that support the sustainable impact of mission-driven organizations to achieve measurable progress on each of the 169 subgoals within the 17 SDGs.