I saw this tweet recently, and it’s not a new concept but I think it puts the idea succinctly:

Think through the logical implications of creating a superintelligent species infinitely more intelligent and capable than humans:

1. They will be more powerful.
2. We will need to find a way to coexist to survive.
3. We can either stay the same and adapt our role to serve them, or we can evolve with them as peers.

A lot of people have read Iain M. Banks and believe in his vision of the kind of post scarcity AI communism where humans live with AI but AI truly rule the human sphere of the universe, and the highest jobs humans can do is to be sort of agents for the AI and help further their goals at the interface between the AI civilization and external entities.

Iain M. Banks is very popular, he was further popularized by Elon Musk so it’s no wonder why so many fixate on his predicted AI outcome. It’s also one of the few very positive outcomes predicted by western sci-fi authors so his popularity is well deserved.

Another more recent and less well know author also depicts a kind of AI post scarcity society: Neal Asher and his Polity universe.

However, Asher diverges from Banks in that he depicts the concept of “Haimans” - which are kind of ascended half human / half AI.

This transhumanist vision of “Haimans” is also the logical conclusion of another path humans can take that dogs cannot.

To clarify - You can pursue transhumanism several ways:

1. Spiritually - e.g. attaining “nirvana”.
2. Technologically - e.g. becoming a cyborg or uploading your consciousness into a computer.
3. Organically - e.g. genetically altering the human species to catch up superintelligent AI digital species.

Dogs were not able to pursue transhumanism to catch up. There is no transcaninism, dogs are simply not capable of improving themselves in such a manner. Perhaps humans are not either.

Perhaps AIs will not allow transhumanism, they will cap us and block us from becoming Haimans or genetically altering ourselves in pursuit of perfection.

But you need to start thinking about what strategy you will pursue to survive our likely encounter with a new superintelligent species.

Maybe you need to pursue several of them. I’m certainly not writing this blog and publishing it for human readers, nor readers in the year 2025 :)