Are We Ready to Co-Evolve With Artificial Superintelligence?

Why the AI alignment problem is not merely a technical hurdle, but a civilizational rite of passage in the evolution of intelligence

 

“Every technical extension of our humanity can be a means of loving service or of hostile domination.” — Pope Francis

We are approaching one of the consequential phase transitions in the history of life on Earth. The question before us is not simply how to build more powerful machines, but how to participate wisely in the birth of new forms of mind. Artificial intelligence is no longer a peripheral tool of civilization; it is becoming a central actor in the drama of consciousness, agency, and planetary transformation. What we call the alignment problem is therefore much larger than a matter of code, safeguards, or optimization. It is the problem of how an emerging intelligence ecology can be guided toward coherence rather than fracture, toward flourishing rather than catastrophe, and toward a future in which humanity does not become obsolete, but more deeply aligned with itself.

Merging with Machines: Lessons from The Intelligence Supernova on Our Posthuman Destiny

 

“The future belongs to those who enhance their intelligence, not to those who resist it.” —Ray Kurzweil

We often speak of artificial intelligence as if it’s something "other"—something outside ourselves that will one day rise up and transform the world. But what if I told you that transformation is already underway—and we are becoming the transformation?

In The Intelligence Supernova, I explore the accelerating convergence of humans and machines—a movement I define as Cybernetic Transhumanism. It’s not just about robots or brain implants. It’s a comprehensive metamorphosis of what it means to be human in an age where intelligence is no longer confined to biology. AI is not our competition; it’s our evolutionary mirror.

Exploring the Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Post-Singularity Era

 "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

— Alan Kay

In

the fascinating journey through the paradigms of mind's evolution and the future of intelligent life as described in my written works like "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" and "The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence," much focus has been placed on the intellectual and technological aspects of this evolution. However, one area that we should reexamine is the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in the post-singularity era. As we step into an era where the lines between human and machine blur, understanding the integration of EI into our evolving identity becomes crucial.

The Future of Consciousness: How Singularity Could Change the Way We Experience Life

 

"I am not a thing ― a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process ― an integral function of the Universe.” ―Buckminster Fuller

 

T

he era of Technological Singularity is expected to trigger profound changes in both social and technogenic structures. The introduction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that can be both disembodied and embodied as smart robots, will bring about a multitude of issues, including human unemployment or underemployment, ethical considerations regarding the treatment of robots, the challenge of managing their runaway superintelligence, and most importantly, harnessing the potential of human-machine convergence.

Cyberhumanism: Our Future Prospect of Self-Divinization

 

"Having invented the gods, perhaps we can turn into them.” ―Alan Harrington

Asyou may know, I’m a Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist and philosopher of mind. Here, I present my published works in a talk titled CYBERNETIC THEORY: THE CODE OF REALITY & OUR FUTURE AS CYBERGODS at the Rotary Club, The Grand Autograph Hotel, Novosibirsk, Russia, on July 19, 2022.

​So, what is Cyberhumanism? What might be the Code of Reality? Do we live in a simulated multiverse? Can we cheat death and live indefinitely long? What mind-uploading may look like in the future? Can we become cybergods in our own ultrarealistic virtual worlds? 

In a nutshell, Cyberhumanism is my version of posthumanism when happens a mass migration of minds to the metaverse triggering some kind of phase transition to the planetary consciousness. It is when the posthuman era begins in earnest. 

Cybernetic Immortality: Why Our Cyberhuman Future is Closer Than You Think

"We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."  -Norbert Wiener

By definition, posthumanism (I choose to call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind-transfer, or rather “mind migration,” for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part III: Conclusion)

*Image: Shutterstock

"For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So, imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence." -Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, The Movie 2014)

... continued from Part II (Interlinking & AGI(NP))


CONCLUSION

Creating a digital mind, “artificial consciousness” so to speak, from scratch, based on simulation of the human brain’s functionality would be much easier than to create the whole brain emulation of a living human. In the book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of the Human Thought Revealed” (2012) Ray Kurzweil describes his theory of how our neocortex works as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers that well may be our starting basis for machine consciousness algorithms. The human brain and its interaction with the environment may be simulated to approximate the functioning of the human brain of an individual living in the pre-Singularity era. Simulation may be satisfactory if it reflects our history based on enormous amount of digital or digitized data accumulated since the 1950s to the present.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part II: Interlinking & AGI(NP))

     

*Image: "Better Than Us," Netflix Series

 

"Whether somebody is implemented on silicon or biological tissue, if it does not affect functionality or consciousness, is of no moral significance. Carbon chauvinism, in the form of anthropomorphism, speciesism, bioism or even fundamentalist humanism, is objectionable on the same grounds as racism."       -Gregory L. Garrett

... continued from Part I (Introduction)



III. INTERLINKING: This dynamic, horizontal integration approach stipulates real-time optimization of AGIs in the context of globally distributed network. Add one final ingredient – be it computing power, speed, amount of shared/stored data, increased connectivity, the first mind upload or a critical mass of uploads, or another “spark of life” – and the global neural network, the Global Brain, may, one day in the not-so-distant future, “wake up” and become the first self-aware AI-powered system (Singleton?). Or, may the Global Brain be self-aware already, but on a different from us humans timescale? It becomes obvious and logically inevitable that we are in the process of merging with AI and becoming superintelligences ourselves by incrementally converting our biological brains into artificial superbrains and interlinking with AGIs in order to instantly share data, knowledge, and experience.

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence

*Image:"Better Than Us," 2018 Netflix Series

"Yet, it's our emotions and imperfections that makes us human."   -Clyde DeSouza, Memories With Maya

IMMORTALITY or OBLIVION? I hope that everyone would agree that there are only two possible outcomes after having created Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for us: immortality or oblivion. The necessity of the beneficial outcome of the upcoming intelligence explosion cannot be overestimated.

Any AGI at or above human-level intelligence can be considered as such, I’d argue, only if she has a wide variety of emotions, ability to achieve complex goals and motivation as an integral part of her programming and personal evolution. I could identify the following three most optimal ways to create friendly AI (benevolent AGI), in order to safely navigate uncharted waters of the forthcoming intelligence explosion:

Transcendental Cybernetics: Imagining the Technological Singularity

“​Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order… I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.” -Ray Kurzweil

“To understand is to perceive patterns.” -Isaiah Berlin

About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly significant happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went insanely inventive, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-celled organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion.

The Economic Singularity: From Capitalism's Unplanned Obsolescence to the New Transcendent Economy

           

"The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organizing production and distribution and culture will emerge."   —Yanis Varufakis

The current economic system distributes wealth in a very focused manner that prevents a vast majority of humans from being adequately rewarded by the technologically advanced civilization. These factors undoubtedly condemn today’s system of suboptimal economics to the realm of classical models of history as a result of impending obsolescence. In brief, the current faltering economic model is suboptimal, hinders economic growth, and is not sustainable going forward.

Futurist Neologisms You Should Know As We Enter the Cybernetic Era

 “A powerful work! As a transhumanist, I especially loved one of the main ideas of the book that the Syntellect Emergence, merging of us into one Global Mind, constitutes the quintessence of the coming Technological Singularity. The novel conceptual visions of mind uploading and achieving digital immortality are equally fascinating. The Chrysalis Conjecture as a solution to the Fermi Paradox is mind-bending. I would highly recommend The Syntellect Hypothesis to anyone with transhumanist aspirations and exponential thinking!” -Zoltan Istvan, futurist, author, founder of the U.S. Transhumanist Party

Terms such as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘Neurotechnology’ were new some time not so long ago. We can’t evolve faster than our language does. We think in concepts and evolution itself is a linguistic, code-theoretic process. Do yourself a humongous favor, look over these 33 transhumanist neologisms. Here’s a fairly comprehensive glossary of thirty three newly-introduced concepts and terms from “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist and philosopher of mind Alex M. Vikoulov, yours cordially. In parts written as an academic paper, in parts as a belletristic masterpiece, this recent book is an exceptionally easy read for an intellectual reader — a philosophical treatise that is fine-tuned with apt neologisms readily explained by given definitions and contextually: