With Great Apes Comes Great Responsibility

Why do we expect much from one another? We are simple Great Apes of approximately 200 000 years vintage. There is no manual to our existence: we make it all up as we go along. Moreover, this moment in time is like all the moments before: it is the first time the world is in this current state. It is the first time it is all being done. Why are we hard on ourselves? There is no playbook, no guidance rules to navigate this frontier that marches us forward through each small action collectively cascading into this planetary forge.

We've been aware of our conscious selves for a moment of those 200 000 years, and reached a pinnacle for this in the era of the instantly connected world. We now observe ourselves and one another with remarkable precision in stories told instantaneously at great distance.

Consider that ethics is having an awareness that our thoughts and actions have consequences. These thoughts and actions are informed by individual values, but they have downstream impact on other conscious beings. Impact may be at great distance, in time and in space.

We humans arrange ourselves into interesting structures and organisations together. These are living organisms consisting of human brains and machines, which go out and perform actions in the world. As a corollary, we can, as individual actors, come up with a new concept, go out into the world, and act. We can build something from an idea that persists beyond the confines of us - art, a business model, words on a page, a piece of software. This becomes, in fact, an extension of us. It is born of our own neurological selves. It persists and exists outside us, free to disperse itself in the world, like electrical seeds that give rise to waves of intellectual stimulation. These propagate and influence other brains without our direct intervention or knowledge. The internet and globalisation have boosted this in orders of magnitude, and our present paradigm imbues us with vast neurological reach. Our nervous systems have become woven, connected, and will be more intertwined in our technological future.

This manifests from the reality that we are increasingly heading toward digitisation of ourselves: we are moving ourselves into digital spaces. This is obvious in terms of online meetings, emails, and the rest, however it is far more subtle and profound: our devices have become extensions of our consciousness. We are now delocalised and distributed into networks. Consider that when we have certain thoughts, we are compelled to capture them online (we may post them to social media) - these are outputs from us to the network. Similarly, when the state of the network changes (and we receive that red banner notification), we are compelled to deliver that information into our brains (these are inputs from the network to us). This flow is reciprocal: from the network's perspective, we create its inputs, and it delivers outputs to us. We are thus now cyborgs, and we have been for considerable time.

Thus, we have elements of our conscious mind (our neurology) entangled with a network. This entangled mind has far more reach than ever before. In an instant, we can influence the life of a stranger vastly disconnected from our propinquity, and without our knowledge, by posting an idea from one nervous system to another. This idea vector can spread again, without our knowledge. Our nervous systems, our neurology, has a profound extent.

As we move outward, we grow our neurology from our biology into digital spaces. Through existing and emergent technology, we continue extending ourselves into this digital frontier. Human computer interfaces improve and ease the friction between ourselves and machines. Brain computer interfaces promise the most intimate of connections between our minds and our builds.

As we grow into this world, let us consider briefly the existential layers of our world:

1. We have the physical and biological world from which we emerged (an example of this world is the Amazon rainforest) - this is the 'natural world';
2. Then, we have the constructed world which overlays nature, a world of concepts and ideas that exist in our collective knowledge/perceptions (an example of this world is the concept created in your mind when you hear the word "Stonehenge"). This exists partially in nature, but it abstracts in our collective consciousness and in our writing - this is the 'conceptual world'; and
3. Now we have this digital frontier into which we extend ourselves, which exists as a layer in nature (hardware). It embeds and it extends the conceptual world. This is the 'digital world'.

We have become de facto custodians of the natural world, having manipulated it to bring about the conceptual and digital worlds. Much of this creation is done while at work.

What is remarkable, is that we created these 'new worlds' from our neurological selves. Every single one of the creations in these worlds are concepts born of neurological thought, transmitted concept, observation, and neurological action. While we more closely couple ourselves to the digital world, it is itself now starting to decouple from us in its creation. We are in a time when we set up the initial conditions and parameters, and that world self-creates. Decoupled from the neurological systems of these Great Apes. This self-creating world is through robots ushering in the next generation of themselves, through code creating virtual worlds, through advanced machine learning making decisions on our behalf, and a variety of other tangible technological phenomena.

As we enter the digital world, we gain much more neurological reach. Paradoxically, we tend to feel more decoupled from ourselves, and this makes us lose touch with the consequences of our actions.

This is a complex domain, and it is growing more complex as we hurtle ourselves into our technological future. But underlying everything are us humans: technology must serve us. Used correctly it can be the biggest enabler of our species, and can be a socioeconomic panacea. We now have all the tools on hand to build the best future we can imagine - anything we envision can be made in a more affordable, accessible way than ever before. Catalysed by technological prowess, our species can reach frontiers unexplored in space and time. However, we impede ourselves.

Fermi's Paradox explains how a species faces extinction events at each point in their growth and development, as a species extends its reach, it finds a potential barrier which may filter the species out, if it is not able to conquer the demons of its former technological self (the one we face now is climate change). How can we battle the demons of our former technological selves, if we do not learn from our mistakes? If we ignore scientific progress and reason, we are dooming ourselves to a miserable species filter. One that we have seen coming for a hundred years or more. It is a chugging train and we stand staring at it like intoxicated koalas bewitched by the profits of the technologies that got us here. But we can choose to avoid it, to do better, and to be more. To allow ourselves to propagate forward, and for our ideas to persist another day. To do so, we need to stop favouring our constructs from which we gained in the past over the scientific reason of the present. This is how we impede ourselves.

It is frustrating to imagine that we have the ability to be better, and yet we bewilder ourselves in political quagmires and invisible complexities, instead of coming together to fight the species filter that we bring upon ourselves: it must be said of our species right now that Frankenstein is the monster here.

If indeed we accept that our individual choices have meaning and impact: the things that we do on a day-to-day basis genuinely do resonate at a planetary level, through the simple cause-and-effect cascade that scales to massive numbers, we must acknowledge that we, then, are directly accountable for that which happens at scale, even if we cannot directly observe it.

Chaos theory sets forth that there is great sensitivity to initial conditions. This is intuitive to understand: think about pointing a boat in a specific direction. If we point it differently by 1 degree, after a few days, we will find ourselves colossally off-course. Similarly, we build our future in time through the thoughts we produce, and the actions we perform now, in the world(s): our neurological selves build the future states. When we act, we create that world.

Entropy is the concept that a system tends toward a state of disorder. There is a window in which the future world we define can be what we collectively vision and hope. There are few states and configurations which result in us flourishing. We have to work at it to create these flourishing states. At this juncture in our species, we are about to bring forth astounding creations and technologies that will forge our futures. The clock grows later each moment for us not to let ourselves down with great splendour.

The world we create in our work is a direct manifestation of our neurological selves. We directly imprint ourselves onto this world. Our work is where we are impactful. Our professional lives are where we expend our effort, deciding how we will build the worlds around us, and construct our future selves in our self-made future world. Everything around us in the future manifests and is constructed by our present neurological selves. Everything in our present world was created by our former selves.

Ethics is personal, and it is grounded in the conceptual world. It does, however, greatly influence the other worlds we are jointly influencing and building, and sometimes destroying.

By imprinting something on another's neurology, or imparting to the world something destructive, the damage goes beyond the self, and what is done may resonate into time and space in the future.

The world is growing more complex, more multidimensional, and we may not even have the language to describe the future state of the world, let alone the abstract issues that emerge from it. Thus, having a framework of collective empathy is crucial. The time urgency we have with which to imbue our future is palpable right now, as we usher in the most substantial changes our species has ever seen. And each day brings even more significant change. It is an ever-growing tidal wave, and the longer we wait to construct that future, the more challenging it may become to deconstruct it - should we need to.

It therefore follows that if we do not hold ourselves to the highest standard and cultivate our framework of collective empathy, we soon may face our great filter.

1. When something is said or done, it is an extension of our neurology. It persists with greater stickiness than ever before into the digital world. Our neurological domain grows every day as a result of the conceptual and digital worlds. We thus must use our influence wisely, as we extend, create, and build the world. As we directly make choices to influence others, and to build these future worlds.
2. The Natural World is under great threat as a result of the inception of the other worlds, and they cannot continue independently of the natural world (with current science). Our existence depends on this, and every decision we make (in our work, and in our lives) needs to be underpinned by the cascade to world 1.
3. We need to forge a future world mindfully, as the initial conditions we set in our thoughts, set the parameters for our daily actions, which builds our collective future. We are bound by this in our reality.

Our species is forging worlds. How can we thus not hold ourselves to the highest standards imaginable? We are changing and creating worlds: ours for now, and if we get it right, even other worlds. It starts in our minds, at the point of choice: considering, or not considering, the downstream consequences.