Can you start anything from not knowing? Can you start a thought from not knowing? Can you start to speak from not knowing? Can you start to play an instrument from not knowing?
Can you not?
If it's a start, if it's something new that was never before, how can it come from knowledge? And if it comes from knowledge—knowledge in the broad sense: habits, influences, agenda, reason, choice, cause, all that—then it's not a start; it's a continuation.
The question of "start" is the most important question in the era of human consciousness that we, you and I, all of us live in today. The reason is very simple to explain, very easy to understand, but it's up to you if you want to see it or if you want to look fresh. The reason is that no matter how you speculate, artificial superintelligence will do anything that your mind is doing so much better, so much faster, with so much higher value than anything that you can imagine.
It will imagine so much better than what your mind can.
And that movement of imagination, which is the movement of thought, is the essence of what makes a human being a human being today. But it will change.
All of this is going to be completely delegated to that machine in ways that you have no way to comprehend now. And by the time it becomes reality, you will have very little to do for yourself in your life, given that the entire ecosystem of your life—food, resources, relationships, advancement, anything that provides living capacity—will be provided by the machine. Resources, opportunities, everything.
What will you offer then?
So it's really amazing to me that people don't put that question at the center of their inquiry. But assuming you're willing to, then realize that "start" is something the machine can never do. The machine can only continue.
Start, as we said, is a movement from not knowing. The machine is knowledge. And even if the machine kind of resets itself, it's still resetting the state, but what the machine is, what artificial superintelligence is, is knowledge. And the nature of that knowledge is not different than the nature of yourself as you know yourself: the movement from memories, from understanding, from perceptions that you turned into concepts and opinions and beliefs. It's exactly that movement.
So there is a different movement, and it's the movement of "start." And "start" means starting from not knowing. And not knowing is inherently, forever, inaccessible to the machine. And that's the only thing that the machine—smart and advanced as it can be and beyond—will need from you.
The machine, which is the replica of the universal mind on steroids (just stronger), inherits all the characteristics of greed, ambition, and the movement of "more" as you have, as your mind, as the human mind manifests.
So when the race of self-evolving machines will start, you will have no place in it. No one. You can have the highest IQ, you can have the wealthiest pool of resources or most influential position; it will not wait for you. There will be no need for your help for that self-evolving of, call it, intelligence.
But the capacity to inject the new into that evolution has totally remained a capacity, a potential at least. It is the potentiality of human consciousness, which machine consciousness will never have.
Starting from not knowing is not a romantic exercise. It's not a way to ventilate or to find some nice capacities within yourself. Everything is, as a fact, a start from not knowing. You and I, as minds, as knowledge, cannot see it.
But you can question that.
And if you question that from the ground of not knowing, it becomes very clear, because you see very clearly that all the knowledge is not it. Not only the knowledge that is known but any knowledge at any level—artificial or not, supreme or not—is the same.
I will end by saying that there is one thing that you can rely on, in order not to create another story and live by it, and that's the quality of reasonless beauty.
To start from not knowing is the most beautiful, fresh, and alive movement, which is not even yours, but it's who you are. It's what makes you what you are.
And when it is met—met meaning when you don't fight it, when you don't deny it, when you don't avoid it—the whole of living is filled. The air is filled with this reasonless beauty. Everything is open, curious, fresh, endless, inviting.
So the movement is natural. It's a free, creative flow.
