Project summary
Our documentary explores one of the most intriguing and critical challenges of our time: In an age when machine intelligence is becoming ever more intertwined with human intelligence and every aspect of our lives, how can we ensure that its interests align with our own?
This forces us to confront an older and deeper challenge: How can we humans align our interests with one another in a pluralistic, polarized world? How can we stop fighting wars, and end our winner-take-all competition to exploit the remaining resources of Earth? When will we collectively come to realize that win-win solutions are possible and can lead to a flourishing future for all?
If we’re unable to solve our own alignment problem, how can we expect intelligent machines to align with humanity’s goals? Exactly what would they be aligning with? Who would decide?
To explore these questions, we turn to an unconventional source: the evolutionary history of life. While throughout most of life’s four-billion-year history competitive natural selection drove evolutionary change, there were several remarkable turning points when cooperation took hold. During those times, individuals found creative new ways to align their interests with one another, and come together to evolve more complex lifeforms with emergent capabilities that didn’t exist in their individual parts.
Scientists now recognize these pivotal moments as major evolutionary transitions. Past examples include the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, and from loosely organized ape groups to highly cooperative human hunter-gatherer bands.
In each case, aligning the interests of individual agents—whether cells or humans—fostered cooperation, reduced internal conflict, and encouraged individual innovation that gave rise to synergistic relationships that ultimately enabled the emergence of agency at the level of the group.
Today, we may stand at the threshold of another such transition—one that calls on us to align not only with one another, but to ensure that the powerful new intelligences we are bringing into the world are aligned with us. It may be the most difficult and important challenge life on Earth has ever faced.
This documentary explores that challenge through the lens of evolutionary history—revealing how learning from past transitions can help us navigate the one that is now underway.
This Essay presents a more detailed exposition of the core content of the documentary—the role of AI in a Major Evolutionary Transition
The documentary features scenario planning to envision possible futures for humanity and AI. We're recording preliminary online interviews in preparation.
