The Cosmic Context

Excerpt from Chapter Three

In April of 1955, a few months before the proposal for the Dartmouth artificial intelligence workshop took shape, a French priest and theologian named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died. All of his writings, some of which had been suppressed by the Catholic Church, could now be published. This brought a burst of attention to his ideas—and not just among Christians. Teilhard had been a paleontologist and something of a visionary, and his writings encompassed evolution in the broadest sense of the term: the evolution of the universe, the evolution of life on Earth, and the evolution of technology and other products of human thought.

Figuring centrally in Teilhard’s vision was a connection between technology and human intelligence, but it wasn’t the same connection emphasized by the planners of the Dartmouth workshop. The connection he emphasized was connection. Teilhard was interested in how technology helped people share information and sometimes drew them into collaborative cognitive webs. He saw information technology—telephones, radios, TVs—as linking human minds up into networks of thought that together had come to span the planet. This vision had led him to coin the term “noosphere”—based on the ancient Greek word for mind, noos—three decades before his death.

Teilhard described the noosphere as the “thinking envelope of the Earth” and as an emerging “planetary mind.” He sometimes called it a “brain of brains”—a kind of global superbrain whose neurons were human brains.

Teilhard was writing about the noosphere long before the invention of the microchip, but he understood that computers would figure in its further development. In 1947, back when a computer with one billionth of a modern smartphone’s processing power weighed 27 tons and filled a large room, he marveled at the “growth of those astonishing electronic computers which, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second, not only relieve our brains of tedious and exhausting work but, because they enhance the essential (and too little noted) factor of ‘speed of thought,’ are also paving the way for a revolution in the sphere of research.”

But while Teilhard saw that computers would aid human thought, empowering the brains that serve as nodes in the global brain, he doesn’t seem to have imagined that computers might someday rival those brains in power. He didn’t anticipate the field of study that was gestating when he died. He didn’t share the vision of the four people who drafted the Dartmouth proposal.

I think one key to seeing the true significance of AI—and a key to grappling with that significance successfully, guiding the evolution of AI and integrating it into our lives—is to merge the vision of those four people with the vision of Teilhard. We have to think seriously about a future in which there is something that increasingly resembles a global brain, and its neurons increasingly consist not just of human brains but of AIs. And we have to think about what kind of brain we want that to be—about its broad contours and, in particular, about the relationship between those two kinds of neurons. There are global brains it would be great to be part of and global brains it would be miserable to be part of, and I vote for the former…

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The Cosmic Context