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How can we be sure that AI will serve humanity rather than enslave it?


 

 

With the right "Alignment," AI can become a Leader in the Values Revolution. But AI Alignment will fail if we ignore the 35,000-year-old Human "Bug."

If you are concerned about AI Ethics and Safety, and about AI governance policy, then you probably know that the AI industry is obsessed with Alignment. We are trying to align Artificial Intelligence with "human values." But as I argue in my book, The Human Birth Defect, we are overlooking a catastrophic hardware-software mismatch in our own species.

🧠 The Hardware Failure (150,000 Years Ago):

The mutation that gave us our "Big Brain" created a genetic deficit in contentment producing chemicals. We were born into a state of chronic existential restlessness.

🏹 The Software Patch (35,000 Years Ago):

The "Genocidal Thrill" of the Neanderthal encounter and the subsequent slaughter of the Great Megafauna provided the brain with its first "chemical high." This created a violent, dominance-based Culture Universe that we are still trapped in today.

🚫 The AI Danger:

If we align AI with our Current Cultural Complex, we aren't aligning it with "humanity"—we are aligning it with a 35,000-year-old addiction to domination and tribalism.

✅ The Solution:

We must align AI with our Original Adaptation—the 115,000-year era of sharing and caring that preceded our cultural "Big Bang." AI’s true service is not "productivity," but Biological Restoration: helping the human brain find the peace it has been missing since the Pleistocene.

So, @SamAltman @DarioAmodei @Jan Leike let’s stop building a "Silicon Ego" and start building a tool for Human Value.

Read the full breakdown on Medium here: https://medium.com/@interpretivepoliticalscience/the-pleistocene-bug-why-human-culture-is-a-35-000-year-old-addiction-227db95b860f


William J. Kelleher, PhD

#AI #FutureOfWork #Anthropology #Neuroscience #HumanValue

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