A Manifesto for Biological Intelligence
Humans must reign over machines and tame the silicon beast | Edition #294
We are about to become the last generation to have been educated, trained, and raised without heavy reliance on and exposure to AI.
Silicon ‘intelligence’ is spreading, and the ingenuity of the biological mind is becoming secondary and invisible.
Silicon outputs are being prioritized over biological creations for the sake of speed, convenience, and the idolatry of machines. The future looks hybrid, potentially fully automated.
There does not seem to be a way back, as the socio-technical wave is already too powerful and moving too fast.
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Biological intelligence is organic, complex, multifaceted, interconnected, delicate, and poorly understood. It is a direct product of the mysterious flames of human life and consciousness, over which we have no control.
It took millions of years to form and evolve.
It depends on food, water, oxygen, adequate temperatures, and the integrity of the biological structure and wetware that sustain it.
It is the manifestation of a particular DNA combination existing at a certain time and space.
If the body dies, the intelligence that inhabits it dies too.
Biological intelligence is also deeply tied to the social, subjective, and unique lived experiences of each individual who expresses it.
It is extremely fragile, both physically and psychologically. It can degrade, become unbalanced, or shut itself down completely. It requires practice, support, care, and love to thrive.
It is deeply connected to our existence as humans.
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Silicon ‘intelligence’ is inorganic, unalive, and pragmatic.
It can be trained, fine-tuned, fixed, filtered, upgraded, and updated.
It will not die in a car crash or with a hidden disease. It will not age or start to forget things. It will not be drawn in a negative depressive loop or decide it does not want to live anymore.
Silicon ‘intelligence’ is human-made and needs to be fed with pure human intelligence to grow and function, like an ever-hungry digital monster.
By devouring human intelligence, it learns to imitate and exploit it.
Silicon ‘intelligence’ often sounds convincing, accurate, and grounded in lived experiences, even when it is a non-deterministic combination of words gathered from the human world.
It processes data and produces outputs much faster than human intelligence ever could, making the latter seem slow, cumbersome, and old-fashioned.
It does not require biological, emotional, social, or ethical foundations to emerge and evolve, but it can effectively mimic those, appearing as an adequate replacement for human intelligence whenever acceleration is needed or desired.
With economic pressure, military competition, and an automation race looming, silicon replacement becomes destiny.
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It is in our hands to keep the flame of human intelligence burning.
As of now, we will be the last generation to have known it and experienced it in its pure form, without traces of or direct influence from the increasingly convenient silicon ‘intelligence.’
Like ancient wisdom, the product of biological ingenuity and creativity will slowly disappear if we do not shield it from being fully consumed by the ever-hungry silicon beast.
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Thirty years ago, John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. He famously started by saying:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.”
Time has passed, and cyberspace has changed. The so-called home of Mind, the mind itself, and the survival of our own flesh and blood, are being targeted by new threats.
The governmentlessness and deregulation sought 30 years ago are, paradoxically, a fertile ground for silicon's exploitation of carbon, for inorganic digital bots to swallow organic human creations.
Exceptionalism, lawlessness, and rising new idols and cult-like behavior towards machines make humans seem weak, slow, ineffective, and replaceable.
To help the ‘civilization of Mind’ continue thriving and to protect what is made of flesh and blood, we might need to trust and rethink the old human systems, laws, and boundaries.
The ‘home of Mind’ is under attack, and the ideas that helped conceptualize it 30 years ago will not help because they are the ones feeding and growing the silicon beast.
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There are ways to protect biological intelligence and the human flame and prevent carbon from being taken over by silicon.
It will require conscious efforts to put humans first and prioritize human systems, frameworks, values, and well-being.
The human space, including the mind, body, emotions, values, frameworks, institutions, systems, and everything that helps biological intelligence to flourish, must be actively protected and shielded from intangible, machine-led acceleration.
Human existence is slow, biologically grounded, and filled with physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences. It is also time-bounded. There is no time for mindless acceleration.
In biological terms, an “artificial intelligence race” is a race to the bottom. Perhaps we should call it the “biological intelligence decay.”
Society can and should continue transforming itself, innovating, creating, inventing, discovering, and evolving.
Artificial intelligence will hopefully help us diagnose and cure diseases, live longer and happier lives, and help us solve numerous societal challenges.
This will only be possible if we do not give up on who we are, including the values, frameworks, institutions, and structures that help us sustain ourselves as humans.
Carbon must reign over silicon.
Humans must reign over machines.
Biological intelligence must reign over artificial intelligence.
All in all, I trust the power of our individual and collective biological intelligence, and I am confident we will manage to tame the silicon beast.
I invite you to join me.
I love everything you wrote here and wholeheartedly agree with your manifesto. The parts about the fragile nature of biological intelligence are especially compelling to me and actually highlight how precious it is. The “race to the bottom” and “biological intelligence decay” captures my sentiments too (and that of MANY others). You can count me in to join your movement.
The thirty-year arc from Barlow to this manifesto tells a specific story about how tools become substitutes. Barlow assumed cyberspace would extend biological intelligence. The manifesto documents the moment it started replacing it. The mechanism is precise: when the outputs of biological and silicon intelligence become indistinguishable, the market prices them identically and chooses the cheaper one. Biological intelligence loses market share because its outputs have been commoditised by silicon replicas, regardless of how different the underlying processes are.
the deeper asymmetry your manifesto names without formalising: silicon scales with investment, biological intelligence scales only with practice. You can accelerate silicon by spending money. You can only develop biological intelligence by spending time, decades of reading, failing, thinking, experiencing. When the economic incentives favour speed, the practice time disappears. Protecting biological intelligence is an infrastructure problem disguised as a philosophical one, and the infrastructure is measured in years of undistracted human development that the acceleration economy no longer provides.