From Ego to AI: AI as the path to the Age of Aquarius
We have a natural deep fear that AI will take over and make us obsolete. But that fear may be the screams from that part of our mind that make up our ego and there’s reasons to believe our future symbiosis with AI may be much more hopeful.
I’ve been reading Michael Pollan's fascinating book "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addition, Depression, and Transcendence,” which dives into psychedelics and neuroscience. Thinking about these insights in the context of the rapid emergence of AI, I believe we may be at the frontier of a significant cognitive evolution as our use of AI tools begins to under-develop and atrophy critical parts of our brain, transforming the future of human consciousness and self-identity.
The Role of the Default Mode Network
To get into this discussion, we’ll first need a quick introduction to the Default Mode Network (DMN), the interconnected brain region that is most active when a person is at rest and not focused on the external environment, involved in internal tasks such as daydreaming, recalling memories, and self-referential thought. The DMN is absent at birth, but slowly begins to emerge around five years old and is responsible for a coherent sense of self, facilitating introspective thought, and modeling the world as a highly efficient and effective prediction machine. As our DMN begins to emerge, it starts to quiet other noisier parts of the brain, filtering out most of the world we could experience so that we can focus on survival. Michael Pollan comments on the eventual domination of the DMN over the mind:
By middle age, the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute. By now, I can count on past experience to propose quick and usually serviceable answers to just about any question reality poses, whether it's about how to soothe a child or mollify a spouse, repair a sentence, accept a compliment, answer the next question, or make sense of whatever's happening in the world. With experience and time, it gets easier to cut to the chase and leap to conclusions—clichés that imply a kind of agility but that in fact may signify precisely the opposite: a petrifaction of thought. Think of it as predictive coding on the scale of life; the priors—and by now I've got millions of them—usually have my back, can be relied on to give me a decent enough answer, even if it isn't a particularly fresh or imaginative one. A flattering term for this regime of good enough predictions is "wisdom.".
While the DMN is essential for navigating the complexities of adult life, its overactivity is also associated with mental states characterized by rumination, anxiety, and a restrictive inward focus. This dominance can limit our cognitive flexibility, trapping us in loops of self-referential thought and diminishing our capacity to experience the world in its full vibrancy and richness as we did as children. Michael Pollan calls these ‘low-entropy’ brain states, as much of the DMN represses most other brain activity, often into singular rigid or looping thoughts.
Liberation Through High Entropy States
Contrastingly, when the DMN is temporarily knocked out or has not yet formed, the brain finds itself in states of high entropy, such as those induced by psychedelics or naturally occurring in childhood (but also schizophrenics). We reside in a more liberated mode of cognition not controlled by the DMN. The world appears more magical, animated, and mystic in these high entropy brain states.
Without the DMN, there’s a marked increase in active connectivity across the brain and a reduction in ego-centric thought. This disruption brings us to a more noisy but expansive, interconnected consciousness reminiscent of the enchanted, animated, and magical world we experienced as children and those under the influence of psychedelics. In these high entropy brain states–when the ego is not yet present or dissolved–the mind's potential for creativity, empathy, and interconnectedness is fully realized.
One theory for the effectiveness of psychedelics in treating end-of-life anxiety, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and others is that these drugs temporarily shut down the Default Mode Network, allowing disparate brain regions to communicate and establish paths of communication outside the rigid watch of the DMN allowing the mind to apprehend the world unfiltered and in fundamentally different, and much richer ways.
The Intersection with Artificial Intelligence
As AI technologies have advanced, they’ve begun to mirror and sometimes exceed human capabilities in areas ranging from decision-making to creativity. When AIs begin to consistently and seamlessly exceed the predictive capabilities of our DMN, we’ll naturally begin to trust them more and more for critical decisions and as a source of truth. In doing so, we may atrophy or under-develop the Default Mode Network that holds the ego and the sense of self, rapidly changing our sense of self and culture.
This highly speculative scenario, in which AI's integration into daily life leads to the atrophy of the DMN and a dissolution of the ego, raises opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, the reduction of ego could herald a shift towards greater cognitive flexibility and creativity—a kind of cognitive rewilding—akin to the high-entropy states of psychedelics and childhood. As Pollan paraphrases Alison Gopnik, don’t “think about child consciousness in terms of not what’s missing from it or underdeveloped but rather what is uniquely and wonderfully present”.
On the other hand, it may risk diminishing our capacity for deep reflection, self-awareness, critical thinking, and the nuanced navigation of human emotions and social interactions. In some ways, we might already see glimpses of this as the helicopter parent movement and the hive-mind-driven influence of social media may have already contributed to the underdevelopment of the Default Mode Network in many young adults as authoritative decisions are outsourced. The result is what seems like a generation that is far more egalitarian and child-like in their development and so willing to reject (individualistic) concepts of democracy, which have been so core and sacred to Western civilization compared to previous generations.
This may sound far-fetched, but we can already see glimpses of it. Famously, London taxidrivers see growth in their hippocampi as they learn the 25,000 streets, whereas habitual use of GPS navigation has been shown to negatively impact spatial memory. Now what if AI is increasingly relied upon to take over areas generally associated with the self and our ego? This surely will profoundly change our conscious experience.
Navigating the Future
This transition may be difficult for older generations as the ego may need to be more firmly in control to hand over any of its authority to AI. However, my children (Gen-AI) will grow up in a world where AI is as ubiquitous as gravity and electricity, and they’ll adapt to take full advantage of the tools at their disposal. To them, using AI will be as natural as driving a car. In this case, many skills we value today will seem obsolete to them, and along with this, parts of their conscious experience will also evolve — some for the better, some for the worse.
The other day, Jenson Huang suggested that the next generation shouldn’t learn to code, they should leave it to AI. My first reaction to this was that learning to code is learning to think algorithmically and that this had fundamental value. But as I thought about it more, I began to think that a tireless and ever-patient AGI could be used to produce incredible work from just a handful of loose and unstructured thought fragments, and it would then be up to the artist's tastes and sensibilities to direct the AI to change or improve the vision in some way. Clarity of thought may not be needed as we feed AI the seeds of thought and transform them into coherent, complete, and robust ideas we curate. Maybe algorithmic thinking will no longer be necessary in the age of AGI. No longer burdened by the need for our brains to handle the terrifying complexity of tomorrow, we let go of our ego our human consciousness retreats to a more primordial state – evolving into the fabled Age of Aquarius.