Ep. 505 - AI, Mythology and the Edge of Existence

Living Myth

Michael Meade explores fears around AI extinction through an ancient Mayan creation myth, revealing humanity's role as both a risk and a gif

Key takeaways

• Humanity's conscious awareness is both a blessing and a danger to existence.
• AI echoes ancient myths where creations turn against their makers due to lack of gratitude and connection.

Main topics

• AI and existential risk
• Mythology and human purpose

Notable quotes

We are the inheritors of a seeing instrument — a capacity for imagination that dwells in our hearts.

Conclusion

Humanity's role at the edge of existence is not to dominate but to awa

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:09) Welcome to the Living Myth Podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective. This episode begins with the increasing fears that the rapid development of AI might lead to the extinction of humanity. As the dangers posed by AI agents coincide with end-time fears, Mead turns to an old myth that shows that humans have always been a great risk taken by the forces of creation. As creatures capable of conscious awareness, humans can become the enemy as well as the friends of creation. By Speaker 2 (1:00) its nature, the human soul is both ancient and immediate at the same time. Being immediate means that our souls connect us to the issues and concerns of the world around us, whether we like that or not. Being ancient means not simply being connected to things in the past, but more importantly, being secretly connected to the very origins of life. Because the world around us is changing so rapidly, and because the current issues bring into question the future of humanity and even the existence of the earth, it becomes increasingly important that we find the threads of imagination that can connect us all the way back to the origins from which life continually tries to renew and recreate itself. Speaker 2 (2:07) In mythological terms, the entire cosmos is in a constant state of flux as everything from the stars to the forests around us and the cells of our own bodies are engaged in a process of ending and beginning, of dying and being reborn again and again. At critical times, like the end of an era, the veil lifts and we can see more clearly how many things are coming to an end and how fears that it all might end become more widespread and more easily provoked. In the immediate moment, AI or artificial intelligence has become a rapidly changing source of fears about human extinction and the possibility of human technologies turning against us and threatening the very existence of life on Earth. In a mythological level of irony, one of the cutting-edge artificial intelligence projects causing immediate fears and concerns about life on Earth was named Mythos. At this critical time, there is more going on here than a simple play on words, because in the modern world, myth is typically used to refer to something that is false, not genuine, or not true. While in the ancient world, the word myth or mythos referred specifically to the underlying truths of life and the immediate sense of emergent truth. An old way of describing an actual myth is that it involves a series of lies that reveal the truth. In other words, the elements of a myth are not factual, but rather are metaphorical and symbolic in ways that help us grasp the abiding truths about humanity and about the earth that are otherwise hard to find and hard to hold. In the case of AI, it is significant that it self-defines as artificial, as if to imply that it is a substitute for kinds of understanding and intelligence that are more authentic. And whereas they might involve fears and dangers, they tend to also be life-enhancing by deepening our understanding of the world and revealing our place and purpose within it. Actual myths involve us in a deep sense of imagination that tends to be missing in the potentially self-destroying realm of artificial intelligence. Since the dangers posed by the development of artificial intelligence coincide with the fears that typically arise during the end of an era, I imagine that I will be addressing these issues repeatedly. For the time being, I want to turn to the ancient realm of mythos in order to view the immediate fears and worries of contemporary life. The Mayan creation story known as the Pulp of Wu or the Council Book depicts how the great imagination at the root of creation keeps becoming lost, yet always can be found again. Like most ancient peoples, the Mayans considered creation to be an ongoing project, not a one-time event. Their intricate and accurate calendars might at some point come to an end. However, time would turn over after touching the eternal origins again. In their creation myth, the original articulations of life were hidden behind the eternal darkness that was there at the very beginning when nothing stirred because everything was waiting, still held back behind a veil of silence. Then, the original thinkers or creators joined their breaths and their thoughts and their words together and formed the expression of existence that flowed forth in the shapes and forms that became the manifest world. Those first thinkers and original dreamers had names like Heart of Heaven, Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, but also Hurricane and Sudden Thunderbolt. Some people say there was only one being breathing life and sound into the world at the beginning. Others say that the Creator