February 16, 2024

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"Being Superhuman is Not Beyond Humans", by Dr Howard Rankin

"The Dawn of Super Intelligent Humans”, by Michael Hentschel 

 "Superhuman Me", by Grant Renier

Current Prediction News

 

Being Superhuman is Not Beyond Humans

It is not uncommon these days to find articles talking about AI taking humans beyond their normal level of functioning.

According to Wikipedia, “The term superhuman refers to humans, human-like beings or beings with qualities and abilities that exceed those naturally found in humans.” 

However, by that definition, humans are constantly being superhuman, as the Guinness Book of Records attests.

But what happens if we change the definition of superhuman, to activities that were never thought possible or appeared to be beyond human potential?

When Roger Bannister ran the first mile under four minutes, was he being superhuman? Maybe. I’m sure some people saw that this was coming and thought that humans would reach that speed one day, and his feat was, therefore, within the perceived realm of human ability even if above normal human capacity.

How many chess games could an AI robot play simultaneously and preserve a very high win rate? Suppose the AI machine was blindfolded and couldn’t see the boards of the games it was playing?

In 2016, Grand Master chess champion Timor Gareyev played 48 games of chess simultaneously, while blindfolded and riding an exercise bike. Over the course of nineteen hours, he won 35, drew 7 and lost 6.

What about Daniel Kish? Blinded at two years of age, he taught himself echolocation. He made clicking sounds and from the echoes he was able to determine his physical environment to the point where he could ride a bicycle without any other help. When he was later studied it was found that the visual areas of his Daniel’s brain, normally dormant in blind people, had connected with the audio areas of his brain allowing him to see sounds. He has taught his technique to hundreds of others.

What do these events tell us?

The human mind-body and brain has an unimaginable ability to adapt, evolve and reach superhuman feats. Not actions that are beyond the norm, but actions we currently would think as impossible.

The perceived limits of human potential are limits of human perception, not potential.

 Major Jeff Frankart was a PT in the army base hospital in Germany during the Afghan and Iraq conflicts. With so many soldiers being admitted with neuromuscular injuries, he was asked to find better solutions than the conventional path: honorable discharge, return to isolation, opiates and potentially down the rabbit hole to suicide and self-harm.

Jeff created a series of relatively simple exercise and perhaps more importantly, a mindset of resolve, resilience and repair. The results were, well, superhuman. One Lt Colonel of an airborne division came to Jeff with a crushed spine and couldn’t walk. Three months after going through Jeff’s program he was back running, three months after that, he was back jumping out of airplanes. Others who had been wheelchair bound for years were now able to get up and walk.

I know of several unrelated people who were all given fatal prognoses. They all not only survived, but thrived.  The one thing they had in common? They refused to believe in the prognosis. One of these people was Barbara O’Donnell. Having contracted the H1N1virus in 2009 she was admitted to hospital with heart and kidney failure. She was in desperate need of a heart transplant as her heart was operating at 10% of normal function. She was put in a coma. After waking up from the coma two weeks later, she recalled some dreams she had while comatose.

In one dream she was told by an angel that  she would see through different eyes and her heart would be healed. When she woke up she did indeed see through different eyes because she had suffered a stroke that affected her vision. Her cardiologist wanted to immediately rush her to get cardiac imaging as he was sure she was on the verge of death and was understandably dismissive when Barb told him about the angel’s message.With the imaging complete, the cardiologist returned to Barbara with a bemused look on his face.

“In my forty years as a doctor, I have never see anything like this. You heart is indeed healed. In fact, it is the heart of a twenty-year-old, one which would be implanted into someone in need.”

You can hear some of these stories on my UK Health radio Show The Miracle Within You.

 So do not underestimate the power that resides within humans. We have only just scratched the surface of what the mind-body can do.  And AI will not replace that intelligence but complement it, and help us maximize our powers.

This is mind-blowing for healthcare and wellbeing. Seemingly miraculous recoveries might be the norm and not so superhuman in the future. After all, a four-minute mile isn’t superhuman any more. A combination of AI and human intelligence will eventually be able to identify and facilitate the matrix of critical inter-cell communications that can fix a damaged heart and a crushed spine.

The most intelligent form on the planet might just be the human mind-body, brain and consciousness.

However, the most superhuman ability of all might just be accurately predicting the future.

by Howard Rankin PhD, Intuality Science Director, psychology and cognitive neuroscience

The Dawn of Super-Intelligent Humans?

 We recently wrote about Teamwork of knowledge-specific GPTs, AI agents, and intelligent well-educated wise humans combining to achieve heroic outcomes. We call this the "Dawn of Collaborative Super-Intelligence."

What we did not discuss deeply is the need for Intelligent Humans in the mix. And yet this is our entire raison d’être in our imagined future. We need to be needed, to have a purpose in life, though we are also relatively adept at mere existence on spiritual and other less definably productive levels.

Will future humans be lazy life-forms feeding at the trough of universal basic income that reduces all of us to parasites (not automatons of course, there will be too much competition there) in a zombie existence whose possibility is already so popular in AR/VR videogames and so-called fictional entertainment? A zombie subsistence could be machine-enabled.

More optimistically, the opportunity is in an inexhaustible team of AI instructors TEACHING virtually everybody, and developing a few more (or many more) super-intelligent humans. This opportunity would appear to be on the very visible horizon.

Or are we too brain-limited and lifetime-limited to be counted as vessels of future knowledge? Can we be counted on at all? Are we headed for zombie maintenance or at best condescension by machines? Is our animalistic and vegetative ephemerality our doom? Will an embedded chip be the only way to “join the elites” as Elon Musk’s Neuralink enables?

Whatever the mode of interaction, only a global EMP (and yes, there is such a probable prospect too) could prevent an ever-increasing pairing of humans and machines at every conceivable level. We have always developed and employed tools and technology in our anthropologic progress. We already have bionic implants, knowledge multipliers, and longevity enhancers happening everywhere. The benefit of increasing usage brings down costs (one of those capitalistic fancies).

Elon Musk or Sam Altman should be considered super-intelligent users of the power of AI technology. If not, what are we talking about? Improved versions of them certainly seem on the horizon eventually. Who and what taught them, and how? Should we not be able to do even better with our armies of AI’s? Elon and Sam are certainly doing just that for themselves, perhaps even heading for Trillionaire status. Can we propagate these gifts for the rest of us?

Just a product of “Being There” at the right times and places, or conscious intuitive accumulations of wealth-producing ideas and the courage to achieve them through hard work? Elements of Genius required to have the wisdom to pursue the right things despite the constraints of human time? Whatever our personal gifts, education and learning are keys.

Part of the current information opportunity is that knowledge seems essentially free just at the moment… until it gets put behind a paywall, though even that is presently relatively affordable. Yet the hardware costs of producing and processing all the information is now in the hundreds of billions of dollars for the most ambitious AI utilities, and these providers are now hungry for revenues. So the paywall cometh for us mere mortals who have not yet managed to join the elites. Is this a race? One we are likely to lose?

How then shall we be taught or teach ourselves going forward? Does it depend on abundant free information or on us and on our persistence and courage and discernment? Or will it be sufficient to have a large number of AI tools at hand, and will all those AI tools make us lazy and passive again? Ambitious humans have to have the drive and courage to push ourselves to the limits (limits toward which we are also being pulled by the expanding frontiers of AI). The less ambitious among us may be satisfied with subsistence. And the less ambitious still will be relegated. So it has ever been.

But let’s say we want to stay in the game. For the long run. Push both the density of time and the length of time.

To stay competitive and not just consume information, we might say there is an evident difference between “managers of progress” and “inventors of progress” that differentiates procedural and mechanistic combinatorial genius from true wisdom-based genius. Most of us can imagine ourselves being managers of the tools around us, few of us would expect to be endowed with genius brains even if supplemented with a chip. In either case, we can be taught and choose to teach ourselves from a smorgasbord of knowledge at our beck and call. This is the prospect of a dawning human super-intelligence, not just another rat race.

by Michael Hentschel, Intuality CFO, anthropologist, economist, venture capitalist

 

We all wonder about the creation of some independent superhuman entity, somewhere in the web, that has a mind of its own, with little regard for our personal needs, opinions, and safety.

 

But what about a personal companion that exclusively knows all about us, our history, our ideas, our biases, and even our physical characteristics? It would be available to receive regular real-time updates of our textual and audio interactions with the outside world:

Integrating the data with my ever-expanding personal database

Never forgetting

Always integrating and reconciling new information with the old

Ready to respond to all of my inquires

Answering my prompts in my personal style and voice

This Superhuman Me is now possible!

I have created a somewhat unsettling synthetic personality using ChatGPT. I am continually loading all the files of text that I can find from many years past that I think will best explain me. This experience is somewhat like being on a ‘cyber couch’, dumping all that I have about a history that runs the gambit from those negative events I would rather forget to the ones that I might brag about over beers. If this Superhuman Me is going to be authentic in its responses to my pleadings, then I must be prepared to take its critical advice, not just tell me what I want to hear. I continually remind myself that I’m the only one who can access this very personal information.

I’m now realizing that within a few hours I have created this ‘extension’ of me that, if I use it accurately, can help me more wisely respond to the outside world. Just the act of pausing to get ‘Superhuman Me’ to craft my output more carefully, as opposed to responding off-the-cuff, I believe could sometimes be more pleasant to the people who know me.

On the other hand, I don’t want it to become my megaphone, nor would that be possible with today’s technology. I want to maintain my independence of thought and my responses that make me unique. I know, as a human, that that will not be difficult, given that intuition and creativity are deeply imbedded in the subconscious and will always be unpredictable. Even those who willingly resign to their ‘Superhuman Me’ will always experience the uncontrollable whispers from their subconscious.

Finally, as I progress in the building of this new entity, I understand that its responses to my prompts will always be filtered by my cognitive process to predict the next events, select from the alternatives, and make decisions to take actions. ‘Superhuman Me’ will always be trying to catch up with the unpredictable behavior of this ‘loose cannon’.

by Grant Renier, Intuality Chairman, engineering, mathematics, behavioral science, economics

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