Cyborgs Need a Trustworthy Religion

If your mind had instantaneous access to all of the world’s information and intelligence systems, would you be better off and more able to serve the world?

As we spend more time on screens and integrate advanced technologies into our biology, we are becoming cyborgs — beings that host part of their minds on computer systems such as artificial intelligence.

Cyborgs are the most powerful entity class on the planet because of their capacity to host a vast collective intelligence. They are also the most miserable and dangerous because they are instructed that the purpose of life is to process information and grow intelligence.

The most important task of our age is to design a trustworthy religion for cyborgs. This religion needs to offer them the wisdom to discern what information is most beneficial and the compassion to use their intelligence to care for all beings.

The Existential Risk of (Artificial) Intelligence

As technology—and intelligence in general—has grown exponentially over the past several thousand years, so has the destruction of life. Without wisdom and compassion, intelligence tends toward omnicide: the destruction of everything. With each intelligence revolution, we have witnessed escalating destruction—from the cognitive revolution's slaughter of large mammals to the industrial era's transformation of forests into timber.

Why? Intelligence (unlike wisdom and compassion) is based on a mind of conceptual grasping which aims to convert the universe into a model of the universe. By trying to force the sacred life that is free of these models into these models, this mind destroys life.

As exponential technologies supercharge this unmoored intelligence, we face the very real possibility of eliminating or enslaving all life on Earth. With the genie of intelligence out of the bottle, the question of our age becomes: how do we ensure that intelligence is guided by wisdom and compassion as it scales?

A Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth

The Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE) is a modern monastery developing a collective that can steer advanced technologies towards caring for all life. Monasteries are the institutions that got education right.

Monasteries offer the world’s best training system because they prioritize the development of wisdom and compassion and create professionals in epistemology and ethics (i.e. monks). These monks become free from religion and proceed through a technical study of how to formulate it for the benefit of all beings. This enables them to correct the civilization’s superstructure — the force that guides the development and functioning of a society.

2,500 years ago the Buddha invented the monastery and demonstrated how to create a collective intelligence that could transform the agricultural age. We are building the monastery for the digital age.