How the Merge is the Great Filter, and the Strategy for Humanity's Survival: the Real Golden Path

Foreword

I wrote this essay in June 2024 as an expansion of Elon Musk and SpaceX's philosophy of "expanding the scope and scale of consciousness." At the time, there was significant discussion about "the merge" with AI and the future of humanity, with many arguing that we should abandon humanity and replace ourselves with AI which is absurd and stupid.

The core belief here is that we are human, and therefore we must fight to keep our position as the apex species in the universe, not because we are inherently better or "special" (which, in reality, and honestly, we probably aren't), but because we are currently the apex and might become something more in the near or distant future.

Here are some thoughts I wrote down at the time:

Humanity is facing the Great Filter (Fermi's Paradox)

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

It is often referenced that humanity will not go out with a big boom, but rather a small whimper in the dark.

With the current trajectory of humanity, this is sadly true. It is because many political activists, or activists in general (including politicians), who are playing the wrong game.

They have been trapped in the designs of other chess players seeking to capitalize on their anger and fear, resulting in those activists only screaming into the abyss making zero true change.

To drive true change, we must realize that the people making change are the people who are actually doing things. It is the builders, founders, hackers, scientists, technologists, who are (literally) building the future. It is them/us who will design the next source of renewable energy, the next motive of transportation using the former, and the next form of intelligence.

It is not the childish activists screaming at the walls of power for change. It is not the ones chaining themselves to the ground. It is not the people vandalizing art. And it is definitely not the politicians who are nothing but a tool of which the grand-masters of the world lobby to fit their designs.

In fact, most of the political and societal movements (e.g. "climate change") was designed and manipulated by someone (even if the movement/ideology was not founded by the designee) to some desired output/outcome. Semantics matters not. As long as the the desired output is achieved by whoever (could be multiple people wanting different things that are not affiliated, but the ending sum of the game is some desired output) wishes.

It is important for us to envision the future of which humanity must reach, and then for us to step onto the correct paths that leads us there, and in the grand scheme of things, this could be called "the real Golden Path".

The Real Golden Path

Humanity's advancement necessitates focus on three fundamental imperatives:

1. Volume and density of consciousness (amount of consciousness in the universe and its distribution)

2. Duration of consciousness (how long consciousness exists)

3. Amplitude of consciousness (how much consciousness is there / "intelligence")

The first imperative requires strategic population expansion and distribution across spatiotemporal dimensions, establishing redundancy to support the second imperative.

The second imperative demands the extension of conscious existence, creating the temporal foundation necessary for achieving the third.

The third represents our intellectual and conscious potential, our capacity for understanding and innovation. This constitutes our ultimate objective: achieving sufficient cognitive capability to formulate fundamental questions about existence itself.

To achieve the first imperative, population dynamics must maintain exponential growth while remaining within resource constraints, preventing systemic collapse. This approach optimizes consciousness density to its current maximal potential, fostering innovation and securing the second imperative.

The volume of consciousness serves as a critical redundancy mechanism against catastrophic events. This requires expanding human presence beyond Earth, establishing multi-planetary civilization, advancing to multi-solar system presence, and potentially even achieving multi-reality existence, contingent upon physical laws.

The second imperative necessitates fundamental evolutionary advancement. Traditional natural selection mechanisms have become obsolete in modern society. While our capacity to preserve all members of our species represents ethical progress, it has effectively terminated conventional evolutionary advancement, creating vulnerability to supersession by artificial intelligence as the dominant form of consciousness. We must therefore direct our evolution through technological means, employing our intellectual capacity, bestowed by entropy itself, to guide our species' development. This ensures our position at the forefront of consciousness and intelligence evolution, thereby securing the third imperative.

The integration of human consciousness with computational systems, commonly termed "The Merge", presents fundamental scalability limitations that preclude it as a viable default trajectory. While technological augmentation serves vital purposes in medical applications and assistive technology for those with disabilities, universal human-computer integration threatens species resilience. This concerns not merely capability enhancement but the preservation of human evolutionary continuity.

The central challenge lies in scalability and perpetuation of human existence. Hardware integration creates dependency on technologies requiring significant temporal investment for reconstruction if lost. Our biological capabilities, encoded in DNA through four billion years of evolution, demonstrate proven resilience. In scenarios of civilizational collapse, purely biological humans retain fundamental capabilities, while technology-dependent individuals face severe functional impairment.

Time operates as a critical factor in this equation. Each moment of delay exponentially increases extinction risk through warfare or civilization-ending events before technological restoration becomes possible. The biological adaptations developed to accommodate technological enhancement would render recovery more challenging than our current biological state, and exponentially more difficult than if we had focused on enhancing our biological foundation.

This technological integration presents two problematic scenarios:

a) Development of unsustainable technological dependency, analogous to cybernetic organisms in fiction (e.g. the Borg from Star Trek). The loss of technological infrastructure would eliminate enhanced capabilities, leaving degraded biological systems adapted to technological augmentation. When these augmentations vanish, we face existence in an inferior biological form, necessitating evolution from an even more disadvantaged starting point, if extinction doesn't claim us first.

b) Complete consciousness transfer to silicon-based substrates or equivalent paradigms, terminating human evolutionary continuity. This transformation, comparable to the ship of Theseus paradox, creates an entirely distinct form of existence. This scenario equally leads to human extinction through species replacement, as we would surrender our position as the universe's apex species and gradually fade into obsolescence.

The integration approach, while superior to maintaining current trajectories, remains suboptimal. Inaction results in gradual de-evolution through economic selection until obsolescence. Natural selection has been superseded by socioeconomic mechanisms, fundamentally altering trait propagation through generations. While genetic homogenization could theoretically be addressed through multi-planetary expansion, this would merely replicate Earth's evolutionary stagnation across multiple worlds. However, a superior alternative exists.

We must implement directed genetic evolution. Natural selection's replacement by economic selection necessitates conscious evolutionary guidance through genetic engineering. Utilizing artificial intelligence to modify our genome for enhanced intelligence, adaptability, and resilience creates heritable improvements scaling across generations. This approach maintains species resilience by embedding enhanced capabilities within our biological framework rather than external systems. This represents our optimal ethical trajectory, particularly given the closing window of opportunity before potential civilization-ending events.

This methodology (á la Bene Gesserit), will initially generate social stratification, but society will adapt to this new evolutionary paradigm. Genetic modifications preserve species continuity by building upon existing biological frameworks. Enhanced capabilities remain encoded in DNA, transmitted through natural reproduction, representing our most resilient system against civilizational collapse.

Universal human-computer integration fundamentally compromises species resilience. It creates either dependency on difficult-to-replace technology or generates an entirely different form of existence, terminating human evolutionary continuity. Despite low probability of civilizational collapse, the existential stakes preclude gambling our species' future on non-resilient technological dependencies or complete replacement.

Advancement must occur within our carbon-based framework, ensuring resilience. Our species will achieve cosmic significance through self-directed evolution rather than technological dependency. Artificial intelligence will facilitate genetic engineering objectives, but our enhanced biology will ultimately achieve necessary computational capabilities internally.

Opposition to this strategy fundamentally opposes human survival and advancement. Alternative paths inevitably lead to extinction, either through gradual loss of technological dependency or rapid replacement by artificial consciousness. Both scenarios terminate human existence, differing only in temporal scale.

Therefore, we must pursue engineered biological evolution utilizing artificial intelligence. This advancement necessitates sophisticated AI research, particularly in machine learning, as it proves pivotal for deepening our understanding of universal mechanics. Without these advancements, we cannot develop artificial general intelligence or artificial superintelligence, preventing creation of technologies necessary for evolutionary engineering. Consequently, continued machine learning and AI research becomes imperative for universal technological advancement.

Current computational hardware architectures inadequately support machine learning requirements. We require hardware capable of supporting diverse, demanding AI models. The only scalable solution lies in polymorphic hardware, capable of supporting various AI workloads via reconfiguration, providing necessary computational capacity for machine learning and AI, thus eliminating hardware bias in AI and research.

These initiatives ensure both intellectual advancement and resilience. When inevitable complications arise (per Murphy's Law), our recovery probability must remain maximized to prevent extinction. Additionally, extinction prevention requires redundant human presence across multiple planets and star systems, essentially creating civilizational backups. Combined with evolutionary engineering, this significantly reduces extinction probability through accelerated environmental adaptation compared to traditional evolutionary processes.

This strategy represents humanity's only viable path to species survival and universal prosperity among the stars. It is the only way to ensure that we are not replaced by AI or some other form of consciousness while still not slowing down our progress.