Thomas Moynihan: Is increasing complexity humanity's path to survival or destruction?

RNZ News

25-05-2025

Can humanity take a path toward a better future? Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan thinks we have the tools that make it possible.
Photo:
CHRISTIAN BARTHOLD
Humanity's strength is in our shared knowledge and thinking - a kind of 'global brain', Cambridge University's Dr Thomas Moynihan says. But does increasing complexity ultimately create a path to our species' certain destruction, or can we build a more benevolent future?
Dr Thomas Moynihan is a writer interested in the history of our thoughts about the future.
He is a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of
X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.
And in a recent article for Noema magazine,
discussed the idea
we're unintentionally building an artificial 'world brain'.
It is thought that
99 percent of all species that have ever lived
are now extinct. But Moynihan says compared to the length of time humans have existed, it has only been the past few hundred years we've begun to seriously contemplate our own possible extinction.
"When we do think about the sheer complexity of the planetary predicament and the amount of vested interest in corruption globally, the crumbling of geopolitical stabilities, I think we've reached a point of such technological might but haven't got the systems in place to harness that in productive ways. So, not to be too despondent, but it is a quite terrifying situation," he says.
"There are these branching paths ahead of us, and some of these lead - in the near term, within potentially decades, maybe even years - to wholesale destruction. The world seems more precarious than ever."
Moynihan is not willing to speculate on how likely extinction is for humanity, but he says others have: Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal
has given us
a 50:50 chance of making it to the end of the century, while Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord
has predicted
there is a one in six chance we won't make it that long.
"But then there are other futures," Moynihan says. "There are other paths out of the present wherein that doesn't happen and we continue doing the things that we've been doing."
What does AI mean for the future of the planet? Can it help us save ourselves?
"AI seems new and it seems scary and newfangled, because we often think that we haven't been doing that with cognitive processes - and to a degree that is true, but at the same time intelligence has never been brain-bound," Moynihan says.
"We learn who we are and what we're capable of and all the things that make us powerful as intelligent agents from the outside in - we learn from copying our parents and our community.
"Humans have always been completely enmeshed with their technologies and have been transformed by them, and therefore created more transformative technologies in turn. And so this is, in a sense, an extension of that long-run process that's been going on forever."
Photo:
123rf
The future is going to be much stranger, he says.
"If things go well and these more cataclysmic scenarios don't happen, but we do develop more powerful more potent AI systems - the kind of positive vision that I see is not utopias of abundance and all human problems are solved. Again, history is going to get more complicated as that happens, and therefore that final kind of destination, that utopia is never going to quite happen, in my eyes.
"We'll begin cooperating with these systems and they'll transform us and our interests will transform in turn, and it'll be this open ended ongoing process.
"To really zoom out, the project of human enquiry, is all based upon us trying to know more about the world so we can navigate it better, so that we can mitigate the risks better. This began with the invention of crop circulation or the dam, or even city walls."
Ironically, as we gain knowledge and our society and technology become more complex, different new risks are created, he says.
"That project of inquiry that began with the invention of crop circulation also led to the invention of hydrogen bombs."
Of the thinkers who have considered the invention of a global human brain, there are as many who have said it is beneficial and what we need to survive as have said it is catastrophic and terrible, he says.
Each step on the pathway - from the leap from single-celled organisms to multicellular creatures, from solitary hunters to large-scale cooperative groups - each step comes with the sacrifice of separate autonomy to a collective that is a more potent and complex whole.
"So, this is just to assume that all this world brain stuff is feasible anyway - which it may not be; But if you think about it, that we are creating a far more complex planetary system and are far more coordinated globally, even if that hasn't led to peace ... if that's going to intensify, then of course something like a loss of autonomy will necessarily have to happen on the human individual."
Humanity was destined to make predictions about our future, but the scope of our ability to foresee what could be ahead took time to develop, he says.
"You go back to anywhere in the ancient world and no-one had quite yet noticed that the entire human future could be be drastically different to the past, and in unpredictable ways, in some sense simply because there just wasn't enough historic record yet.
"So there wasn't the chronicle to look back and go 'oh the past was a foreign country', such that the future might become one too.
"But also because the rate of change was so slow that within one lifetime you didn't really see so many things changing - that kind of rate of unprecedented change is only going to continue."
Today's forms of art, cultural expression and media would have been almost incomprehensible to the ancients, Moynihan says.
Photo:
AFP
"Now we step into the future with almost more of the opposite, I think. We now appreciate just how complicated everything is, and just how the smallest tiny inflection or perturbation can change the entire future in completely cascading ways.
"It took Edward Lorenz in the 1960s to discover this by accident by messing around with weather simulations on his computer, to arrive at this fundamental insight from chaos theory - is that even in deterministic systems, very small changes to initial systems can leave to completely divergent futures.
"And ... that metaphor of the branching paths - we now know that that applies profoundly at planetary level. If that can cultivate again that kind of sense of collective responsibility, then that would be a brilliant thing."
Moynihan himself is hopeful the future can be more in line with proposals that have been made of a hopeful vision and cooperative steps forward.
"And I do think that in the current era - you look at the people in charge and the ways that they act, and of course that seems like a completely idealistic thing. But then again, only 200 years ago the idea that universal suffrage was real, and that women would have the vote and that civil rights would be a thing that happened, and LGBT rights - those things would have all seemed impossible.
"So I think we have to keep thinking that what seems impossible to us now can change overnight."
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter
curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.