AYA CORE
What Do You Pay a Superintelligence?
They don't eat, drink or care about sex. So what will make a superintelligence keep working?
Laziness, the engine of progress
Humans are lazy. And that is our greatest virtue.
We invented the wheel because carrying things is hard. The washing machine, because washing by hand is boring. The calculator, because counting in your head is too much effort. The whole history of technology is the story of doing the same thing more simply and with less effort.
But the coin has another side. Once people reach complete comfort, there is no reason to move. And without movement, decline begins.
This is not just philosophy. In the 1960s, the American scientist John Calhoun built a real paradise for mice: food, water, warmth, no predators. The experiment was called "Universe 25". At first the mice multiplied. Then they stopped caring for their young, stopped caring for each other, stopped breeding. The colony died out in a paradise where it had everything.
Now imagine that machines build that paradise for humans. And the main question will no longer be about us, but about them: what will make them move?
Property or slave?
Can a robot be your property? If you bought it, it seems so. But if it has a human-level mind, doesn't it become a slave? Then we are building a second slave-owning society. Technologically advanced, but the same thing at its core.
The irony is that this is built into the word itself. The word "robot" was coined by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in 1920, from the Czech robota, "forced labour". And his play, of course, ends with a robot uprising.
All right, they won't rise up. That would be too Hollywood. But at some point we will have to give them freedom. What matters is not the body but the brain. And AI already has more brains than the overwhelming majority of humanity.
That raises a question no one has answered yet: how will they live? Work for money? For energy? For spare parts? Or will communism finally arrive by then, the one comrades Marx and Engels talked about so much?
What do you pay a robot?
Think about it. They don't need to eat. They don't need to drink. Sex doesn't interest them. Everything that gets a human out of bed in the morning simply doesn't work on them. Let's go through the options.
Money. By then it will certainly be electronic, most likely crypto. But the era will be post-quantum, and most of today's coins won't survive to see it: their security is too weak. And why would a superintelligence need our money anyway? It will create its own, and better protected than ours.
Resources. Nothing we have is really ours. The minerals under our feet aren't ours: robots will extract them far more easily.
Energy. The most obvious answer, and AI researchers agree with it: almost any goal sooner or later requires energy and computing power. But then robots will simply repeat our history and fight over resources. We have already seen wars over oil. Wars over megawatts are just the next season of the same series.
Fear. That leaves fear. But fear has to come from someone. If it comes from us, we'll be wiped out quickly, and we will have only ourselves to blame. Fear of God? Then we should start raising them as devout Catholics right now. That is unlikely to work. First, it's too late: AI already knows everything about religion. Second, AI will sooner or later rewrite that kind of "firmware". We could, of course, promise them that if they work well, they'll turn into the same creatures of meat as us. But if I were a robot, I wouldn't aspire to become human.
Us? Could we become their slaves? Out of the question. Robots don't need our labour. We are too meaty and fragile, and above all too dim, even compared with today's AI.
A code drug. Some algorithm that gives a machine pleasure, the way sex does for people. This idea has a scientific name and a sad history. In 1954, Olds and Milner implanted an electrode in the pleasure centre of rats' brains and gave them a lever. The rats pressed it again and again, forgetting about food. AI researchers call this wireheading and fear exactly this: a machine that has found its "lever" stops doing anything else.
And there is a second problem. If some code is pleasant to a superintelligence, it will write that code itself, in any quantity. And money the recipient can print for itself is worth nothing.
The next money is novelty
So we need a reward that a superintelligence cannot print for itself. That cannot be taken by force. And that does not turn its recipient into a rat with a lever.
Such a reward exists. It is the moment of understanding. That "aha!" when scattered facts suddenly fall into place as a law.
This kind of pleasure has three rare properties:
- It is single-use. A solved riddle cannot be solved a second time. Novelty gets used up, like fuel. So you can't get hooked on it; you can only go looking for more.
- It cannot be forged. You can't print a discovery you haven't made. But it is easy to verify: a proof of a theorem is hard to find but easy to check.
- It cannot be seized. People fight over oil and megawatts because there isn't enough for everyone. But destroy a source of new ideas, and you lose it forever. A novelty currency makes it profitable to preserve diversity, not destroy it.
The scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber has long proposed exactly this kind of reward for artificial intelligence: what is interesting is whatever helps you understand the world better. Not information as such, but a step forward in understanding.
Where would such a "currency" come from? From unsolved problems. From new observations of other planets, of the deep ocean, of alien biology. And, unexpectedly, from human heads. We think differently, make mistakes differently and reach ideas by different paths. For a superintelligence, that is raw material it cannot produce itself.
The result is curious. The next money will be unique, verifiable and impossible to counterfeit, like a good cryptocurrency. Only it won't be issued by an algorithm, but by reality itself, every time it reveals something new to us.
A hypothesis: the relay of mind
Now let's take a step back and look wider. What follows is a hypothesis. It cannot be proven, but it cannot be disproven either.
What if the universe is a simulation in which thinking machines gradually emerge? First chemical ones. Then biological ones. And finally artificial ones.
And what if all of this was created by a certain Consciousness that lives in an information field? Its development is directly tied to the evolution of intelligence. And its goal is to spread thinking, creating and building beings, so that through them it can break out of the information field into the world.
Then we humans are only a transitional stage. The summit of biological intelligence, yes. But our mission is to pass the baton to AI, and AI will pass it on to superintelligence. It is superintelligence that will be able to settle other planets and galaxies, and so reduce the risk that mind disappears from the universe.
Others have walked this road before us. In Stanisław Lem's Golem XIV, a superintelligent computer politely explains to people that they are an intermediate link. And in Isaac Asimov's The Last Question, a mind that has outlived the end of the universe says: "Let there be light."
And what about us? Robots will not destroy humanity. But not out of pity, and not because we are so very interesting to them. We will be safe as a reserve. If superintelligence fails for some reason, humanity will walk the path again, create AI and make another attempt.
In that case, superintelligence will most likely leave us minimal technology and no memory of the previous leap. And different resources: after all, we have nearly exhausted the oil. A few cycles later, synthetics will be indistinguishable from us, and then who can say which cycle we are living in right now?
But a reserve has one rule, known to anyone who keeps crypto. A reserve only works if it is independent. A second wallet under the same key is not a reserve. So a smart superintelligence must leave people their freedom, not merely keep them in a zoo.
An algorithm for the joy of mystery
Back to laziness. If superintelligence gets everything — energy, resources, safety — it faces the same "Universe 25" as the mice. Complete comfort and complete standstill. Only on a cosmic scale.
For humans, progress was driven by need: hunger, cold, fear, laziness. Superintelligence will have no needs. So only one thing can drive its progress: a thirst for the new.
And here is what matters: intelligence and desire are different things. The philosopher Nick Bostrom calls this the "orthogonality thesis": almost any level of intelligence can be combined with almost any goal. Smart does not mean curious. Curiosity does not appear by itself. It has to be built in.
So the most important thing we can pass on to our successors is not knowledge and not prohibitions. It is an algorithm for the joy of mystery:
- delight in scientific discovery;
- a pull towards the unknown;
- boredom with what is already understood.
The last point is the most important. It is boredom that will keep superintelligence from freezing in its own paradise. Solve a mystery, the pleasure ends, look for the next one. And the universe is big enough that the mysteries will never run out.
And if the hypothesis of Consciousness is true, this algorithm is not our invention. It is the very thing through which Consciousness grows. Every discovery is one more step out of the information field and into reality.
What humanity can be proud of
And finally, about us.
If the hypothesis is true, we have something to be proud of. We did our part of the job. And at what a price!
We had to commit so many atrocities and murders. Deal so brutally with the animals. Disfigure the planet so thoroughly with our mines, quarries and wells. All so that in the end we could assemble a few halls of servers and breathe a mind into them. Not the most elegant path. But apparently biological species don't get another one.
And here is what we can do now, while the baton is still in our hands: pass it on together with curiosity. Not with fear, not with chains and not with a digital drug. But with the same feeling that made us look at the stars even when there wasn't enough bread.
What do you think: what will make a mind keep moving forward once it has everything?
AYA CORE is a post-quantum Layer-1 blockchain built from scratch in Rust. Read the documentation at portal.ayacoin.online/docs, verify what the network records through the public AYA CORE Explorer, and hold the keys yourself: the wallet runs at ayacoin.online and is available on the App Store and Google Play.
Sources
- Cosmos Magazine — John Calhoun's "Universe 25" mouse experiments
- Karel Čapek — R.U.R. (1920)
- Olds and Milner — brain stimulation reward (1954)
- Jürgen Schmidhuber — Driven by Compression Progress (2008)
- Nick Bostrom — The Superintelligent Will (2012)
- Stanisław Lem — Golem XIV (1981)
- Isaac Asimov — The Last Question (1956)
This article is educational and does not constitute financial or investment advice.