Mind Revolution Manifesto

Navigating the Transformation of Consciousness

Face Stock photos by Vecteezy

The Coming Mind Revolution

We’re so focused on how AI might shake up our jobs and institutions that we’re missing something just as important: how it’s also transforming the way we think, feel, and experience ourselves and the world.

We’re fixated on waves and missing the dangerous current sweeping us out to sea.

This shift in how we think and feel is likely to stick around for centuries.

The many debates about automation, misinformation, economic disruption, and political manipulation are examining surface ripples. Beneath them, our attention, our desires, our sense of self and each other is shifting as AI changes not just what we do but who we are.

To keep pace, our discussions about AI safety must expand beyond misaligned goals and rogue algorithms to include the risk of misalignment with what we value most about being alive.

We can approach this revolution in two connected ways: by tracing the breakthroughs driving it, and by exploring how they’re reshaping specific areas of human experience.

Our Changing Inner Worlds

How we see ourselves, others, and even reality itself is being radically transformed.

Our memories and emotional regulation may become AI-based. We might soon think with AI co-processors that enhance our reasoning speed and complexity beyond current human limits. How we plan and make decisions, along with how we conceptualize time, could undergo fundamental redesign. We're also on the verge of acquiring superhuman senses, vastly extending what we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Our connections with others might shift to digital spaces. We may even find ourselves preferring companionship and intimacy with humanoid robots over human interaction.

This is just a sample of the profound shifts to our experiences that are on the horizon. (I'll detail these experiential changes more comprehensively in a later post.) This level of change will challenge our ability to remain recognizably human.

The Forces We Face

AI might be the most discussed mind-changer, but dozens of other innovations are also altering our minds. Any single one might radically reshape us. Put them together and we’re almost guaranteed a revolution in consciousness.

Some of the more powerful mind-changers already in development include haptic suits and sensory interfaces that can simulate realistic touch with people, animals, and even imaginary beings. Other researchers are testing designer psychedelics that unlock precise mental states on demand, and pharmaceutical emotion regulators that adjust feelings: up and down, stronger and weaker. Advances in gene editing may soon allow us to alter embryos, children, and adults to boost intelligence, appearance, and resilience.

Pioneering brain-computer interfaces even now let people manipulate keyboards and robot limbs with their thoughts. Neural knowledge enhancers could teach us complex skills, languages, and facts, bypassing traditional study. Implanted memory extenders might record every experience for perfect recall whenever we choose. Soon, we may see personal brain links enabling mind-to-mind communication, and collective brain links joining humans and AIs to solve problems, create, and share thoughts. Agentic cognitive assistants are being widely adopted to make decisions faster than we can, drawing on vast memories and deep knowledge.

This is merely a sample of the mind-changers we face. (I'll catalog these emerging technologies more comprehensively in a later post.) Additional breakthroughs will likely appear in the years ahead, probably at an accelerated pace driven by AI science. The combined impact of these innovations may fundamentally rewrite what it means to be human.

What We Can Do

We must act to broaden discussions about AI's consequences beyond economics and politics to include our threatened inner worlds. This conversation cannot wait for perfect understanding as the changes are happening too fast.

No single person could master all the forces reshaping our minds. It will take hundreds of researchers with diverse expertise to illuminate the challenges we face. But we can start building that collective understanding now.

Mind Revolution aims to become a platform where researchers, philosophers, technologists, and concerned citizens collaborate on humanity's latest transformation of consciousness while preserving what makes us human.

We need practical strategies for maintaining human agency, and urgent conversations about the choices we're making, often without realizing it, about our mental future.

We still have time to shape the fourth revolution in consciousness before it reshapes us. But time is not on our side.

Future Posts

My future posts will include summaries of recent developments in mind changing technologies and discussions of:

· Previous mind revolutions in history

· A probable timeline for our current mind revolution

· Mind transformation as an AI alignment and safety problem

· What happens when thinking and memory are outsourced to machines

· The future evolution of human emotions

· The final sexual revolution

· Why AI may marry but can never fix us

· Our changing relationship with death

· Edmund Carpenter’s discoveries about how technology redesigns consciousness

· The uncanny valley of digital duplicates creating multiple versions of “me”

· The proliferation of neurodiversities

· A cosmic sociology preparing us for our own and other alien minds

As well as much else.

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