Neighbors, It's Time to Make a Stand
Every side believes they are right. This means the conviction itself causes us to vilify our neighbors.
Accelerating evolutionary mismatch is our shared problem. We've created a world we didn't evolve to inhabit.
Every major wisdom tradition pointed to the same truth: We're all neighbors in an interconnected world.
Here’s something we all know but never say: Every single one of us believes we’re "the good guys.” No one wakes up and chooses the wrong side. If we thought our views were wrong, we’d change them. So the very thing that divides us is something we share: the absolute conviction that we are right.
We should all reflect upon the implications of this. Because something just happened in the world of AI that holds up a mirror to this exact predicament, and what it reveals is not really about AI at all. It’s about us.
This week, the government and the AI company Anthropic publicly clashed over how the most civilization-altering technology should be used for Good. Both sides believed they were protecting America and humanity. Both sides called the other dangerous. And on the same night Anthropic was blacklisted for its position, its rival, OpenAI, struck a deal using the very same terms.
This isn’t just a news story. It’s a tale as old as time because there is nothing new under the sun. Fellow human beings, fighting bitterly over different ideas of Good, each certain that the other side is the threat.
How long must we sing this song?
We are all the same in this, each of us convinced we are on the Good side and the dreaded Others are on........
