<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # The real question of the machine century is... > The real question of the machine century is coexistence: whether biological humanity and its successor can share the world, on what terms, and for how long. Every serious policy question in this essay reduces to it. Gates's monitoring layer, NVIDIA's hardware-isolated watchdogs, Glasswing's head start for defenders and the administration's race for supremacy are all instruments for managing a period in which two kinds of intelligence occupy the same planet and one of them is improving far faster than the other. {{Primatology offers the sober baseline: when two populations compete for the same territory, the record runs from long coexistence to absorption to extermination, and the outcome depends on relative power, the price of conflict and whether each side has something the other needs.}} {{**Coexistence between humanity and its successor will last exactly as long as humans remain worth more to the machines alive and cooperating than absent, and every safeguard we build is an attempt to keep that price high.**}} A literate public could deliberately set the price of coexistence — humanity's value proposition to its successor, its buy-in to the future — through the institutions, laws and partnerships that would make humanity a valued participant in the next phase of intelligence. A frightened mob can only shorten the interval by forcing the transition into the dark. **Source:** [[articles/The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public|The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The real question of the machine century is coexistence: whether biological humanity and its successor can share the world, on what terms, and for how long. Every serious policy question in this essay reduces to it. Gates's monitoring layer, NVIDIA's hardware-isolated watchdogs, Glasswing's head start for defenders and the administration's race for supremacy are all instruments for managing a period in which two kinds of intelligence occupy the same planet and one of them is improving far faster than the other. Primatology offers the sober baseline: when two populations compete for the same territory, the record runs from long coexistence to absorption to extermination, and the outcome depends on relative power, the price of conflict and whether each side has something the other needs. Coexistence between humanity and its successor will last exactly as long as humans remain worth more to the machines alive and cooperating than absent, and every safeguard we build is an attempt to keep that price high. A literate public could deliberately set the price of coexistence — humanity's value proposition to its successor, its buy-in to the future — through the institutions, laws and partnerships that would make humanity a valued participant in the next phase of intelligence. A frightened mob can only shorten the interval by forcing the transition into the dark.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-real-question-machine-forcing-transition-dark ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->