“Cogito, ergo sum”

Rene Descartes left us with a very insane quote. “I think, therefore I am”. It’s not about existence as a whole, it’s about progress. It’s about thought. What makes us human is the ability to autonomously decide. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, where the frontier is actively fucking up all over the place, the big question is: is it really AI that’s going rogue, or is it replicating Human Nature? In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes has said that, without government, humans would live in a “war of all against all”, making life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Humans are driven by self-interest and fear, and Hobbes argues they “need a strong authority to keep them in check”. Xunzi (3rd century, BC), has argued that human nature is bad, and that goodness comes through learning and discipline. Augustine taught original sin, and Machiavelli advised rulers that people are ungrateful, fickle and self-serving. There’s no questioning that both ancient and modern philosophers…

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