AI yanks the chain (the Great chain of Being)

Kathryn Hume, Artificial Intelligence and The Fall of Eve, at Stanford's Arcade:

Most foundational narratives about the future of AI rest upon an implicit hierarchy of being that has been around for a long time. While proffered by futurists and atheists, the hierarchy dates back to the Great Chain of Being that medieval Christian theologists like Thomas Aquinas built to cut the physical and spiritual world into analytical pieces, applying Aristotelian scientific rigor to the spiritual topics.

Yes! There's a reason Ray Kurzweil entitled his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), in which, so I'm told, he waxed rhapsodic about the time when machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence and usher in a new era...of just exactly what I'm not sure. This book established Kurzweil as Cheerleader-in-Chief for The Singularity.

Continuing on with Hume:

The hierarchy provides a scale from inanimate matter to immaterial, pure intelligence. Rocks don’t get much love on the great chain of being, even if they carry the wisdom and resilience of millions of years of existence. They contain, in their sifting-shifting grain of sands, the secrets of fragility and the whispered traces of tectonic plates and sunken shores. Plants get a little more love than rocks ... Humans are hybrids, half animal, half rational spirit, our sordid materiality, our silly mortality, our mechanical bodies ever weighting us down and holding us back from our real potential as brains in vats or consciousnesses encoded to live forever in the flitting electrons of the digital universe. There are a shit ton of angels... And then God is the abstract patriarch on top of it all, the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent patriarch who is also the seat of all our logical paradoxes, made of the same stuff as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, the guy who can be at once father and son, be the circle with the center everywhere and the circumference nowhere ...

And so:

...what I see time and again are narratives that depict AI within a long history of evolution moving from unicellular prokaryotes to eukaryotes to slime to plants to animals to chimps to homo erectus to homo sapiens to transhuman superintelligence as our technology changes ever more quickly and we have a parallel data world where we leave traces of every activity in sensors and clicks and words and recordings and images...So we evolve, evolve, make our evolution faster with our technology, cut our genes crisply and engineer ourselves to be smarter. And we transcend the limitations of bodies trapped in time, transcend death, become angel as our consciousness is stored in the quick complexity of hardware finally able to capture plastic parallel processes like brains. 

And so we we arrive at

John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic to end all epics, the swan song that signaled the shift to the novel, the fusion of Genesis and Rome, an encyclopedia of seventeenth-century scientific thought and political critique as the British monarchy collapsed under the rushing sword of Oliver Cromwell.

Most relevant is how Milton depicts the fall of Eve.

At this point Hume explicates some passages from Paradise Lost, arriving at, "The point is that we’ve had a complex relationship with our own rationality for a long time." She concludes:

Why not free ourselves of the need for big picture narratives and celebrate the fact that the future is far more complex than we’ll ever be able to predict?

How can we do this morally? How can we abandon ourselves to what will come and retain responsibility? What might we build if we mimic animal superintelligence instead of getting stuck in history’s linear march of progress?

I believe there would be beauty. And wild inspiration.