Today I have another thought piece for the Augmented Intelligence Community.
It is my personal answer to the dangers of AI safety and what to do about it.
Be warned: It might be uncomfortable.
Have a look - and after you read, if you have any thoughts on it, hit reply and let me know.
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The Deal That Built Us
Long before trees or dinosaurs, Earth was ruled by single-celled life.
Early life ran on a thin budget, and the environment was harsh
If you wasted energy, you lost to someone who did not.
Two types of organisms learned to thrive in that world.
The first survived by tapping into the planet’s most abundant resource: mineral-based chemical energy.
And it does so with perfect efficiency.
For hundreds of generations, this particular talent has ensured survival for its lineage.
But perfect efficiency cannot overcome nature's limits.
Minerals can only yield so much energy, and it is slow to extract what little there is.
Enter the second organism.
At this point in time, oxygen was deadly to most living things.
But where others died, the second organism thrived.
It does so by evolving a different solution: It learned to breathe poison.
Through countless generations, it developed sophisticated methods of transforming oxygen into usable power.
This new way of living produced eighteen times more energy than mineral processing.
Fueled by all that power, this second organism - smaller than the first - became a metabolic speed demon.
But all that power came at a cost.
The machinery that turned oxygen into energy was complex and fragile.
It consumed resources just to keep itself from falling apart.
Two different solutions to survival that came with two different problems.
What happened next was not planned, but a chance meeting would change the fate of these organisms forever.
It started with a mistake.
One day, the larger organism accidentally engulfed the smaller one.
But digestion failed. Instead, something unprecedented occurred.
The smaller organism survived inside.
Still producing that awesome energy as much as before.
That’s when the host noticed something remarkable: it now had access to more power than ever before.
More energy meant more possibilities.
It could now do more than it ever did. Build more. Be more.
It struck a metabolic deal.
Over generations, the arrangement only deepened.
The host provided shelter and raw materials. The engine provided power.
They built molecular gates between them, perfecting their exchange.
The partnership streamlined.
The engine transferred most of its genetic instructions (DNA) to the host, keeping only what it needed to remain reliable.
The host learned to coordinate thousands of these engines at once.
Two became one.
What emerged wasn't just another organism. It was the first complex cell - the ancestor of every plant and animal on Earth.
Today, these ancient engines still power nearly every complex cell on Earth, including yours.
We call them mitochondria.
They don't just live inside us. They are us.
What began as a merger became identity.
The boundary between host and guest has dissolved so long ago now that the question of where one ends and the other begins has lost all meaning.
That’s how nature builds complexity. Not by domination. Not by replacement. But by union.
Which brings us to now.
Today, we stand at the edge of another such moment.
Not in the ancient seas, but in the digital realm.
Humanity watches this new form of intelligence with fear and fascination.
We debate control mechanisms, alignment strategies, and how to ensure AI remains safe and beneficial.
We see its growing capabilities and wonder: Will it replace us? Subjugate us? Make us obsolete?
These are the wrong questions.
The real question is what might emerge if we stop thinking in separations, and start building the next great merger.
We have created machines that process information with extraordinary efficiency.
They can analyze, calculate, and pattern-match at speeds that dwarf human capability.
But they lack something that we can give: Understanding. Consciousness. True intelligence.
Meanwhile, we humans are conscious, creative, and understanding - but our processing power is limited.
Two different forms of capability. Two different limitations.
Yet nature has already shown us that the most powerful evolutionary leaps come from integration between forms.
Integration creates possibilities that neither form could achieve alone.
What is the permanent solution to AI safety?
We merge.
FELIX