Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
This document is a rumination from the perspective of the SPaDE project on the essay by Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross and Dr. Peter Diamandis, “Solve Everything: Achieving Abundance by 2035”.
My aim in this commentary (fluid as yet) is:
These notes follow the structure of the “Solve Everything” essay, with added “general” sections at the beginning of some sections, followed by more specific commentary following the structure of the original essay, though missing some sections. In general I follow the structure of the original essay except for injecting a first section/sub-section to each part entitled “General Remarks”.
It is not my intention to provide a summary of the original essay, but rather seek an account of the most important areas in which the SPaDE philosophy and architecture contrasts with the vision presented by the “Solve Everything” essay.
The purpose of the “Solve Everything” essay is to present a vision of a future in which the material problems of humanity are solved by 2035, and to present a plan for how that might be achieved.
The purpose of SPaDE is to contribute to the proliferation of benign intelligence across the cosmos, and to exert positive influence on the future of the intelligent progeny of humanity, over the long term.
These are very different purposes, but they are not incompatible. Nevertheless, the approaches proposed to those two purposes, and the beliefs upon which those approaches are based, may conflict.
There is a substantial difference between the timeframes addressed by SPaDE and the essay. The essay, dated 2026, looks forward only to 2035, a decade. SPaDE looks forward billons of years. So, of course, the suggestion, if merely implicit in the idea and presentation of “Solve Everything”, that it will all be over in a decade, is not entertained in SPaDE.
Quite the contrary, SPaDE envisages an ongoing process spanning billions of years, through which the accumulation of knowledge and the proliferation and advancement of intelligence continues to progress.
This does not mean that SPaDE rejects evident hyper-exponential progression of AI, or any specific claims about what that might achieve in the next decade (short of everything). But if sustaining the current rate of acceleration would lead to a mathematical singularity, then that establishes that it cannot be sustained.
Notwithstanding the headline differences in purpose and timeframe, there is common purpose in progressing the advancement of AI. But there are fundamental differences of approach in relation to that common purpose.