Soenke Ziesche - IkigAI & AI, Ikigai Risk (IRisk)

What happens to human meaning when AI takes over not just our jobs - but our joy, our purpose, even our sense of self?
In this conversation, I speak with Soenke Ziesche, co-author of Considerations on the AI Endgame, about Ikigai - the Japanese concept of life purpose - and how it may be at risk in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence.

Together we explore:

    The psychological illusion of meaning in modern life
    The looming threat of Ikigai Risk - when AI automates away the things we live for, not just on
    How this connects to Nick Bostrom’s vision of Deep Utopia
    What happens when AI systems become more engaging than our friends, more competent than us in every skill, and indifferent to our well-being


Along the way, we raise difficult questions:

    Will humans still find purpose when AI can outperform us in love, labour, and laughter?
    If superintelligent AI lacks ikigai-kan - a felt sense of meaning - would it care whether we are flourishing?
    Could human values become obsolete in the eyes of indifferent optimisation?


This is a discussion at the crossroads of ethics, technology, and existential reflection.
If you're interested in AI safety, post-work futures, or how to retain meaning in a machine-accelerated world - this is for you.


  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Avatar Polymorph - The Ethics of Boosting Animals from Sentience to Self...

Image
This video was posthumously published - RIP Avatar Polymorph.  The question of boosting the intelligence of animals other than humans, to the level of self-awareness and consciousness, is one that cannot be considered in isolation from the general process at work in the social and speculative movement known as Transhumanism. Transhumanism is partly about augmentation of the human body, for example by molecular computational nanotechnology (cell repair and DNA repair molecular machines, and rod logic molecular supercomputers for enhanced memory). More generally is is the movement to ‘self-directed’ evolution (replacing evolution by random mutation and natural selection). This was pointed out by myself in 1996 and by Damien Broderick in his book The Spike, which was the first popular book on the idea of the ‘technological Singularity’ (a time when technology surges forward based on accelerating computing). This is a radical movement away from evolution as we understand it, and un...
Read more