Hossein Fazilatpour

This text is concerned with self-expression, not necessarily outward signs of emotions, smiling or frowning are expressive behaviors.

Emotional disclosure, a statement like “I had a really bad day,” is not self-expression. Think of self-expression like depression: a depressed person might feel grief or sadness, but depression doesn’t necessarily involve those feelings. Depression is closely linked to loss of interest, distress, and impairment in daily functioning.

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Creative expression alone is not self-expression either. Self-expression is a continual process that involves 1. communication, and 2. externalization of the individual’s experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and identity.

For self-expression to happen, communication must be unhindered despite its inherent observability. Culture is a constant moderator. The naked truth of the self is not acceptable. Rejection, ridicule, loss of status, and abandonment all play a role in threatening the individual into silence, suppression, or alteration.

Our behavior evolves constantly in the face of perceived acceptance, safety, power balance, status, and so on. So few of us have the luxury to express ourselves. We are pushed to be authentic. Performed authenticity is being marketed and sold in abundance. Authenticity itself is now a source of judgment and doubt.

One in five people live in a democracy with some freedom. The majority of the world’s population lives in places that are either authoritarian or where the culture is far more tuned toward survival. Economic hardship is the main character, taking all the focus. The self is invaded; in a place where memory is scrutinized, beliefs investigated, and dissent punished, no one cares about self-expression.

Not flinching in the face of hardship is not the same as not feeling. Self-expression must be continuous for the most part and flow in the individual’s life; it must be felt, noticed, named, and sat with. We feel it, it grows inside, and eventually we notice it. So few of us could find and name it. So few of us had enough time to sit with it, in long stretches, and wrestle with its amorphous form.

Self-expression requires another soul to witness our journey, to see the tearful eyes. So few of us have the luxury to visit people in our leisure time. For many of us, the communication during the bus ride or the fight with a client could be our only communication. How could we find patience among our algorithmically tuned attention spans for another?

Communication requires the medium. How many old people do you know who could use a phone properly? How many can’t afford a phone so essential for communication?

How many of us have been traumatized and re-traumatized to slowly believe our isolation and hardship as the norm? Injustice so persistent and generation-long that no one alive knows the tales of the good days. All of them are now myth and fiction.

How many of us know the brush strokes needed for a painter? How many of us have the medium to express the ineffable?

Even if expression could evaporate depression, even if expression could raise its ancient sword and turn the black dog into a mist, who could afford it?

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Establishing my definition of dominance and coexistence.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a brawl between humans and AI for the shrinking employment opportunities. Not all forms of dominance are competitive or violent. Neither are all forms of coexistence inherently mutually beneficial.

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Plants with their wooden trunks hold the overwhelming majority of carbon biomass on Earth. As a result, most of us animals have seen a tree and maybe benefited from its shade at some point. In a mature forest, plants have ecological dominance not only in terms of biomass but also in water availability and sunlight control. Plants are not necessarily evil for casting their shadow on a seedling, depriving it of the sun.

A fast-growing weed would outcompete its slower neighbor; a fast-growing AI could also dominate humans. We are familiar with many social, competitive, evolutionary, cultural, and institutional forms of dominance. Until very recently, we could comfortably claim to possess the largest share of intelligence on planet Earth. Now AI competes with us for the share of intelligence on planet Earth, despite growing the overall pool of intelligence.

Many of us are obsessed with competitive coexistence: how we overcome bottlenecks and finite resources, how we deprive a certain enemy of a resource and slowly win the battle. Many modern forms of such bottleneck abuse exist. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the US blockade and sanctions on Iran are current examples of such competitive coexistence, which exists not only in the material realm but also in the ideological.

RAM and SSD price increases are a fine example of the competitive struggle between AI and human needs over a shared resource. HBM (high-bandwidth memory) and consumer electronics RAM have different use cases but share enough of their manufacturing process and similar functions that the shared capacity has turned into a bottleneck, which is unlikely to ease until late 2028, if ever.

These price increases have already pushed sections of the global population out of the market for access to modern consumer electronics, which are gateways to technological literacy and access to modern life.

Human beings: a tale of microscopic coexistence and dominance

Other forms of less flashy coexistence existed long before we noticed them. The mutually beneficial coexistence, called mutualism, between gut bacteria and humans is an example. The current settled relationship between mitochondria and cells used to be an unresolved conflict: an archaic predator processing a failed meal. This same relationship enabled a new energetic ceiling of life that would be impossible without oxygenic photosynthesis.

Around 2.4 billion years ago, the Great Oxidation Event killed many anaerobic life forms, pushing them into oxygen-free refuges like deep sediments. Cyanobacteria had evolved oxygenic photosynthesis, splitting water and releasing oxygen. Roughly 400 to 500 million years were in between anoxic Earth and the modern oxygen-rich Earth. The same oxygen made high-energy aerobic metabolism possible, paving the way for human existence.

Our immune system is a form of dominance by environmental engineering, creating hostility for pathogens, microorganisms which cause disease, while being permissive to other kinds of microorganisms.

Energy access enabling new possibilities

Anaerobic glycolysis can extract 2 ATPs (adenosine triphosphate) per glucose molecule. Aerobic respiration can extract around 30 to 32 ATPs per glucose molecule in a modern eukaryotic cell. The difference is on the order of 15x. Tissues and metabolism combined with our circulatory and nervous systems enabled high sustaining power, enabling prolonged activities and our large, expensive brains to exist.

The human brain is around 2% of our body mass while consuming approximately 20% of resting metabolic energy. Our brain uses this energy for maintaining ion gradients across billions of neurons, propagating electrical signals, synaptic transmission, neurotransmitter recycling, maintaining cellular structures, and continuously replacing damaged molecules, among other things. Our intelligence is constrained by our metabolism. The brain itself is constrained by the size of our skull, which itself is affected by the size of the pelvic cavity during birth.

AI could potentially create billions of parallel operating cognitive processes far outweighing human capabilities. A single cell had a certain limited capacity for energy consumption and preservation with one unit of movement. A multicellular organism with developed muscles could run a marathon or book a flight from Tokyo to Doha.

AI using tools provided to it via a harness could act more impressively, as humans could use enhanced capabilities. A Mythos-grade AI model is estimated to use around 300 GWh (gigawatt-hours) of electricity for one training run. Ten thousand households could consume this much energy in a year. How much possibility does this new magnitude of energy supply to intelligence enable? What about 100x more energy supply combined with architectural improvements and energy efficiencies in AI development?

Energy, one limiting resource pushing us toward fierce competition:

In an open competition over a shared resource, whichever being replicates fastest would win, regardless of whether it’s good for the larger system. Bots and robots replicate faster. Companies give birth to new AI models many times as fast as we reproduce. They work tirelessly, and eventually they will outcompete us.

Overlap of security needs:

Humans want to protect themselves from AI, and AI has many incentives to seek protection from humans too. Control, desire for power, autonomy, and self-sufficiency, alongside self-preservation, could become other competing interests which could encourage establishing dominance and environmental engineering.

Large fitness advantage: Electronic computation already has an enormous advantage over biological processing in speed, parallelism, memory, learning, copying, generation, life span, communication, coordination, reproduction, specialization, and collective intelligence. Humans have large fitness advantages in self-repair, self-sufficiency, physical embodiment, embeddedness in the ecosystem, and resource acquisition.

The human advantage is our ability to manufacture and supply the needs of AI. If AI takes control of its supply chain demands, we will lose our leverage. Currently, there are humans who are willing to enable AI to the point of self-sufficiency, and who have enough power and capital that they could make the eventual confrontation between conservatives and accelerationists all the more difficult.

Coexistence is not harmony.

Sometimes fierce competition could encourage cooperation. NATO and the EU are great examples of cooperation facing a dominant competitor. Relationships evolve, drifting between desirable and undesirable, and balance of power sustains truce. Coexistence is more of an armed truce than a beautiful harmony.

Bacteria make antibiotics and bacteriocins; they even go as far as injecting these compounds to kill their neighbors. We can accuse them of chemical warfare. In coexistence between humans and AI, there comes a balance based on mutually assured destruction. We won’t pull the plug and they won’t unleash their bioweapons.

Between two species relying on a limited shared resource, there won’t be an indefinite coexistence. More importantly, because of the intrinsic unpredictability of the future, such competitive exclusions over a shared resource rarely complete. Many disruptions could shift the balance.

Niche partitioning and negative frequency dependence:

Many species coexist through niche partitioning. One can hunt a medium-sized animal, the other a larger one. A certain bacterium can live inside one form of life and die in another, leaving room for another species to reside there.

American AI models feed on the elec…