Artificial Intelligence and the Global Civil Society

k.kovacs Radio evolve

Thomas Steininger talks with Nicanor Perlas

Nicanor Perlas powerfully paints the dramatic dilemma facing humanity today: we stand torn by, on the one hand, the advancement of an Artificial Intelligence that will surpass our collective human intelligence in the next twenty to forty years and, on the other, our individual and collective inner, albeit mostly unconscious, knowing of Spirit within and around us. Perlas is deeply alarmed by the rapid transformation of the basic principles behind our open, pluralistic society–such as autonomy and privacy–by the overwhelming power of the commercial digitalization of everything.

Nicanor Perlas is a Filipino social activist who ran for president of his country; he’s also an author and publisher. Since the late 1990s, Perlas’s focus has been on social movements and their power to change the world by educating those of us in civil society about the effects of corporate globalization. Now, in the emerging era of artificial intelligence, Perlas has been exploring how a spiritually conscious, global civil society could be the answer to protect and develop the human spirit in the age of the machine.

This week on Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Nicanor Perlas about the human spirit, artificial intelligence, and how civil society needs to become both global and conscious.