After two videos about electromagnetism, I thought, yes, for a few years I have occupied myself intensively with the singularity, that means that the development of artificial intelligence proceeds in such a way that at first it develops very slowly, like that, and then suddenly there comes an acceleration and the development grows exponentially. And in the meantime, we are already years further on again and one actually sees this acceleration in a certain sense, yes, but in a certain sense also certainly not. But what I looked at back then, that then led me to write a book with the title Posthumanism.
That was actually intended as a counterweight to the views of transhumanism and posthumanism, which are connected with artificial intelligence. And I dared to form conceptions that are such that one does not choose the path of ever further materialization for the human being, but that one proceeds from the assumption that there is also a possibility of coming to an ever further spiritualization. And that then became this book and it is, in a certain sense, a prophecy, one could say, only one that is not based on visions, but that is based on something quite different.
And that is what I would like to discuss today, Rudolf Steiner has clearly indicated that he has given more or less prophetic views concerning the development of the Earth and also afterwards. And he then says, one must actually imagine it in such a way that there are certain laws which, if one knows them, can lead to one’s being able to look into the future as well, how these laws will continue to develop. These are therefore not visions, this is not science fiction or something like that, not that either, but this is a lawfulness carried further.
Just as there is the law that in the evening the sun sets and in the morning it rises again and one can trust, if no catastrophes occur, that tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and next week and so on this will always be so again, so one can also know certain laws from the past and from there form conceptions, form imaginations, interwoven with inspirations and intuitions, which have to do with the future. And that is actually a completely new kind of prophecy, that is not what Nostradamus gave, for example, one must not see it that way. It is truly a spiritual-scientific extension of the present.
Now I do not want to say that I am capable of that, but we human beings have a possibility, on the basis of certain knowledge, of nevertheless also imagining something about the future. Thus, in the short term, we naturally also have the weather forecast, we all actually trust in that more or less, it does not go so far, perhaps two weeks or something like that, but one can nevertheless see, will the weather really be bad next week or not, and so on. That does not always hold true, of course, if next week there are three drops from a grey cloud and then next week comes and there is only one drop from a not so grey cloud with a sun behind it, yes, then of course we do not say that it is completely wrong, there is indeed a depression there, but not as bad as was expected.
That is something we accept without further question, that there is a possibility of predicting the weather more or less, on the basis of meteorological science, and so I dared, on the basis of communications by Rudolf Steiner, to shape for myself imaginations, pictures, which give a certain foresight into that which the human being can become if a spiritual direction is chosen. And it then becomes clear that, on the one hand, the material direction will become stronger and stronger, that we cannot expect that this development towards transhumanism and ultimately also posthumanism with artificial intelligence, that this will not become reality,
it will certainly develop further, perhaps not as totally as one hopes, but certainly that will go far, but alongside it there is a possibility that there will be human beings who develop in such a way that ultimately they can live on Earth without still needing the material body of flesh and blood. And these are, of course, one can easily dismiss these as fantastic conceptions or say, that is madness, but one can also dismiss the conceptions of artificial intelligence, which will produce truly robot-like, superintelligent human beings, as fantastic and nonsense.
But we can nevertheless imagine, on the basis of spiritual-scientific facts, that the physical body will always, how shall I put it, become more and more worn out, and that the possibility for a human spirit to live in these human bodies that are becoming harder and harder, that this possibility will be there less and less. And thus Rudolf Steiner describes that at the end of the sixth millennium, that will still take some time, that then the human bodies will have developed in such a way that women can no longer be fertile. Yes, then one either needs technical aids in order nevertheless to make reproduction physically possible, or it will also be possible to live on Earth, but no longer to need the physical body.
For me, that was an incredibly comforting conception, that alongside this threat, for that is how I feel it at least, that alongside this threat of technical transhumanism and posthumanism, there is also a spiritual development, which could also be called transhumanism and posthumanism, but which proceeds from the assumption that the spiritual development of the human being will be such that he can indeed live on Earth, but will no longer need the physical body. Then he will walk around among the other human beings and they will not become aware of that, but there will then be a community of spiritually living human beings who are active together on Earth and who will, of course, indeed have the possibility of intervening right into material existence, but who will no longer need this heaviness and hardness of the physical bodies. In this book I have tried to describe a gradual development, how one must then imagine that this, from now, when of course we still quite certainly need the physical body, how this can develop from now towards then, the end of the sixth millennium, when we no longer need it.
What intermediate stages must we imagine in this. I wanted to bring that forward once again today. It is already a number of years ago that I wrote the book, but I still think and believe that it is incredibly important for us, living in our time of the development of artificial intelligence, that we also have another view alongside it, with the certainty that this too will happen in this way.
That which one hopes for from technical trans- and posthumanism. I do not believe that it will go as far as one hopes, but it will certainly go far. And we need, in advance, views about, shall I call it an alternative, that things can also go differently.
And that we as human beings have also been given a possibility of supporting this other possibility, of being active in it, of helping ourselves for our descendants, so that they do not need to harden and become more and more technical, but that there is also a possibility that we as humanity become ever gentler, ever more full of feeling, ever wiser, ever more loving. That is what I so much wanted to say today. And I must add that I do not write down my little lectures.
The writing down comes only afterwards, as a transcript. But I do not already have that on paper beforehand and speak free.
