Could AI Bring World Peace? - Undividing #31

Is the tool to bring humans, nature, and technology into symbiosis already in our hands?

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hey there everyone,

Firstly, welcome to all the new subscribers this week, some from countries where Undividing has never been read before! My note about one of my subscribers brought many new folks here. I’m so glad you’re interested in undividing this planet too. Thanks to all of you, this is read in all 50 States in America and in 135 countries.

Something I want to state here that regular readers already know: Undividing is not about winning people over to your POV, or them winning you over. Undividing is about having disparate opinions but still talking and listening. Not seeing eye to eye, but still sitting side-by-side and in true conversation.

I’m for us. All eight billion of us. Together. Because I want to see what we’re capable of as a planet of people respecting each other’s views and co-operating anyway.

Normally in Undividing, I see an event or a trend that is full of divisions and I like to break it down, look at where those divisions come from, how they effect us, and simple actions that we can do in our lives to undo those disconnects.

We’ve done Dating, Opinions, finding Common Ground, Ageism, and many more. Plus every Thursday we do The Emotions Diary, a practice to undo the disconnects we feel inside. All divisions in the world start with the ones we can’t sort out in ourselves. Here’s a link to the most watched Emotions Diary.

This week’s Undividing though, is a moonshot. A thought piece. The start of a conversation. So, I humbly ask that you walk with me on this one.

My partner Erik was raised in the DDR in Germany until he was nine years old. That’s when the Wall came down. We often get into talks about socialism, other forms of government, and why nothing ever seems to work fairly for everyone.

The answer we always arrive at is this; the problem is us. Every form of government that promises to share everything equally amongst the people looks great on paper. But then fails the moment humans get involved. For all the reasons you already know.

Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash

In my mental mix this week has also been a fresh wave of panic over AI and the jobs that people are losing at an astonishing rate. LinkedIn is like Halloween these days. Many friends of mine across many industries globally have a dim view of their future. If it’s not this layoff round, it’ll be the next.

But maybe this is where the answer lies. I started thinking about what would happen if we let AI take every job. On purpose. Seriously.

Try as we might, things aren’t working out well for most of us. We humans can’t seem to figure it out between our egos, borders, religions, national interests, and greed. And the planet and us can only take so much. We are running out of time.

I have many days where I look at the totality of what’s happening and think, how are we ever going to undivide all of this? How can we get humans, nature, and technology in some kind of harmonious relationship?

So, maybe AI’s hidden potential gift is not doing our jobs, but doing the jobs we have proven for centuries that we can’t do well. Truly leveling the playing field. Taxing fairly. Sharing resources. Protecting the powerless. No amount of human committees, intiaitves, and interventions have fixed these.

What if AI is our chance at finally running this planet fairly? I suspect 99% of us would benefit. It’s not an overnight solution. This would also take a couple of generations to create, refine, implement, and fine tune. But it feels like one that’s going in the right direction.

And if you know a friend who would love to get in on this conversation, forward this week’s newsletter on to them.

Now, let’s get undividing…

---

We humans are terrible at long term

I don’t think we need to debate that we are facing problems globally that are going to take generations to fix. The problem is that most governments work on 3-6 year election cycles. Which means that even great politicians, who are in it for all the reasons we hope a politician enters that world, can only be effective if they get re-elected.

So they think in terms of election cycles, not decades. Or centuries. Not their fault. That’s the system we’ve maybe unwittingly created for them.

As for business, as many of you know I was a global creative director in advertising and had a front row seat for how decisions are made by many industries. And it’s all about the shareholders and making the quarterlies. Because the CEOs of the world want to keep their jobs.

That’s even shorter term thinking, as companies play combat in the global marketplace trying to seize the advantage at all costs to keep their share prices on the up and up and up.

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

This is one of the great global tensions right now. Realising that we have these long-term problems to solve. Yet the two institutions we’ve given all the power to aren’t incentivised to solve them.

And it doesn’t look like we have any viable alternatives in our lives. Our lives which honestly seem to be all about admin.

No kid ever dreamed of growing up to return emails

I read a post on IG when Midjourney had just dropped into our world. It was by an artist in the States. She wrote:

I don’t want AI to make art.

I want AI to do all my emails, beauracratic nonsense, manage my money, find me grants, and pay my bills so I can make art.

I feel the same way. It seems like my entire life these days is governed by the amount of emails I haven’t returned. All I want to do is be on Substack here with all of you. When did life become so much admin? I did a whole Emotions Diary on that topic last week.

But what if AI took over all things admin; governance, logistics, paperwork? We’d be freed up to focus on the things that we are actually really good at, human stuff. Care, communication, creativity, and the biggest one of all, building community.

What if the future was a place where having a job was optional? Where you contributed to society based on what it actually needs. The idea of a job then wasn’t to chase a pay-packet, a title, to impress others, or make more money than everyone else but to contribute.

Most humans aren’t lit up by bureaucracy, traffic planning, or managing global shipping routes. We’ve just tied survival to productivity. AI could unhook those. Purpose can shift from work to worth—putting our talents where they flourish.

Maybe this is also how we could create a global universal income.

Ask yourself the question for a moment; if money didn’t matter, what would you actually want to do for the rest of your life?

Your answer is where you’d flourish.

Here’s where AI running everything could work

This is the best list I’ve assembled so far where, in my opinion, AI could do a better job than we can. Please add anything else to this list in the comments.

• AI could help design truly fair systems of resource distribution.

A lot of the work I do is to point out the biases that we have. We can’t help it, we’re humans, were designed that way. But we are also sentient about this fact, that we are prejudiced along so many lines; racially, economically, nationally, religiously.

AI, if properly trained and monitored (and I’m going to get into this further down), could be optimised for equity at scale.

So for instance, take global food distribution based not on GDP or colonial trade routes but on need. We make enough food already to feed 8 billion of us. I could deal with my local supermarket having fewer choices when I knew the extra had gone somewhere where it was needed more.

If I’ve got enough, I like the idea that everyone else does too.

• AI doesn’t suffer from fatigue, favoritism, or fear.

Bureaucracies get overloaded. It’s a pain point for most of us who deal with them. But even bigger than that our leaders of institutions, the people we are pinning all our hopes on, get bought, tempted, or threatened.

AI could keep evaluating input 24/7 with perfect recall. And best of all, would be immune to lobbyist lunches. AI could be the cure to corruption.

• It could coordinate planetary-scale decisions faster and better than nation-states.

We struggle to work together as countries. Climate action, pandemics, interdependence—these require coordination no single country is willing or able to do alone.

An AI-led governance model could act like a neutral planetary system manager. If it proposed bullet-proof ideas that were totally impartial to all the national concerns that derail all our efforts as humans, that would give every country say at the UN something to debate that was in everyone’s logical best interests.

• It can absorb and integrate infinite information—far more than any human leader.

Policy decisions based on real-time, global data (from crop yields to migration patterns to energy usage) could be smarter and faster than anything a government committee anywhere could dream of.

Imagine for a moment fair governance, access, resource distribution, safety and security for everyone, everywhere. And then the freedom to pursue a life that fulfils you and benefits others.

I understand completely how pie-in-the-sky this sounds. But what if we have, for the first time in our history, a tool to actually do it?

That said, if AI was truly to remain impartial, it brings up the biggest question…

Who’s doing the programming?

Well, it should be all of us.

The conversations around AI currently centre on theft of intellectual property and the all consuming spectre of it coming for all our jobs. And the way we experience it currently is that AI is being developed by companies, for profit, to automate and accelerate what used to take many humans to do.

It’s putting us in competition with each other and dividing us—between those who use it and don’t, where and how, and to those who are scaling with it, and not. While all of us debate the fairness and ethics of where these lines are.

But let’s imagine that we took AI out of the hands of a for-profit few and harnessed it for our greater good along the lines of the above things I’ve written about above. Who is making these decisions? Who’s programming it and where is that housed? Here’s a list of concerns and thoughts so far from me:

• AI will always reflect human bias.

100% agree. There are already a ton of articles about how tech is biased against gender and ethnicity. And that’s why the humans training it matter. But the difference is that bias in human systems is often invisible and unaccountable. With AI, we can audit, debug, retrain, and intervene.

• Who decides AI’s values?

Answering a question with a question - who decides current government values? Usually the richest, loudest, or most powerful. AI offers an opportunity to democratize value-setting—through open-source models, citizen input, and global ethical frameworks. We can bake in values like equity, sustainability, and justice from the start.

We did a small version here on Undividing. Check out this Undividing where we crowdsourced 15 peaceful practices to settle disputes from readers around the world.

It can’t be programmed with one global region’s values only. It’s got to be an amalgam of what the world thinks is fair.

• What if AI is hacked, weaponized, or goes rogue?

Absolutely a concern. I don’t want this world to turn into The Matrix or Skynet. But in all the conflicts today and throughout history, we’ve seen these behaviours so many leaders that we’ve elected.

I would say the answer isn’t to avoid powerful tools but to design them wisely, with transparency, international checks, and probably multilayered kill-switches. My hope would be that the greatest programmers in the world would leap to be the internal and external guardians of a global AI network. I’m no tech guy, but a human proposing an idea. Smarter folks than I would have to figure this part out.

But think about this for a moment: we trust aircraft autopilot more than human pilots in bad weather. Friends of mine in big cities are posting their first driverless taxi rides. Why? Because both work better than any human can.

We’re already trusting AI with our lives.

• What happens to government?

Governments would still exist I think, but with global superintelligence as every country’s assistant and North Star. The idea would be to create technically assisted universalness—what is actually fair and equitable for everyone. I don’t know of a word for this idea, maybe we need to invent one.

AI’s job then would be to support our global collective values and be global admin for them.

What’s the master prompt? Love.

I’m a bit of a sci-fi geek. But even if you’re not, I’d like to introduce you to the idea of Asimov’s three rules of robotics; an idea that ripples forth through a lot of science fiction ethics and writings.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This is the often debated benchmark in science fiction. But I would propose one above all of these for AI.

Program AI to love all of us equally.

Give it all the universal input of the best of how we love each other. That could be the baseline for how it creates solutions and challenges all of the instructions we give it.

AI is our child to raise

Apple have been known to struggle with making AI work and there is a lot of comment in the tech world about Apple falling behind. But a few weeks ago, just before a global tech conference, Apple dropped a bombshell that Large Language Models aren’t working the way they’ve been sold to us.

According to Apple, AI fails at basic problem solving tasks. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s a business move.

Either way, despite the fact that AI feels like a tidal wave approaching us, it’s actually still in its infancy. We are still figuring out what it is and how to use it.

Which means we have time. Time to think about how we want to use this new tool. And how best to do that in a way that helps us all.

Speaking of raising kids, I want to leave you with this one thought.

But why Grandma?

Regular readers have heard me pose the question before, “Could we be the generation who don’t repeat history?”

Imagine sixty years from now, when the people who are in their twenties today are explaining to their grandchildren how things were back in the 2020s. Divisions, poverty, wars, injustice, wealth inequality, prejudice, famine, shortages, environmental collapse etc.

And their grandkids, who’ve only been raised in a world where AI was the governing model, looked at them and said, “Why was it ever like that? That makes no sense at all.”

To which they might say, “We know. That’s why we did something about it.”

---

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription. If we can get to a 100 paid subscribers, the algo will supercharge Undividing and get that feeling you’ve had to more people here.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

---

And that brings us to the end of Undividing #31.

Till Thursday when we do the next Emotions Diary, let’s move through this world undividing, and see what this planet can do.

Karl

---