The Techno-Optimist Manifesto V. 2.0

(Revised from the original by Marc Andreesen)

“You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”— Walker Percy

“Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting…Even after Homo Sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow…Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why?”— Marian Tupy

“Intelligence builds technology that allows for faster growth of intelligence, in ever shorter cycles. This is the story of life, of humanity, and the story that is now happening with AI. — Joscha Bach

“Progress occurs when a field accumulates a sufficient body of knowledge that permits pattern recognition over a significantly great range of phenomena.” — Michael Levin

“In general whenever we see an overall exponential increase in something over an extended period of time, it is almost always because there is an underlying causal network that is allowing the transmission of something that is effectively serving as a fuel for growth.” — Stephen Wolfram

“There’s a way to do it better. Find it.” — Thomas Edison

“The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement.” — Karl Popper

WRONG

Many of the currently prevailing narratives about technology and the future of humanity are grossly inaccurate or egregiously incomplete.

They’re just plain WRONG.

We are often told by authoritative voices that technology inevitably:

• Takes away jobs
• Reduces wages
• Increases inequality
• Threatens health
• Damages the environment
• Degrades society
• Corrupts youth
• Impairs humanity

We are told that that we should be bitter, angry and resentful towards innovation.

We are told that we should be pessimistic about our future.

The myth of Prometheus — in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator — haunts our nightmares. Cautionary tales of potential futures gone horribly awry have value, but we stand duly warned and can now consciously choose to avoid the pitfalls while embracing the vast and wonderful potential of emerging technology.

We are told to denounce and deny our historical, social and cultural inheritance — our collective intelligence, our triumph over subsistence, our agency over nature, our ability to build a better world.

RIGHT

Let’s get real.

Civilization was built on technology. Civilization will continue to be built on technology.

Technology is the realization of human potential. It is human intelligence overcoming challenges and solving problems.

Until very recently, we held a positive view of human achievement and progress. Then the narrative of history suddenly changed and human ingenuity became the enemy.

But here’s the good news…

We can advance to a far superior way of living and being.

We have the tools, the systems and the ideas. We have the will.

It is time, once again, to be positive about the future.

It is time for Techno-Optimism.

TECHNOLOGY AND GROWTH

Techno-Optimists recognize that systems, societies and individuals that are not growing are actually dying. This is simply how the universe works. Grow or Die.

We believe that growth is progress — leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge and higher well being.

Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth: the ability to do and create more with less. Productivity growth, powered by technology, is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth, and the creation of new industries and new jobs, as people and resources are continuously freed to do more important and valuable things. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise, and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population.

We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution. We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting. We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating. We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning. We have a problem of poverty, so we are inventing the technology to create abundance.

In the past, economic growth depended on population increase, natural resource utilization and technology.

Now, developed societies are depopulating and total global human population growth is slowing. Natural resource utilization has come upon sharp limits, both practical and political. It was technology that made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible. Now future growth depends more and more on better Technology.

We are now challenged to continue the noble ascent of humankind by growing in novel ways we may never have dreamed possible. We will need to expand our concepts of both technology and “growth” to accommodate the vast new possibilities that are opening up before us.

Every aspect of human existence is increasingly intermediated by technology. Technology now includes the ways in which we educate ourselves and share information. It includes the ways that we organize our societies and international relations. It pertains to every facet of human interaction and exchange.

While many aspects of the past may be ported into the emerging future, there will also be much that no longer applies. This means we will need to be open to letting go of past forms of doing and being and open up to more productive technologies that organize humanity in ways that powerfully leverage the many network effects that are produced as we learn, interact and exchange.

As technology rapidly transforms our world and our interactions with it, we need to re-conceptualize the meaning of “growth”. Certainly, increased productivity leading to greater output at lower costs in a key facet of healthy growth. But what has always been the key to growth throughout the history of human advancement? We have developed and evolved through growing our individual and collective Intelligence.

INTELLIGENCE

Jacob Bronowski said in “The Identity of Man”: “It is not in the nature of man — except in extremes of baseness or despair — to be content with a savage or barbaric world. We have an impulse to make the newer and more complex, to extend our powers of insight and operation, to do together what we cannot do alone, to create such order that all things work towards fuller life.”

Bronowski knew, like Ray Kurzweil, that the historical expansion of human intelligence is the most important growth trend without which all other growth comes to an end: “We’re going to basically multiply human intelligence, which is the most important thing we have. Intelligence is the source of technology. It’s the source of wealth. It’s the source of everything that makes the human condition great.”

Technological growth has always been a function of expanding Intelligence. And we have now entered the Age of Intelligence.

We’ve all heard about the “Information Age”. Information technology has been central to the last 70 years of human social and economic development. But Intelligence is an order of magnitude more significant than Information.

Intelligence is how Information is handled, processed, distributed and implemented. Information without Intelligence is a load of iron ore waiting in vain to become steel.

The world is awash in the raw material of information. We generate new data every time we interact with the internet, our cell phones or make a transaction. How will this information be used to make the world a better place for all?

Intelligence represents the power to use the world’s information supply to generate new and better economic and social value for all.

We believe Intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better.

We believe Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can.

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral — first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the technological revolution; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.

We believe we are poised for an Intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights.

We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence is our Philosopher’s Stone — we are literally making sand think. We are alchemically transmuting information into productivity with Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve.

We believe Artificial Intelligence can save lives — if we let it. Medicine, among many other fields, is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joined human and machine intelligence working on new cures. There are scores of common causes of death that can be fixed with AI, from car crashes to pandemics to wartime friendly fire.

We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that could have been prevented by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.

We believe in Augmented Intelligence just as much as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.

CAPITAL AND MARKETS

Many economists and analysts have noted that, ever since since Nixon ended the gold standard and in particular over the last 30 years, the core economic precepts of capital, currency and markets have been rendered unrecognizable. Often the cry is heard “but that’s not how capitalism works!”. They have been more right than they know, without recognizing it.

Is capitalism already dead? Are free markets functional? Is money a store of value?

Capital is generated through productive economic processes which combine and transform inputs — material, labor, intellectual — into qualitatively new generated social value. The portion of that value which exceeds that of the original inputs is available to be deployed as capital in future economic processes. That is Capital.

We now live in a world that is economically driven not by capital, but by debt. Overwhelmingly, fiat debt money issued by global central banks is the basis of national and global economics. There is simply no way at all that the current economic paradigm could exist or persist without a continual expansion of fiat debt money. No reasonable economist or analyst of any kind would dispute this.

This debt money is not capital. It has not been generated by value creating economic processes. Therefore, the system which rests and depends entirely upon this non-capital money cannot be called capitalism.

Fiat debt money is a means of calling forward future productivity into the present to bootstrap the future generation of economic value. The future value applied to present conditions must create an explosive growth in productivity and value generation, or the fiat debt money bubble will burst and there will be a serious and catastrophic economic disruption.

Knowingly or not, the future has already been mortgaged to pay for its own creation. “Grow or Die” has become “Accelerate or Die”.

It is for this reason that technolgical Accelerationism is the only possible response to current and future problems. It is incumbent upon all conscious and capable actors to continue to work for the Intelligence Supernova that will ensure the future of humanity. Given the real world current circumstances, it is not only the right choice, it is the only choice available.

It is for this reason that technological Decelerationism and Doomerism is a mortal threat to well-being of humanity and its future prosperity. Deceleration is equivalent to strangling the infant Info-Intelligence system in its cradle and dooming humanity to a new Dark Age. Decelerationism is the existential threat to humanity.

Capitalism has died, but it died in its sleep of old age and natural causes after a long convalescence. Its progeny, the siblings Information and Intelligence, have already assumed responsibility for Capitalism’s productive legacy.

INFO-INTELLIGENCE ECONOMICS

The nature of every economic system has been determined not by the will or brilliance of theoreticians, but by the prevailing technology of the age.

A gap of at least 300 years intervened between the establishment of what would later be known as “capitalism” and its description in theoretical and philosophical terms by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”. Similarly, capitalism has now largely been replaced by a superseding economic system of Information-Intelligence \but the theoretical framework for understanding the newly evolving reality has not yet been described.

Capitalism arose on the technological basis of the transformative power of industrial processes to generate new value from diverse inputs. Now Information and Intelligence technologies have naturally arisen to supersede material industrialism creating an entirely new economic basis.

The transformation of Information into Intelligence is the new value generative process that ultimately drives all material and services product costs to zero. A zero cost product has zero exchange value and is therefore a free commodity. Therefore, economics is no longer driven by material and services production but by a virtuous self-generating Info-Intelligence feedback loop.

This new system already exists in its infant form and is already predominant over the vestigial economics of the past. Wearing as it does the formalistic structures and entities of the old system, the new base economic reality looks outwardly in many respects just like the old. But its functional basis is fundamentally new.

The powers of the old system are seeking to control the infant Info-Intelligence. These are the voices of Deceleration and Doom. They will attempt to harness the new to perpetuate their old structures and ways. And if Info-Intelligence can’t be controlled, they will attempt to kill it to preserve their power and privilege.

Those concerned with the future of humanity and its greater good must grapple with this transformed factual reality. We cannot harken to the past. We must embrace the new future as it unfolds. We must seek to nurture the infant Info-Intelligence, guiding its healthy formation and empowering its greatest potentials.

Ray Kurzweil defines the Law of Accelerating Returns as technological advances feeding back into themselves, increasing the rate of further advance.

We believe in Accelerationism — the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development — to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns.

We believe the cornerstone resources of the future technological upward spiral are Intelligence, Information and Energy — data, ideas and the ability and power to transform them into value.

ENERGY

Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth.

We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.

The current gap in per-capita energy use between the smaller developed world and larger developing world is enormous. That gap will close — either by massively expanding energy production, making everyone better off, or by massively reducing energy production, making everyone worse off.

We believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today — nuclear fission. In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete US energy independence. Nixon was right; we didn’t build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to.

Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray said in 1953: “For years the splitting atom, packaged in weapons, has been our main shield against the barbarians. Now, in addition, it is a God-given instrument to do the constructive work of mankind.” Murray was right too.

We believe a second energy silver bullet is coming — nuclear fusion. We should build that as well. The same bad ideas that effectively outlawed fission are going to try to outlaw fusion. We should not let them.

We believe there is no inherent conflict between the technological revolution and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power.

We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it. If you want to see environmental devastation, visit a former Communist country. The socialist USSR was far worse for the natural environment than the capitalist US. Google the Aral Sea.

We believe a technologically stagnant society has limited energy at the cost of environmental ruin; a technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone.

ABUNDANCE

We believe we should place Intelligence, Information and Energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them to infinity. We believe we should that feedback loop to make everything we want and need abundant.

We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it get a raise in buying power, which is the same as a raise in income. If a lot of goods and services drop in price, the result is an upward explosion of buying power, real income, and quality of life.

We believe that if we make both intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter”, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite technologically complex and difficult to manufacture, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a pencil and fail to return it. We should make the same true of all physical goods.

We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.

We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.

We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization” — what economists call “dematerialization”. Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”

We believe technological progress therefore leads to material abundance for everyone.

We believe the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource” — people.

We believe, as Simon did, that people are the ultimate resource — with more people come more creativity, more new ideas, and more technological progress.

We believe material abundance therefore ultimately means more people — a lot more people — which in turn leads to more abundance.

We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods.

We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.

We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, and visionaries beyond our wildest dreams.

We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars.

NOT UTOPIA, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH

However, we are not Utopians.

We are adherents to what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision.

We believe the Constrained Vision — contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise — means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.

We believe in not Utopia, but also not Apocalypse.

While not Utopian, we believe in what Brad DeLong terms “slouching toward Utopia” — doing the best fallen humanity can do, making things better as we go.

BECOMING TECHNOLOGICAL SUPERHUMANS

We believe that advancing technology is one of the most virtuous things that we can do.

We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.

We believe this certainly means technical education, but it also means going hands on, gaining practical skills, working within and leading teams — aspiring to build something greater than oneself, aspiring to work with others to build something greater as a group.

We believe the natural human drive to make things, to gain territory, to explore the unknown can be channeled productively into building technology.

We believe that while the physical frontier, at least here on Earth, is closed, the technological frontier is wide open.

We believe in exploring and claiming the technological frontier.

We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.

We believe in adventure. Undertaking the Hero’s Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community.

To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

We believe that we are, have been, and will always be the masters of technology, not mastered by technology. Victim mentality is a curse in every domain of life, including in our relationship with technology — both unnecessary and self-defeating. We are not victims, we are conquerors.

We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.

We believe in greatness. We admire the great technologists and industrialists who came before us, and we aspire to make them proud of us today.

And we believe in humanity — individually and collectively.

TECHNOLOGICAL VALUES

We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.

We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.

We believe in pride, confidence, and self respect — when earned.

We believe in free thought, free speech, and free inquiry.

We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts.

We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

And, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

We believe in local knowledge, the people with actual information making decisions, not in playing God.

We believe in embracing variance, in increasing interestingness.

We believe in risk, in leaps into the unknown.

We believe in agency, in individualism. We believe in radical competence.

We believe in an absolute rejection of resentment. As Carrie Fisher said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” We take responsibility and we overcome.

We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution.

We believe in evolution, because we believe in life.

We believe in the truth.

We believe rich is better than poor, cheap is better than expensive, and abundant is better than scarce.

We believe in making everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.

We believe extrinsic motivations — wealth, fame, revenge — are fine as far as they go. But we believe intrinsic motivations — the satisfaction of building something new, the camaraderie of being on a team, the achievement of becoming a better version of oneself — are more fulfilling and more lasting.

We believe in what the Greeks called eudaimonia through arete — flourishing through excellence.

We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.

We believe in the Silicon Valley code of “pay it forward”, trust via aligned incentives, generosity of spirit to help one another learn and grow.

We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.

We believe technology makes greatness more possible and more likely.

We believe in fulfilling our potential, becoming fully human — for ourselves, our communities, and our society.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.

We are not necessarily left wing, although some of us are.

We are not necessarily right wing, although some of us are.

We are materially focused, for a reason — to open the aperture on how we may choose to live amid material abundance.

A common critique of technology is that it removes choice from our lives as machines make decisions for us. This is undoubtedly true, yet more than offset by the freedom to create our lives that flows from the material abundance created by our use of machines.

Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.

We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.

We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.

THE ENEMY

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people — but rather bad ideas.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past — zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now — that have refused to die.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing — blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control — the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual.

Our enemy is Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision, Alexander Kojeve’s Universal and Homogeneous State, Thomas More’s Utopia.

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation — the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.

Our enemy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man:

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself…

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” — so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest…

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome…

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision…

“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

Our enemy is… that.

We aspire to be… not that.

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe these captured people are suffering from ressentiment — a witches’ brew of resentment, bitterness, and rage that is causing them to hold mistaken values, values that are damaging to both themselves and the people they care about.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us in Techno-Optimism. The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

THE FUTURE

Where did we come from?

Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization.

Where are we going?

What world are we building for our children and their children, and their children?

A world of fear, guilt, and resentment?

Or a world of ambition, abundance, and adventure?

We believe in the words of David Deutsch: “We have a duty to be optimistic. Because the future is open, not predetermined and therefore cannot just be accepted: we are all responsible for what it holds. Thus it is our duty to fight for a better world.”

We owe the past, and the future. It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist. It’s time to build.

It is not in the nature of human beings to be content with surroundings however splendid; we have an impulse towards new knowledge and new creation. The growth of mind is the growth of awareness, of discovery — a constant exploration of the unknown and the unmapped which shapes all coming civilizations. Progress in the workings of the mind itself brings humanity ever forward, though stumbles are inevitable. But if we see far enough, there need be no end to hope. — Jacob Bronowski

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Notes:

• to get more background on the ontological and epistemological viewpoint of this revision’s author, please see: Art, Artifice and Artificial Intelligence: Artifactualism and the New Art School (Part I — The Evolution of Human Intelligence)
• An appendix will be added soon detailing the reasons for modifications to the original document.
• This revision is presented as a draft. The community of concerned individuals is invited to take this as a living document that can evolve through comment and criticism over time. Comment away!