We Need to Figure Out How to Coevolve With AI

The history of humanity is one of coevolution. For eons, we’ve coevolved alongside other species and in that process grown used to being at the top of the hierarchy of intelligence in the animal kingdom. Artificial intelligence, however, resembles the emergence of a new life form and one that is more intelligent than any single human. Although much has been said about the arrival of AI, in particular about its destructive consequences, not enough of the discussion has been dedicated to considering this fundamental question: What does coevolution with AI look like? We believe that we’re on the cusp of an epoch of coexistence and coevolution with AI—and that is more likely than doomsday scenarios of extinction or the loss of control, if and only if we act now.

While the recent U.S. election was a turning point in many ways, it’s easy to ignore how it coincided with a watershed moment for our society: AI is already here, and we’ll likely see the dawn of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, in the next four years or so under the Trump administration. If we fail to build a global consensus around how we want to govern this technology and harness its incredible promise, AI will only polarize us further.

It’s hard to imagine how dramatically our species will change with the advent of a non-human, synthetic, silicon-based super-intelligence.

Think of a child who will grow up with a polymath in their pocket and the whole world’s knowledge at their fingertips—an AI with extraordinary specialized expertise across domains.

Think of a patient living in rural Indonesia who will be able to get personalized health care advice from leading doctors in her own dialect. Or a farmer who can speak to his phone and be assisted in decisions in sowing, irrigation, and other field activities by an AI that knows weather patterns, local soil conditions, and best agriculture practices.

Think of AI replacing human soldiers as the principal combatants fighting a completely new kind of war on redefined battlefields, through cyber attacks, drone fleets, and AI-enabled “guns” firing rounds of photons and electrons—instead of kinetic ammunition—at inhuman speed and with unerring precision.

Think of a world where our closest companions are personal AI agents, where our choices are anticipated without prompting, autonomously researched, and executed, impacting how we innovate, work, shop, eat, travel, learn, organize our economy, and form intimate relationships.

Read More: How the AI Revolution Will Reshape the World

We’ve already seen how digital technologies like social media algorithms and smartphones have molded our thoughts and values and become intellectual prostheses. AI will be the most transformative technology we invent, changing our fundamental lived experience. While large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are powerful in their current iteration, we will soon have models that don’t just talk to us but can also go from text to action, acting in and shaping the material world. And as AI evolves, and we interact with it, humans must evolve too.

First, human psychology and physiology will need to co-evolve with AI and its effects. If we already struggle to restrain our attraction to TikTok and other addictive social media recommendation algorithms today, what we need is not more stimulating ‘experience machines’ that can provide pleasure or keep captive our attention, but instead AI that’s aligned with our values and intentions. This means instilling in AI a special regard for humans and a reorientation in our society toward that which enables human meaning, such as dignity, curiosity, agency, creativity, well-being, rationality, connection, optimism, and morality. This may manifest in activities that push the human to the limit and spur human potential, like sports, creative pursuits, the liberal arts, and ultimately interpreting the discoveries of AI itself. At the same time, we’ll also have to formulate new norms as AI alters our physique, through advances that may one day lead to the curing of all diseases as well as digital immortality. Hints of that have already surfaced with CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and “deathbots” that create a digital approximation of a deceased person.

Second, we may soon have the power to determine the pace and direction of our own species. Will we become more like AI, or will AI become more like us? Might we consider proactively controlling our own evolution through self-engineering to maintain human agency in the age of AI? We’re cautious and put forth this collective dilemma: altering our biology carries ethical and evolutionary risks, but ceding our exploratory powers to AI might lead to us forsaking what makes us human in the first place. Maximizing AI’s potential might lead to passivity or paralysis, but overconstraining the machine will limit our full potential.

Ultimately, if we are unwilling or unable to become more like AI, we must find ways to make AI more like us—while we are still able. For that, we would almost certainly have to rely on AI itself to control AI. For example, as sophisticated AI agents arrive, they’ll learn to work in concert and coordinate among themselves in a more efficient, superhuman way that we’ll be incapable of understanding. The challenge, then, will be reaching a consensus on what essential and globally inclusive human values AI ought to be aligned with, as well as how to train AI on these values—especially on the commonly accepted beliefs and cultural norms that undergird written rules. Any such supervisory AI will have to develop an integrated understanding of the world, trained on not just the internet and historical records, but also an ability to perceive and interpret reality with “groundedness” (that is, a reliable relationship between inputs reflecting human reality and a model’s outputs). Are we ready for a world of AIs that can straddle the digital and physical? Given how fast this technology is developing, in as soon as five years’ time we may no longer have a choice.

Read More: A Roadmap to AI Utopia

Departing us on the eve of great uncertainty, our dear friend and trusted mentor Henry Kissinger spent his final days grappling with AI and how this technology will change humanity. But as the arc of his life demonstrates, he remained to the end a firm believer in the role of human agency in shaping the course of history. His last written word, our book, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, contains his philosophical investigations into coexisting and coevolving with AI—and a request for all to continue the vast project of securing the future of our species. As we navigate this landscape, the balance between opportunity and risk holds real promise, alongside real peril. The future of AI is in our hands for now. What we do next could be our greatest triumph or our gravest mistake.

Eric Schmidt KBE is former Chief Executive and Chairman of Google. Craig Mundie is President of Mundie & Associates. With Henry Kissinger, they are co-authors of Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.

Contact us at letters@time.com.