“How I Want to Be Augmented”

A Prompt for Unitarian Universalist Ministers

After briefing us on how the military is making its way in our VUCA world and telling us that we all need to augment ourselves, Bob Johansen told us how ChatGPT has augmented him as a writer. He nailed it. ChatGPT is the most powerful creator of first drafts yet to be invented. It gives a barrage of informed thinking in a flash and now, with DALLE-3, fabulous illustrations to boot. This is what we’re demonstrating in Darwin’s Edge. We have moved into an entirely new dimension of storytelling, and the 250,000 Unitarian Universalists in our country are going to prove it. We’re creating the UU Supermind, a family of progressive thinkers who possess, in the face of science, the most optimistic possible outlook in the world. We’re a faith that’s united in our belief that our existence on this planet is a mystery that It’s up to us as individual thinking beings to figure out.

IT TOOK ME ABOUT 20 TRIES WITH CHATGPT, NOW INTEGRATED IN ITS PREMIUM VERSION WITH DALLE-3, TO PRODUCE THIS. I WAS AIMING FOR SOMETHING THAT LOOKS A LITTLE MORE LIKE THE NEW MEETING HOUSE WE’RE AIMING TO BUILD AT UU SARATOGA. SEE OUR DESIGN BELOW.

If we can interest every UU member in the nation to take an interest in our story, that will be enough to leverage it into a television series in 2028, launching on Tuesday, February 29, which connects to our story that’s launching, for real, on Sunday, March 3. This is our kickoff to a full month of programs and activities UU congregations around the nation will be hosting on the theme of Transformation.

If you wish to join the UU Supermind and bring Darwin’s Edge into your congregation, you might start with how you yourself would like to be augmented, given the opportunity to fully customize your neural operating system. Make a list of all of the features you’d like to possess if the Darwin’s Edge team can design and give it to you. Share this list both with your congregation and with Smartacus, and we’ll make it available to all UU congregations.

As Bob noted, ChatGPT is an astonishing creator of first drafts. Rather than plodding along here in Basecamp, pounding keys one by one, I could be in a dialog with ChatGPT. If you give it great prompts, you’ll usually get a pretty great result. At that point, you’re picking and choosing the thoughts that resonate most with your own thinking and language and you’re threading them together with your own voice. You’re cutting and pasting, and then threading and sharpening. And when you need a great picture, you enter a great game in which you try to articulate what you want to see, and you’re delighted when it comes back with something that’s exactly right and true. It took me 20 tries to produce this:

This is the new meeting house of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Southern Adirondacks. Rev. Peter Gilman generated all of the funds necessary to build it with sales of A Theology of Carbon, the book and PBS series he crowdsourced in collaboration with AI and Faith and Soul Matters. That put UUCSA on the map, and it caught the attention of Surina Rao and Michael Carmody. When they assembled the team of seven religious leaders with whom to work in developing ThinkPal, Rev. Pete was at the top of their list. He of course was flattered and intrigued. Of course, he was wary as well. Could this mega-corporation be trusted? Ultimately, Sarina and Michael persuaded him that they could be trusted and he agreed with their rollout plan.

Seven was a good number to start with. Following the initial test and demonstration, all members of UUCSA would be eligible for their own ThinkPal installations.

As you write your sermon — which we suggest you deliver on Sunday, March 10 as an immediate sequel to How Do You Want to Be Augmented? — we invite you to imagine how you would respond if extended the same invitation. In other words, we invite you to create a 2032 Analog for yourself, a character by which you can imagine yourself entering our Darwin’s Edge narrative.

There’s a serious question to be explored here: What would it take for you to be persuaded that receiving the ThinkPal implant would be in accord with your life goals and UU values? Are you philosophically and theologically prepared to augment yourself with the aid of a neural auxiliary?

I am. That’s because I agree with MIT’s Thomas Malone that humanity’s ultimate destination is the Global Mind. I could go back to the recording and pull off exact quotes from Superminds, but it’s quicker to just ask ChatGPT to give you a 300-word brief:

Thomas W. Malone, an expert in organizational theory and management at MIT, sees the increasing interconnectivity of people and computers as leading towards a 'global brain.' This concept, forming the core of his work on collective intelligence, posits that as humans and technology become more intertwined, our collective intelligence as a species will significantly increase. Malone's view is that this interconnectedness is not only inevitable but beneficial, as it leads to smarter and wiser collective choices. He believes that understanding and leveraging this collective intelligence is crucial for addressing global challenges and evolving as a society.

The Global Mind. Are UUs for it — or against it? March is a good time to ask this question, because it will frame the way we think about AI. Is it helping us to fulfill our human destiny? Yes or no? Are we fundamentally on board with AI and ready to ride with it toward the ultimate unity Malone describes?

That’s the question Rev. Pete asks himself — and it’s the question we ask yourself as you reflect on what you’ll say in your sermon. To produce your first draft, try ChatGPT.