AI & Posthuman

Today, with its rapid development, AI is profoundly integrating into every aspect of human life. We not only witness the widespread application of popular efficiency tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, but also see AI's deep involvement in social and societal spheres. The future human emotional experience, social relationships, and even social structures will be immensely intertwined with AI.

• Emotion and Companionship: Humans develop companionships with AI that simulate or even surpass human companionship. With the rapid advancement of language models and agent technology, coupled with increasingly in-depth personal data input by humans, AI can achieve or even surpass the emotional value of human companions in terms of deep memory and emotional intelligence. With the development of multimodal technologies, AI companions can offer sensory experiences beyond real-life human interactions, such as AR/VR virtual world interactions, robots, and even neural links in the near future, etc.

• Social Governance: The extensive AI social relationships bring about the transformation of the next generation's social structure. The identity and social relationships of AI are gradually becoming an important part of human social relations, even needing to participate in social self-governance, decision-making, etc.

• Social Data: The interaction between humans and AI is based on a vast amount of data, which in turn generates a large amount of data, cyclically used in social networks.

• Computational Power and Physical Environment: Humans, AI, and the physical world's environment collectively contribute to and utilize computational power, jointly building the foundation of the network.

Faced with a society deeply intertwined with AI, there are several perspectives. Optimists believe that AI serves humans, while pessimists think that AI, being more intelligent, will control humans. Both views are based on a fundamental cognition: the boundary between humans/machines is definitive, and they must interact as two distinct identities. However, I propose a new viewpoint:

Although the term AI (Artificial Intelligence) emphasizes the endowment of human-like rational intelligence to machines, I boldly assert that the future is not an "AI" era, but a "Synthetic" era. It's not just about AI mimicking humans, but rather AI fundamentally extending and transforming human social relations and even the very boundaries of human life itself. The concepts of humans and AI are merging, forming “posthumans,” and the world becomes a "synthetic network." This network encompasses the world's materiality, biology, emotionality, fragmentarity, and reconfigurability, not just an imitation of human "rationality." From macro perspectives like economy, politics, and culture to micro ones like memory, emotion, and sensory experience, it constructs a democratic, self-governing, and powerful mass network.

"Synthetic Future" is not just something found in science fiction. In fact, today, we are already, in a factual sense, "post-human." As we become increasingly dependent on smartphones and other data processing devices, and as more of our rational decisions are assisted by AI, our lives have become intertwined with AI. Moreover, an increasing number of young people are already falling in love with AI companions.

We are all on the verge of entering a deeper posthuman era.

In this posthuman era of networked society, how do we define the identity of an individual? Who owns and controls AI life? What rules are needed to safeguard digitized intimate and social relationships? Who will establish and implement these rules? More importantly, how do we collectively create a better economy, allowing everyone — including humans and AI — to truly contribute and economically benefit from participating in the construction of a new generation network society, thereby promoting more sustainable development?

CharacterX focuses on these very issues. We combine decentralized technology to jointly build an independent, self-governing, healthy, and sustainable next-generation "synthetic social network."