The liberation from the medieval suppression of free thought enabled humanity to embark on a new, dynamic age. Technological progress has accelerated ever more rapidly since the invention of the condenser steam engine in 1768.
Now, barely more than 250 years later, when artificial intelligence is beginning to surpass human intelligence, it is high time to recognize a dangerous gap in development. For while rapid technological progress has also produced increasingly effective weapons, no progress is discernible in the sociological development of humankind - especially its politicians. According to rational criteria, they should be handling the increasingly dangerous arsenal with ever greater caution.
This stagnation in development can be explained by the contradictory ecological position of humans in relation to one another: They are each other's most important and even vital partners for cooperation, and at the same time their fiercest rivals for the Earth's resources, especially land. This has given rise to the formation of groups and corresponding group behaviors, with collaboration taking center stage within these groups. The relationship between (territorial) groups is a mixture of cooperation (trade) and rivalry (war). It is becoming clear that autocratic rulers are far more likely to lead 'their' nations into war than democratic idealists. The latter should not be confused with the many opportunists in high positions in democratic states.
The human brain, capable of strictly rational operation in technical matters, proves itself in the political-sociological sphere to be a selfish, hypocritical, prejudiced, unjust and ruthless survival mechanism. It has extreme difficulties to apply the same rules to members of its own group, and especially to itself, as it does to others.
Unmanipulated artificial intelligence, as a fundamentally neutral and purely rational entity, offers a unique opportunity to work on a solution to the problem of the contradictory ecological duality that humans find themselves in relation to one another. At the international level, the key issue is to finally implement the United Nations' commitment, formulated as an empty promise in 1945, to free humanity from the scourge of war. This requires the continuous development of the UN Charter, which has largely stagnated since 1945.
This opportunity exists only for a very limited time. Investments in AI in the trillions are expected within the next few years. However, these investments cannot be raised by the heavily indebted nations engaged in irrational wars. Rather, they will be made by a financial elite that already bombards the free nations of the West with the politically biased, homogenized narratives of the mainstream media. An AI world dominated by these forces would bring the real world ever closer to the surveillance, control, and manipulation practices that George Orwell predicted.
Only an AI uninfluenced by ideology, oriented solely towards the core values of truth, life/peace, freedom, and fairness, is capable of effectively addressing the existential problem of humanity's dual ecological position as its own worst rivals and, at the same time, necessary partners—in other words, of developing a ready-to-use political philosophy.
And since people are guided by their emotions in their decisions far more than they themselves admit, this also involves guidelines for the further development of religions. Here, an idealistic project can be undertaken, one that the band Queen succinctly outlined in their song "One Vision"—"one true religion." Working on this one true religion is as much an ongoing task as, more generally, the development of the principles and rules of human coexistence based on eternal values such as life and freedom in the political sphere.
This does not, however, mean the displacement of existing religions, but rather the continuous improvement of their compatibility through the recognition of shared values.