superintelligence” alternatives, in which machine superintelligences interact with otherwise human-led corporations or nation-states. The four scenarios are as follows:

State/AI: individual nation-states control and ally with multiple machine intelligences.

Corporate/AI: For-profit corporations control the most powerful and rapidly improving AIs.

Self-interested super-AI: AIs act solely in their own interests, rather than being aligned with either humans or hybrid Superintelligences.

Optimistic AI: Machine intelligences are not allied with each other but rather work to further the goals of humanity as a whole.25

These scenarios are not outlandish. Less sophisticated leaders may look at these scenarios and ask questions such as the following: What implications would these scenarios have on your governance agenda? What testing and safety should we insist on before implementing hybrid superintelligence? In what parts of your organization do you most need to invite advanced AI? Essentially, these leaders are considering how they can outcompete others in the various scenarios.

These questions are outdated if used in isolation. Threshold leaders will approach Hillis’s scenarios with greater complexity of mind, by also exploring questions such as: Who really governs our universe? From where does wisdom come? How do we know what constitutes good government?What intuition am I getting from the periphery about governance? What is my gut telling me? How is everything linked? In asking these higher order questions, you are discovering and connecting with what your “macro violin” means for you. Such complex observations are provisional, even speculative. But epochal human breakthrough will not come in well-worn paths. It will come at the edges, where we peer toward the future.

Emergent wisdom is triply open to ethereal clues. For many who believe that the divine is beyond time, the system of our universe is not closed at the beginning of time as we know it. For those who do not believe in the divine, the initial conditions of our universe still carry a fascination and a wonder. In either case, the beginnings of our existence are open in some way. Advancing AI also invites us into a system that is open at the other end, in the sense of being emergent. Our universe may actually be trebly

open: not just open beginnings, not just an open AI future, but also an open-ended process of increasing human maturity. This is a thrilling three-stranded cord.

Threshold leaders will step to a different rhythm and climb a different hill. They work with clues they have received during life. They prize an open view of the universe. They know that AI does not have to outshine humanity. Even if the first Superintelligences are malicious, wise leaders will maximize the chances that Superintelligence turns toward better purposes.

Love and wisdom fuel all four pathways of this book. We do not just offer love and wisdom, we cultivate them in stillness, we attend to them, we embody them, we seek them humbly, playfully, and at ease. In a world where machines score A+ on everything, let us establish love and wisdom as the beating heart.

# THRESHOLD RESOURCE

# RESOURCE FOR ANY LEADER

Resource 22. Three Loving, Wise Transformational Habits of Mind

Purpose

Invite love and wisdom.

Process

This is a five-step reflective exercise that takes about forty-five minutes. Each step starts with the letter A.

Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnson developed the three transformational habits that form the core of this resource. The habits and several other prompts in the “adopt” step of this resource are contained in Garvey Berger’s book Changing on the Job. As Jennifer told me when we discussed them in the context of this book, “If you anchor to these habits, the work you do stands a fair chance of being transformational in some way, because the habits have this quirky advantage of being able to shape what you do in the moment and also being able to grow you over time.”

STEP 1: Adjourn