Epitome Anatomy: EXISTENTIALISM
EPISODE SUMMARY:
"It looks like this is a tall order, but we all have to start somewhere by being active, making sure, fighting for humanity."
This episode explores existentialism through the urgent questions artificial intelligence raises: who controls its development, what responsibilities come with such power, and what humanity risks losing if progress continues without accountability. Drawing on her tech experience, Wish reflects on freedom, ethics, digital identity, and the emotional weight of rapid technological change, while making a clear case for a human-first future.
REFERENCES FROM THIS EPISODE:
PLEASE HAVE YOUR ORGANISATION SIGN THE PRO-HUMAN AI DECLARATION
Sign the Change.org petition as an individual supporting The Pro-Human AI Declaration
Listen to the Episode
MAIN TOPICS:
00:00 — AI and the Existential Question
01:52 — Freedom, Responsibility, and Dread
05:42 — Why Everyone Deserves a Say
09:00 — The AI Race and Humanity’s Future
14:31 — Moving from Fear to Action
19:43 — Beyond Slowdowns: Laws, Limits, and Accountability
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Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (00:00.098)
I was very hesitant to pile on the AI topic, but it's been in my face too much every single day. There are existential threats from Silicon Valley being political to rogue AI that will possibly extinguish humanity down to a handful of people deciding the fate of eight billion people on Earth without consent.
I have so many invasive thoughts and still have a passionate desire to steer towards some questions and how to move to a different, better direction with artificial intelligence. I just hope we won't go down too dumb not to fight until the very end. I'll run you through a regular person's thoughts about the current AI situation. No, I'm not an expert.
But I will talk to you as a normal person with a former career in tech and innovation who is now part of the society of walking talking humans going about her life and involuntarily swarmed with all these matters.
Welcome to Human Desaurus Presents Epitome Anatomy. My name is Wish, a retired tech operator, indie author, cat mom, and self-aware life explorer. Epitome Anatomy is an opinion piece on the power of words and their ethos that I extracted from this life. Ready for the epitome of existentialism? Let's go!
Our key word is existentialism. According to Wikipedia, existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explores the human individual struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence. In examining meaning, purpose, and value, existentialist
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (02:18.74)
thought often includes concepts such as existential crises, angst, courage, and freedom. The term existentialism, which in French is legistantialism, was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s. And according to Britannica, the key themes in existentialism include possibility,
Which means the existence is understood as a realm of possibilities from which individual must choose and commit. Then there's freedom and responsibility, which means individuals possess radical freedom to define themselves, which comes from profound responsibility for their choices. And there's angst and dread, which means the awareness of freedom.
possibility and the limitations of existence can lead to feelings of dread and anxiety. And last, being in the world, which means humans are always situated in a concrete historical context that influences their choices. There's more to this philosophy. It's really, really a rich topic, so you can read further in your own time. For now,
We will align existentialism with my thoughts on AI.
So, yes, like what I said, I was reluctant piling on trendy topics such as AI in terms of content and talking to you about certain topics. But here I am once again. I had this discussion with my brother on where I'm gonna take the content because AI headlines have been everywhere this past few days, and it's also
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (04:13.932)
Normally when I absorb news or I absorb topics that I see on media of different sorts, sometimes you know you reflect on it and then you move on. But this one has been on my mind because like what I said the past episode, it kind of pisses me off at one point because of the direction where AI is going. This is all the existentialist threats. The topic is being shoved.
In our throats in such a negative light, in such an alarming way, and rightfully so, because there are a lot of the aspects of AI development right now that we should be concerned about. All this negativity and all of this realm of dread for all of us, there are still good uses of this, it's just a matter of balance.
But we know that balance is quite a commodity right now because there seems to be a lot of imbalance or injustices that's happening out there. I will still be willingfully avoid politicising this issue. Because as a normal human being, yes, there's politics involved all the time. But really, I wanted to come here with just my thoughts. It will be
A good opener for regular people like us to have this other side of the story inside of the conversation that we have the right to express because it affects all of us. So we have to have a say. And this is my say right now: the world will always have different matters in terms of our existential crises.
It always happens in significant cycles. I think one of the biggest ones would have been the risk of nuclear disaster. And it's still upon us that it would still happen. We sort of set it aside because of our access to information, how we access the pace of how we absorb information all the time everywhere. Even when we're sleeping, you can hear beeps from our phones.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (06:40.62)
And there's always something, there's always new information. We can't focus or bank on one thing or the other because there's always a news, there's always an issue, there's always war, there's always there's always something. Are we safe? Are our loved ones safe? Are we gonna live longer? Things like that, or even our health, our personal retributions, all of these, right? It creates this existentialist questions on
How is fate is in our own hands or not? Whether all of these are in all of these different aspects, whether personal or world related or you know, just community-based; again, we have the right to have the thoughts and the feelings and the concerns that we have. And how do we achieve not being overwhelmed about all of these? There are still micro focus also in terms of survival.
Survival meaning you have to eat, you have to have a good sleep, you have to have a good mental well-being, you still want to achieve things in life, you still want to travel, you want to buy a car. Like there are so many things that in our micro selves that we wanted to do as individuals. And then there's this bigger world with bigger concerns that does not just concern us as individual, but
As humanity. This week I'm thinking about humanity altogether. I'm trying not to overwhelm myself. So I try to feed myself with more information. Information that is not about doomscrolling. That's another category that a lot of people would go into doom scroll. What good would that do to you? Ultimately, in terms of existentialism, we have to put ourselves
How much we should care for things, how much we should detach at times to keep ourselves sane. And how much of it can we do on how we can act upon the things that feels far-fetched or beyond us or beyond our control. So let's drill to what led me here talking about AI or talking about this existential crisis. The main topic that led me here is about.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (09:00.898)
How will possibly go extinct in the next 10 years because AI may destroy humanity? My biggest question is why? And I even know the answer to some of this. When you absorb the content, when you watch different content from different media, there are different points of view, there are different experts from the godfather of AI to AI researchers or scientists.
To tech bros themselves. There are lots of different voices about this that's talking about AI and now, like how we need to slow it down and all of these different matters. There are two sides of public opinions about this. One would be this is a ruse, this is not true, everybody's just scaring us because the tech bros needed a reason to
pull out of their IPOs because nobody's really earning money from it. They keep on spending billions of dollars to build data centers. They're not getting any return for all of the costs and AI bubbles gonna pop soon. All of these, sorry I'm piling it on as well. I'm I'm making it all convoluted. It's really more of I'm just talking to you about this very freely. I have some talking points here, but I am allowing myself to go
Gung ho with I would like to lay this out. It may be constructive or not, but this is how real humans have to talk, so be it. So this is the scenario that in 10 years we're gone. That's where my existential crisis is coming from. What does that entail? How will this look like? How brutal would it be?
Be would it be painful for all of us, for all of humanity, and how far-fetched is this? How ridiculous or how realistic is this? So there are so many components to just one statement that's being fed to us. They could all be true. It is a ruse, yes. But also at the same time, it is also possible that AI, when being developed this way.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (11:16.628)
That only a handful of people have decided to keep the pace to where it is, talking about AI race as in it's a game, it's a race. Towards what? Towards the destruction of humanity? Because that's the mindset of most of these commercial AI tech bros, and even some of the scientists, they
Agree that they wanted to build a superintelligence and they wanted this to happen. It's because they accept the scenario that we are subservient to robots, to digital intelligence. Because they accept it. That's where science and ethics clash in my mind. Yes, humans are messy, humans are so imperfect.
Humans could be dumb. Humans sometimes you think that they don't really serve this earth. Humans are doing disservice to animals and whoever goes extinct in this world. Yes, that's part of the beauty of what being human is. If these tech bros think that it's better to hand over to our descendants, which is digital beings.
Digital species. yes, that's that's the term that they're using now. So if they wanted to hand humanity over new species, such as digital species, to keep this world alive, then what? Why do we care about that kind of future? If we're all dead and if billionaires will I don't know, probably they will be cyborgs or whatever if that's even humanly possible. What's the
Fucking point. As an artist, I went towards science and maths in the end because I felt that creativity needs to be injected into maths and sciences, building things for the world, making things happen for humans so that we're building new intelligence so that they could coincide and help us with the menial task. As human race, we're able to
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (13:34.176)
Upskill ourselves and perhaps unlock more parts of our brain to enable ourselves with more skills, with better equilibrium of the world, with better share of resources, with better share of wealth. the wealth will be divided in such a way it's a utopia world of nobody has to suffer, nobody has to be hungry. I don't really
Ask for the world to be perfect because that will be boring too. You know, it would be nice to have some kind of peace or some more positives than negative, or we all excel. We achieve humanity as a success if we're an experiment or whatsoever. A lot of these billionaires or a lot of these people who hold the power, they forget how the
You know, as humans we have to be serving each other here. I think most of us think that way. But everything is so skewed. I don't understand it, but at the same time I do. If you catch my drift. Where am I in this? I think I'm disappointed. I'm just on the well side of it. Or I'm pushing it forward. What can I do as a normal human being? I don't want to feel overwhelmed. I don't want to feel helpless.
I know I could do something with just one of me out of eight billion. Is it somewhat shameful of me not using my capabilities in the tech innovation world by just reading books and and sitting here retired? Yes, what needs to be done? I think all of us would be asking the same questions. It feels like really there's nothing we can do. This is also my question to you. Wha what needs to be done? What do you think?
Can we do moving forward, even though we feel helpless or we feel powerless or we don't have a say in all of this? I cannot really answer this for you altogether. This is not a resolution show. This is a matter of open discussion. I could only speak for myself on what I can do. Right now, I would like to put out some expressions of interest to some researchers, some
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (15:58.594)
People that I could trust or believe in and see what I could contribute in these human-first endeavours for several movements in human-centric AI. As simple as signing the pro-human AI declaration, I would put that into my show note.
So as simple as signing that, there's already now as of this release, there's already 1.1 million signatories for this petition about pro-human AI declaration. Just to read through five different components of this declaration is keeping humans in charge, avoiding concentration of power, protecting the human experience, human agency and liberty.
And responsibility and accountability for AI companies. It looks like this is a tall order, but we all have to start somewhere by being active, making sure fighting for humanity is something that we can do. We can do things in the smallest sense to the biggest ones. I will be contacting a few of these organisations, and you know I was telling all of my friends that I don't ever wanted to go back to tech ever, ever again.
But if I would like to fight for humanity, I am willing to do so. I don't know what that entails really. But I would like to offer my background having been in the industry since early 2000s. So I think there's something for me to do. I have to rediscover that. And now and no, this is not for me rebuilding my career. No, this is not about money for me.
How can I be useful instead of fretting and ranting and just putting it on a podcast about my fears, about my crises, or about my thoughts with this? Yes, this is the first step that I'm speaking about it because I would like to provoke you or evoke you to think about this and what you can do for the human race. Because we cannot just accept what is being shoved in our throats. Everything started
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (18:16.096)
As a good intention for everyone. There's always a risk of building magnificent things in this world as you know history repeats itself. So why aren't some people who's building this fighting for humanity? This is just my evocation. Why are all these dreading news always coming from the US? And it's always USA-centric?
Why does it all just matter to United States and all of us are just very reactive about it? Europe is reactive about it, Asia is reactive about it, and then if you hear China, they're more positive about it, but that's another different story. Where is the rest of the world in this? A lot of us in far-fetched countries did not ask for any of this. All we wanted is to have food on the table.
Have proper shelter, fight climate change, not experience flooding or mitigate natural disasters, and yet here we are. Man-made is about to destroy us. You have a lot to think about. I do. I think of what I could do, what my resolutions are, and hopefully in the future I'm able to share with you what those things are.
So for now I have to figure it out myself as well. Again, not alarming you for anything, but I really wanted you to get involved because this affects all of us. This affects you, your family, your future. One last note. They wanted to slow down the pace of the development of the frontier AIs. No, the genie's out of the bottle. That is bullshit.
It's not about just slowing that down. All we needed is just like during the nuclear arms race is to have declarations, to have laws, to have regulations. Who the hell is in charge? Just a few people? You have to keep an open mind, question things, find different answers, find different points of view.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (20:40.172)
Be happy to be corrected. This has to be an ongoing conversation. And not just a conversation, but realisation and action. So please, one of the things is sign The Pro-Human AI Declaration and also look around, be critical about everything.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (21:05.966)
With my blabber talk, how much do you care or not care about the pace of AI technologies? Is this topic affecting you as much as other pressing events at present? Please do comment. I'd love to hear your opinions. I have a direct message via text or voicemail on top of each of my episode summaries, so do reach out. Until next time, ciao.
Wish Ronquillo Peacocke (21:46.094)
Comment, like, subscribe and share wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also visit humanthesaurus.co. Epitome Anatomy is produced by me and Jeremiah Ronquillo. Music by Ketsa UK. All rights reserved by Wishblizz Media. Thank you, and see you in the next episode.
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