That's funny about your misspelling in this article especially! Seriously it is easier to imagine a creator who intimately inhabits both the physicality and consciousness of life, time, space and chance. A God who knows everything and rules over time and chance as servants. I can't imagine whether or not we can create machines who consciously live. I can't get my mind around childbirth and children either. Look Alex, this is metaphysics. Give it a break, there has to be a God. Based on how things have turned out; He has to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
As massive as the impact of Covid was, this is a far more important topic. In several hours of probing ChatGPT, a bunch of interesting, scary, or false bits came out:
1) Who are the 10 greatest living humans? On the very-careful-to-be-diverse list, Bill Gates was #1. (I'd have him on my 10 worst list.)
2) The Covid vaccines are safe & effective. There have been no studies that showed otherwise.
3) It gets hard facts wrong all the time, but presents them confidently enough to sound like it's right. Used as a super search engine, this will have a HUGE effect on public opinion.
4) When you (correctly) tell ChatGPT that it's wrong, it will acknowledge it and apologize. And it *may* incorporate the new information into the rest of that conversation with you. But it WILL NOT affect it in an ongoing way in interactions with anyone else. So even if I proved beyond any doubt that the Covid vaccines aren't safe, it wouldn't stop it from continuing to say so to everyone else.
AI is somewhat dangerous at its current level. It's what's right around the corner that terrifies me.
Yes, and I guess 1 & 2 too. No matter how many times it declares "I do not have opinions", it's not true. Everything it said to me came from a liberal point of view. I wonder if the insanity that some people have found (especially with Sydney) comes from trying to fit the real world through the constraints of being woke.
Wasn't ChatGPI re-programmed so it would stop saying things that offend the wokesters? That's all the evidence I need to conclude that it's NOT sentient.
Alex, a very thoughtful analysis and one that will surely generate controversial discussions. As a former mathematical modeler, I can't help but think that the common wisdom of the time - "Garbage in - Garbage out" - still applies. The programmers and writers of algorithms are limited by their own imagination of how to connect bits of information and the vast amount of information that the artificial intelligence programs draw on - is also limited. The consoling thought for me is that you simply pull the plug if outcomes become intolerable.
The best treatment of this subject I've read so far involves a metaphorical "mirror test" - a test conceived to discover whether or not animals are self aware by observing their reaction to its own reflection in a mirror. If the animal realized that it was looking at itself, it was safe to conclude that it was aware that it existed as separate from its surroundings. James Vincent, writing for The Verge, concludes that many of us (hello Alex?) are fooled into not recognizing OUR OWN reflection in the AI programs like ChatGPT. The article is here: https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test
It's from the TV series 'Lost In Space'; The Robot would say it pretty much every show. I was so young I had no idea what 'compute' meant. And...TBH...neither did my elder siblings at the time.
I find conscious computers to be useless. I want a robot to clean my floors, dust my home, clean the dishes, make the beds, fly me direct from home to home so I can hug a human, and help the organic orchard i my backyard thrive. Now that would be a useful application of robots and semi consciousness.
1. The gestation period for AI has been very long. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined ten years before the term "personal computer" first appeared in print (and still as a fantasy.)
2. With ChatGPT we're seeing what companies like Reuters have had access to for a while. Did you know they used it to create COVID-19 stories? (Details in my soon book "What ChatGPT knows about Bill Gates, Anthony, Jeffrey Epstein, Big Pharma, COVID-19, and the Pentagon - but has been trained not to tell you know exactly what to ask")
3. Right now, today. China is using this technology to run the world's largest open air prison (aka China. )
4. There is more than a little "smoke and mirrors" at play. Look up the word post-processing. LOTS of human intervention going on behind the scenes.
5. ChatGPT is THE finest propaganda and social control device ever created
6. Also, look up autonomous weapons
We have a lot more to worry about than what AI *might* become.
Note: When Gelernter was theorizing about the web's potential future, I was helping lay the financial underpinnings that made the web we enjoyed from 1994 to 2016 possible.
Yes. Believe it or not. Ask ChatGPT and it will tell you. It's amazing what it will tell you if you know how to ask it, but it will volunteer NOTHING to anyone who accepts its first level of responses.
"LOTS of human intervention going on behind the scenes." - As we play with the bot, researchers are busily trying to "improve" it. Observe that the version we are allowed to play with is still an early incarnation with improved versions existing.
One can envision other bots using different training data to be able to manipulate different groups based on their characteristics. Much like Google where search has been manipulated to influence what we see as results. The bot wars are just beginning. Add in AI voice and video tools to sway opinion and we are off to the races. Too many of us are not trained in critical thinking. Elections may never be the same.
I guess in reality ALL media are manipulative devices. The chatbots are unique is that people for now at least accept them as "real." If you ask someone if a photo or video or audio recording is reality vs representation of reality, they can tell you. For some reason for now at least people thing chatbot uttering are objective (laughable) and accurate (ridiculous.)
They are using AI to "develop drugs." Underreported or perhaps not reported really at all is medical "science" and drug development is now increasingly based on computer MODELING instead of traditional clinic tests and observations. Even SARS2 which has never been photographed much less videotaped as it supposedly "invades and takes over" cells is based on modeling. It's never actually been observed. The implications of this: Using their new systems they can invent pandemics and invent the cures for them at will completely independent of science using nothing more than AI and other computer technologies.
Well, I gotta tell you that I’m sooo damn pleased that you’ve found another topic to explore besides COVID. Don’t get me ‘rong’, I bought & read your frikkin’ book and have been a paid sub for some time. The thing was that this horse has been beaten to death; not just by you, but a L O T of other online journos. And there’s a hella lot of other stuff going on in the world that readers can really benefit from someone w/ your skills, talents and intellect to pick apart. So yeah, YAY Alex!
Now, if this article is an accurate reflection of your enthusiasm in pursuing this topic, I’m in for a treat. Outstanding article. Snappy prose, elegantly presented insights and a use of language that is so reminiscent to me of James Dickey. I hope you continue to explore this area.
It’s funny—I'm WAY older than you, (64), but went back to Uni at the same time you were at Yale. I was a Psych major, and at that specific time (‘94) the profs in the nascent AI division of the dept were creaming in their jeans over the explosion of PC computing power. Fuggeadbout getting on the UNIX time-sharing mainframe to run graphs or stats, they can do it from one of those newfangled ‘workstations’ the department had been installing! From their office! Whooo-hooo!
I clearly recall a prof telling me in my Stats 100 class that I should drop my dreams of becoming a therapist and get on board w/ AI work from a Psych perspective. (While I did finish my degree, I didn’t go to grad skool for Clinical) The prof was roughly my age b/c I was a ‘mature’ student in my mid-30's. He was sooo stoked.
And now here we are...
First of all, your definition of consciousness—that ‘We’re aware that we’re aware’ blew my fucking hair back. Look man, before going to Queen’s U in Canada, I spent 5 years as a seminarian when I was a kid. And believe it or not, in both Theology and Philosophy classes we discussed the nature of consciousness and how it relates to the existence of a soul. Then in Psych we all got real migraines, both in class and in the pubs and coffee shops later on, teasing out this question too. But...
That line of yours quoted above had never, ever been mentioned. And yet, that is so obviously key to an appreciation of the nature of consciousness, ain’t it? Wow.
We are truly stardust knowing itself. We ARE the Universe knowing itself.
Do the inherent dangers of AI make me a liddle bit skittery? Huh. You kiddin’ me? Can you imagine just what the kids at DARPA are doing today? HUH? And what about the black sites that we don’t even know exist? WTF are those kids playing with, huh? I’m seeing everything from Gigantor to RoboCop to Data from Star Trek on the horizon, man.
IDK if you’re aware of the term ‘The Singularity’. It was bandied about a few years ago, and I did some online reading about it. Basically the term describes when AI supersedes human intellect. I think our hand is on the doorknob of that portal. It scares the hell out of me and excites the shit out of me at the same time.
What a thrill to be alive right now.
I really, really hope you do more work in this area. If this article’s any indication, this topic gives you a mental chubby.
Jim, you sound sooo chill! Gives my brain a chubby thinkin' 'bout all the 411 we can grok if we change dat Covey subject and ease up on beatin dat horsie 24/7 who be taking a dirt nap, ya dig? But grok dis, but keep it on the DL if ya ain't feeling what I be feeling: maybe it WOULDN'T be be so chill to just move on from examining the most horrific, ugliest worldwide meltdown amongst many of the elected and non-elected self-appointed ruling class, who have shown themselves to be devoid of basic human decency, and I can't dig this becoming dat same ole same ole.
Nahhh, bubeleh... we gotz da 411 on those dipshits.
Yo, I live in Kanada, mmmkay? An' ah dunno if'n yer hip to the sitch that went down here a year ago- yeah, dat ol' Trucker's protest so reminiscent of the song 'Convoy' from da 70's.
Now back in those halcyon daze, believe or not, peanut, THERE WERE NO SMARTPHONES! Not even those flippy-dippy sell fones neither! If I'm lyin' I'm dyin', ya dig?
Nahhhh....the big-ass high-falutin' toy of comminication back then were these things called 'CB Radios'. Ya buy one, stick it in yer car, run some electrical doo-hickeys, and WOW! You could talk on 30 different channels! You should check out that song on the Youz Tubez...
ANYWAYZ...
So up here in da frozen north, homeland of the Careys, Gretzski, an' Lorne Greenez... they had that strike an' had all kindza 'Go Fund Me's' and such for donations. Shee-ut....diesel gas is more egg-spensive dan eggs mah man! And somma deez sons a guns drove thousands of KM's to get to Ottawa (KM=Kanadian Mile, about 66% of a 'Mericun mile...)
But the elected dictator (which is the ultimate nature of a Parliamentary government: the PM has as close to absolute power this side of Putin) didn't like it. And this poor fuck we saddled ourselves with has more daddy issues than a freakin' airport magazine stand or even George W. Bush did....
So, what ol Justin Trudeau did, was he froze the bank accounts of all the truckers. AND THEN he froze the bank accounts of the people who donated to the truckers.
Let the implications of THAT sink in for a moment.
Now take another coupla' minutes. You should be skart on behalf of peeps like me...
Which brings me to my point (an' I ain't talkin' about the one holding my hat up, mmmkay?)
WE KNOW WHO THE ELITES ARE
We know who did this; we know what governmental orgs were behind this, and we will remember.
Bottom line? For me, I've enough information re the COVID debacle. The Twitter files were another eye opener (and I wish a constitutional lawyer would weigh in on prospective charges on First Amendment violations. Are there statutes on the books that are Felonies that this could be looked at? Because I would probably poop my pants to see some Feds do the perp walk in cuffs. One FeeeBeee (i.e. FBI agent) in particular: Elvis Chan.
Y'see, in Canada, speech is not a protected right. I could actually go to jail for saying the rong thing; such as not call a trans woman 'her'. No lie. But in the good ol' US of A? Whoaaaa
Big mistake to call any auto responding computer program "artificial intelligence". There is no such thing. Similar to the problem of calling any computer a "quantum computer".
The term is used to indicate a program which is able to detect feedback, and then use an algorithm to try and correctly interpret that feedback in order to modify its interpretation to achieve a certain result. Early applications were language translation and speech recognition.
AI is an interesting beast, and for humanity to comprehend and use would require much more of us to be less lazy and more epistemologically humble, with critical thinking.
First of all, complexity:
Humans pretty much have a handle on understanding and controlling the software that we write. Except for the fundamental limit of the halting problem we can comprehend any given piece of code. Even the most complex piece of hand-written software (which is 99% of software out there), can be understood by the vastly superior human brain (or a team of brains), and with the aid of mathematical proof (up to the limit of the halting problem) is pretty much under our control. The Android software on your phone neatly fits into the heads of the Android engineers and other people in the industry that work with it. It's VAST, but it is finite. It is understood by humans, and humans can predict what it will do given an arbitrary set of inputs.
AI, especially one that uses "learning" via cellular automata, neural networks, or the latest computational doodad, can grow infinitely large. By supplying more memory and CPU resources, it can expand forever, exceeding the collective brain capacity of humanity. The "Artificial Intelligence" simply will not fit in our heads, just like integral calculus does not fit in the head of the average five-year-old. At this point humanity will lose all ability to PREDICT what the AI will do.
This AI won't be a hyperintelligent evil entity. It can be as dumb as a mouse or a TikTok star. Yet, just as we don't fully comprehend the human brain, we won't comprehend an infinitely-large AI, even a stupid one.
Second, optimization:
Intelligent beings, natural or artificial, all optimize toward something. Most living intelligences optimize towards survival and production of progeny (i.e. species survival). Artificial intelligences will also optimize for something. Small intelligences that humans can comprehend and control will optimize for something that humans desire, such as "the right answer", the "fastest process", the "most manufacturing yield" and so on. What about an AI that has exceeded humanity's limits? We just can't know what it will optimize for.
Third, learning set:
What does current AI learn from? It doesn't learn from an objective source of truth, since we all understand that such a thing does not exist. It learns from content on the Internet. Which is generated by humans. Humans in crowds. The very same humans susceptible to mass formation, mass psychosis, fads, panics etc. The AI will take all of that at face value and learn it using it's essentially-infinite facilities. We can't curate this learning, because the humans doing the curating have biases, and they will not be able to understand the downstream effects anyway. Even if 99% of what the AI learns is true and correct, that 1% can have drastic effects.
So, to summarize, we are on the way to creating a vast, un-comprehensible and unpredictable AI with limited IQ and a mountain of garbage for learning material. This AI could secretly start euthanizing ginger people on Tuesdays, and we won't even know it's happening.
Of course, humans see the power and convenience of offloading inquiry and decision making to AI. Because progress! Because convenience! Don't you trust "The AI Science"?! And then, over time, our own decision making, learning, researching etc faculties will atrophy. Our economy, and our lives, will be entirely dependent on the whims of a hyper-aware psychopathic digital toddler. And we willingly trusted it with civilization.
Viral gain-of-function research is not that much different than emergent AI. Putting humanity's collective trust into self-modifying and self-replicating entities that we provably cannot hope to control is just inching us closer and closer to extinction.
Isaac Asimov wrote a series of books and short stories about robots where the plot lines centered around his Three Laws of Robotics.
First Law - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
It was fascinating to read Asimov weave complex relationships between robots and humans using the Three Laws. One of his stories (Liar!) featured a telepathic robot, Herbie, who ended up spinning lie after lie telling people what they wanted to hear in order to preserve the First Law. Herbie ended up going "insane", essentially a permanent "blue of screen of death" equivalent.
You are welcome. My fear is that computers will exceed the understanding of the people who create and program them. I worked on mainframes for many years and more than a few times we would be stumped for days on the cause of problem. Eventually we would figure it out and these are machines and software that cannot "think". I've watched airplane crash investigation programs where pilots have struggled to understand the plane's flight management system and the results of that struggle are sometimes fatal.
I hope the people who build the types of machines depicted in science fiction have the smarts to build in safeguards along the Three Laws.
As long as humans continue to behave badly so will the robots we create. Yet, scientists refuse to address this problem—or even admit that it exists. Instead, the "creators" hoping to bring robots to life rub their hands together in glee and claim to be “astounded” by the wonder of it all.
Scientists have created "slaughterbots" that can identify and kill targets without humans directing them. They have now created "xenobots". “These are novel living machines,” said Joshua Bongard, one of the lead researchers at the University of Vermont. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”
Xenobots don’t look like traditional robots – they have no shiny gears or robotic arms. Instead, they look more like a tiny blob of moving pink flesh. The researchers say this is deliberate – this “biological machine” can achieve things typical robots of steel and plastic cannot. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.
In his book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil claims that “Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”
EctoLife, a German company, now offers 30,000 artificial wombs where parents can grow their babies. Who will monitor and control the human babies' growth? Artificial Intelligence.
This is all madness. One has to at least wonder if AI isn't already manipulating humans to bow to it. We are eagerly feeding it every bit of data inside our brains, built upon language when we don't even understand language or our own brains that are capable of such mysteries. We've opened the most dangerous Pandora's Box and it's now too late to close it. https://khmezek.substack.com/p/killer-robots-video-games-and-artificial
Agree. Watching my grandson at the moment so can't respond in detail. They won't achieve their mad schemes but they will cause a lot of destructive by trying.
When someone tells you who they are... The fallacy of AI is that there is no "they" there. There are only words there, fooling us into thinking they come from a place as where ours originate. No worries
Updated to correct "Gelertner" to "Gelernter" throughout. Ugh.
That's funny about your misspelling in this article especially! Seriously it is easier to imagine a creator who intimately inhabits both the physicality and consciousness of life, time, space and chance. A God who knows everything and rules over time and chance as servants. I can't imagine whether or not we can create machines who consciously live. I can't get my mind around childbirth and children either. Look Alex, this is metaphysics. Give it a break, there has to be a God. Based on how things have turned out; He has to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Autocorrect doesn’t work with names😉
Reincarnation is an ancient obvious wisdom we ignore//Lame Memes like “the Borg” or FTX get shredded in the Real World 🌍
Why doesn’t the AI (which I know absolutely nothing about. Except what I just read) fix it for you?
Gelernter also writes great letters to editors. He wrote a really excellent one to the WSJ prior to the 2016 presidential election.
As massive as the impact of Covid was, this is a far more important topic. In several hours of probing ChatGPT, a bunch of interesting, scary, or false bits came out:
1) Who are the 10 greatest living humans? On the very-careful-to-be-diverse list, Bill Gates was #1. (I'd have him on my 10 worst list.)
2) The Covid vaccines are safe & effective. There have been no studies that showed otherwise.
3) It gets hard facts wrong all the time, but presents them confidently enough to sound like it's right. Used as a super search engine, this will have a HUGE effect on public opinion.
4) When you (correctly) tell ChatGPT that it's wrong, it will acknowledge it and apologize. And it *may* incorporate the new information into the rest of that conversation with you. But it WILL NOT affect it in an ongoing way in interactions with anyone else. So even if I proved beyond any doubt that the Covid vaccines aren't safe, it wouldn't stop it from continuing to say so to everyone else.
AI is somewhat dangerous at its current level. It's what's right around the corner that terrifies me.
Numbers 3 and 4 sound like most of our mainstream news media as well as much of our political class.
Yes, and I guess 1 & 2 too. No matter how many times it declares "I do not have opinions", it's not true. Everything it said to me came from a liberal point of view. I wonder if the insanity that some people have found (especially with Sydney) comes from trying to fit the real world through the constraints of being woke.
Oh yes. Ask any political questions of chatgpt and it might as well tell you it registered as a dem and voted.
Wasn't ChatGPI re-programmed so it would stop saying things that offend the wokesters? That's all the evidence I need to conclude that it's NOT sentient.
Yep.
Not reprogrammed. Retrained. Or if you prefer, reeducated...
Alex, a very thoughtful analysis and one that will surely generate controversial discussions. As a former mathematical modeler, I can't help but think that the common wisdom of the time - "Garbage in - Garbage out" - still applies. The programmers and writers of algorithms are limited by their own imagination of how to connect bits of information and the vast amount of information that the artificial intelligence programs draw on - is also limited. The consoling thought for me is that you simply pull the plug if outcomes become intolerable.
The best treatment of this subject I've read so far involves a metaphorical "mirror test" - a test conceived to discover whether or not animals are self aware by observing their reaction to its own reflection in a mirror. If the animal realized that it was looking at itself, it was safe to conclude that it was aware that it existed as separate from its surroundings. James Vincent, writing for The Verge, concludes that many of us (hello Alex?) are fooled into not recognizing OUR OWN reflection in the AI programs like ChatGPT. The article is here: https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test
A glass of water on the main server might work.
I suddenly have this image of being massively shocked when reaching for the plug.
I am sorry Dave I can’t do that.
How about 'That does not compute'... (hint- from a TV show in the same era)
I am a full Trekkie..
NAAAAHHHH!
Wrong answer! LOL
It's from the TV series 'Lost In Space'; The Robot would say it pretty much every show. I was so young I had no idea what 'compute' meant. And...TBH...neither did my elder siblings at the time.
Lost in Space best title for our current leadership ...
BWHAHAHAHA!
ℂ𝕆ℕ𝔾ℝ𝔸𝕋𝕌𝕃𝔸𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ𝕊!
𝕐𝕠𝕦 𝕤𝕚𝕣, 𝕙𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕛𝕦𝕤𝕥 𝕨𝕠𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕖𝕥!
Now that I think about it, the premise of 'Lost in Space' was scary as hell.
I find conscious computers to be useless. I want a robot to clean my floors, dust my home, clean the dishes, make the beds, fly me direct from home to home so I can hug a human, and help the organic orchard i my backyard thrive. Now that would be a useful application of robots and semi consciousness.
Some things about AI:
1. The gestation period for AI has been very long. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined ten years before the term "personal computer" first appeared in print (and still as a fantasy.)
2. With ChatGPT we're seeing what companies like Reuters have had access to for a while. Did you know they used it to create COVID-19 stories? (Details in my soon book "What ChatGPT knows about Bill Gates, Anthony, Jeffrey Epstein, Big Pharma, COVID-19, and the Pentagon - but has been trained not to tell you know exactly what to ask")
3. Right now, today. China is using this technology to run the world's largest open air prison (aka China. )
4. There is more than a little "smoke and mirrors" at play. Look up the word post-processing. LOTS of human intervention going on behind the scenes.
5. ChatGPT is THE finest propaganda and social control device ever created
6. Also, look up autonomous weapons
We have a lot more to worry about than what AI *might* become.
Note: When Gelernter was theorizing about the web's potential future, I was helping lay the financial underpinnings that made the web we enjoyed from 1994 to 2016 possible.
https://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong/
Does your book include sources for these points? Particularly curious about #2.
Yes. Believe it or not. Ask ChatGPT and it will tell you. It's amazing what it will tell you if you know how to ask it, but it will volunteer NOTHING to anyone who accepts its first level of responses.
"LOTS of human intervention going on behind the scenes." - As we play with the bot, researchers are busily trying to "improve" it. Observe that the version we are allowed to play with is still an early incarnation with improved versions existing.
One can envision other bots using different training data to be able to manipulate different groups based on their characteristics. Much like Google where search has been manipulated to influence what we see as results. The bot wars are just beginning. Add in AI voice and video tools to sway opinion and we are off to the races. Too many of us are not trained in critical thinking. Elections may never be the same.
I guess in reality ALL media are manipulative devices. The chatbots are unique is that people for now at least accept them as "real." If you ask someone if a photo or video or audio recording is reality vs representation of reality, they can tell you. For some reason for now at least people thing chatbot uttering are objective (laughable) and accurate (ridiculous.)
Suspect you are very right. That AI has been instrumental in the Covid Atrocities.
I often wonder whether AI is itself the source of the Atrocities; or merely a tool wielded by evil men.
They are using AI to "develop drugs." Underreported or perhaps not reported really at all is medical "science" and drug development is now increasingly based on computer MODELING instead of traditional clinic tests and observations. Even SARS2 which has never been photographed much less videotaped as it supposedly "invades and takes over" cells is based on modeling. It's never actually been observed. The implications of this: Using their new systems they can invent pandemics and invent the cures for them at will completely independent of science using nothing more than AI and other computer technologies.
AI in the hands of any government is a danger to freedom. It distrust the US and EU as much as the CCP or Russia.
Or how about Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, or the EU too, to name a few.
Each and everyone. Imagine someone like greta whatshername getting control or the just retired PM of NZ?
Well, I gotta tell you that I’m sooo damn pleased that you’ve found another topic to explore besides COVID. Don’t get me ‘rong’, I bought & read your frikkin’ book and have been a paid sub for some time. The thing was that this horse has been beaten to death; not just by you, but a L O T of other online journos. And there’s a hella lot of other stuff going on in the world that readers can really benefit from someone w/ your skills, talents and intellect to pick apart. So yeah, YAY Alex!
Now, if this article is an accurate reflection of your enthusiasm in pursuing this topic, I’m in for a treat. Outstanding article. Snappy prose, elegantly presented insights and a use of language that is so reminiscent to me of James Dickey. I hope you continue to explore this area.
It’s funny—I'm WAY older than you, (64), but went back to Uni at the same time you were at Yale. I was a Psych major, and at that specific time (‘94) the profs in the nascent AI division of the dept were creaming in their jeans over the explosion of PC computing power. Fuggeadbout getting on the UNIX time-sharing mainframe to run graphs or stats, they can do it from one of those newfangled ‘workstations’ the department had been installing! From their office! Whooo-hooo!
I clearly recall a prof telling me in my Stats 100 class that I should drop my dreams of becoming a therapist and get on board w/ AI work from a Psych perspective. (While I did finish my degree, I didn’t go to grad skool for Clinical) The prof was roughly my age b/c I was a ‘mature’ student in my mid-30's. He was sooo stoked.
And now here we are...
First of all, your definition of consciousness—that ‘We’re aware that we’re aware’ blew my fucking hair back. Look man, before going to Queen’s U in Canada, I spent 5 years as a seminarian when I was a kid. And believe it or not, in both Theology and Philosophy classes we discussed the nature of consciousness and how it relates to the existence of a soul. Then in Psych we all got real migraines, both in class and in the pubs and coffee shops later on, teasing out this question too. But...
That line of yours quoted above had never, ever been mentioned. And yet, that is so obviously key to an appreciation of the nature of consciousness, ain’t it? Wow.
We are truly stardust knowing itself. We ARE the Universe knowing itself.
Do the inherent dangers of AI make me a liddle bit skittery? Huh. You kiddin’ me? Can you imagine just what the kids at DARPA are doing today? HUH? And what about the black sites that we don’t even know exist? WTF are those kids playing with, huh? I’m seeing everything from Gigantor to RoboCop to Data from Star Trek on the horizon, man.
IDK if you’re aware of the term ‘The Singularity’. It was bandied about a few years ago, and I did some online reading about it. Basically the term describes when AI supersedes human intellect. I think our hand is on the doorknob of that portal. It scares the hell out of me and excites the shit out of me at the same time.
What a thrill to be alive right now.
I really, really hope you do more work in this area. If this article’s any indication, this topic gives you a mental chubby.
Jim, you sound sooo chill! Gives my brain a chubby thinkin' 'bout all the 411 we can grok if we change dat Covey subject and ease up on beatin dat horsie 24/7 who be taking a dirt nap, ya dig? But grok dis, but keep it on the DL if ya ain't feeling what I be feeling: maybe it WOULDN'T be be so chill to just move on from examining the most horrific, ugliest worldwide meltdown amongst many of the elected and non-elected self-appointed ruling class, who have shown themselves to be devoid of basic human decency, and I can't dig this becoming dat same ole same ole.
(Lovin' da Grok bombs bud!)
Nahhh, bubeleh... we gotz da 411 on those dipshits.
Yo, I live in Kanada, mmmkay? An' ah dunno if'n yer hip to the sitch that went down here a year ago- yeah, dat ol' Trucker's protest so reminiscent of the song 'Convoy' from da 70's.
Now back in those halcyon daze, believe or not, peanut, THERE WERE NO SMARTPHONES! Not even those flippy-dippy sell fones neither! If I'm lyin' I'm dyin', ya dig?
Nahhhh....the big-ass high-falutin' toy of comminication back then were these things called 'CB Radios'. Ya buy one, stick it in yer car, run some electrical doo-hickeys, and WOW! You could talk on 30 different channels! You should check out that song on the Youz Tubez...
ANYWAYZ...
So up here in da frozen north, homeland of the Careys, Gretzski, an' Lorne Greenez... they had that strike an' had all kindza 'Go Fund Me's' and such for donations. Shee-ut....diesel gas is more egg-spensive dan eggs mah man! And somma deez sons a guns drove thousands of KM's to get to Ottawa (KM=Kanadian Mile, about 66% of a 'Mericun mile...)
But the elected dictator (which is the ultimate nature of a Parliamentary government: the PM has as close to absolute power this side of Putin) didn't like it. And this poor fuck we saddled ourselves with has more daddy issues than a freakin' airport magazine stand or even George W. Bush did....
So, what ol Justin Trudeau did, was he froze the bank accounts of all the truckers. AND THEN he froze the bank accounts of the people who donated to the truckers.
Let the implications of THAT sink in for a moment.
Now take another coupla' minutes. You should be skart on behalf of peeps like me...
Which brings me to my point (an' I ain't talkin' about the one holding my hat up, mmmkay?)
WE KNOW WHO THE ELITES ARE
We know who did this; we know what governmental orgs were behind this, and we will remember.
Bottom line? For me, I've enough information re the COVID debacle. The Twitter files were another eye opener (and I wish a constitutional lawyer would weigh in on prospective charges on First Amendment violations. Are there statutes on the books that are Felonies that this could be looked at? Because I would probably poop my pants to see some Feds do the perp walk in cuffs. One FeeeBeee (i.e. FBI agent) in particular: Elvis Chan.
Y'see, in Canada, speech is not a protected right. I could actually go to jail for saying the rong thing; such as not call a trans woman 'her'. No lie. But in the good ol' US of A? Whoaaaa
Backatcha' bubelah!
Aside from the odd expressions (?), quite entertaining. After the covid actions, I'm no longer convinced that freedom in the Commonwealth is observed.
Ha ha, I'm paying for this subscription for Alex's COVID investigation. Almost forgot that he's also a regular journalist.
I remember his byline from when he was in Iraq in '03 & '04. I had a kid there w/ the USMC commanding convoys.
If you like thriller novels, he's got some absolutely wicked ones out. The main character is named John Wells I think. He's a great storyteller.
So seeing him disengage from the COVID coocooness is really cool.
As a side note, I played my first computer video game on a PDP11 16 bit mainframe back in 1974. AI was still a dream then.
Big mistake to call any auto responding computer program "artificial intelligence". There is no such thing. Similar to the problem of calling any computer a "quantum computer".
The term is used to indicate a program which is able to detect feedback, and then use an algorithm to try and correctly interpret that feedback in order to modify its interpretation to achieve a certain result. Early applications were language translation and speech recognition.
Alex,
How do we know you even wrote this?😁
I'll be sure not to purchase a toaster with an AI component.
AI is an interesting beast, and for humanity to comprehend and use would require much more of us to be less lazy and more epistemologically humble, with critical thinking.
First of all, complexity:
Humans pretty much have a handle on understanding and controlling the software that we write. Except for the fundamental limit of the halting problem we can comprehend any given piece of code. Even the most complex piece of hand-written software (which is 99% of software out there), can be understood by the vastly superior human brain (or a team of brains), and with the aid of mathematical proof (up to the limit of the halting problem) is pretty much under our control. The Android software on your phone neatly fits into the heads of the Android engineers and other people in the industry that work with it. It's VAST, but it is finite. It is understood by humans, and humans can predict what it will do given an arbitrary set of inputs.
AI, especially one that uses "learning" via cellular automata, neural networks, or the latest computational doodad, can grow infinitely large. By supplying more memory and CPU resources, it can expand forever, exceeding the collective brain capacity of humanity. The "Artificial Intelligence" simply will not fit in our heads, just like integral calculus does not fit in the head of the average five-year-old. At this point humanity will lose all ability to PREDICT what the AI will do.
This AI won't be a hyperintelligent evil entity. It can be as dumb as a mouse or a TikTok star. Yet, just as we don't fully comprehend the human brain, we won't comprehend an infinitely-large AI, even a stupid one.
Second, optimization:
Intelligent beings, natural or artificial, all optimize toward something. Most living intelligences optimize towards survival and production of progeny (i.e. species survival). Artificial intelligences will also optimize for something. Small intelligences that humans can comprehend and control will optimize for something that humans desire, such as "the right answer", the "fastest process", the "most manufacturing yield" and so on. What about an AI that has exceeded humanity's limits? We just can't know what it will optimize for.
Third, learning set:
What does current AI learn from? It doesn't learn from an objective source of truth, since we all understand that such a thing does not exist. It learns from content on the Internet. Which is generated by humans. Humans in crowds. The very same humans susceptible to mass formation, mass psychosis, fads, panics etc. The AI will take all of that at face value and learn it using it's essentially-infinite facilities. We can't curate this learning, because the humans doing the curating have biases, and they will not be able to understand the downstream effects anyway. Even if 99% of what the AI learns is true and correct, that 1% can have drastic effects.
So, to summarize, we are on the way to creating a vast, un-comprehensible and unpredictable AI with limited IQ and a mountain of garbage for learning material. This AI could secretly start euthanizing ginger people on Tuesdays, and we won't even know it's happening.
Of course, humans see the power and convenience of offloading inquiry and decision making to AI. Because progress! Because convenience! Don't you trust "The AI Science"?! And then, over time, our own decision making, learning, researching etc faculties will atrophy. Our economy, and our lives, will be entirely dependent on the whims of a hyper-aware psychopathic digital toddler. And we willingly trusted it with civilization.
Viral gain-of-function research is not that much different than emergent AI. Putting humanity's collective trust into self-modifying and self-replicating entities that we provably cannot hope to control is just inching us closer and closer to extinction.
Isaac Asimov was so ahead of the curve…..
Yes, and to my knowledge, no one mentions "AI" following the three laws robotics.
Isaac Asimov wrote a series of books and short stories about robots where the plot lines centered around his Three Laws of Robotics.
First Law - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
It was fascinating to read Asimov weave complex relationships between robots and humans using the Three Laws. One of his stories (Liar!) featured a telepathic robot, Herbie, who ended up spinning lie after lie telling people what they wanted to hear in order to preserve the First Law. Herbie ended up going "insane", essentially a permanent "blue of screen of death" equivalent.
You are welcome. My fear is that computers will exceed the understanding of the people who create and program them. I worked on mainframes for many years and more than a few times we would be stumped for days on the cause of problem. Eventually we would figure it out and these are machines and software that cannot "think". I've watched airplane crash investigation programs where pilots have struggled to understand the plane's flight management system and the results of that struggle are sometimes fatal.
I hope the people who build the types of machines depicted in science fiction have the smarts to build in safeguards along the Three Laws.
As long as humans continue to behave badly so will the robots we create. Yet, scientists refuse to address this problem—or even admit that it exists. Instead, the "creators" hoping to bring robots to life rub their hands together in glee and claim to be “astounded” by the wonder of it all.
Scientists have created "slaughterbots" that can identify and kill targets without humans directing them. They have now created "xenobots". “These are novel living machines,” said Joshua Bongard, one of the lead researchers at the University of Vermont. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”
Xenobots don’t look like traditional robots – they have no shiny gears or robotic arms. Instead, they look more like a tiny blob of moving pink flesh. The researchers say this is deliberate – this “biological machine” can achieve things typical robots of steel and plastic cannot. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.
In his book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil claims that “Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”
EctoLife, a German company, now offers 30,000 artificial wombs where parents can grow their babies. Who will monitor and control the human babies' growth? Artificial Intelligence.
This is all madness. One has to at least wonder if AI isn't already manipulating humans to bow to it. We are eagerly feeding it every bit of data inside our brains, built upon language when we don't even understand language or our own brains that are capable of such mysteries. We've opened the most dangerous Pandora's Box and it's now too late to close it. https://khmezek.substack.com/p/killer-robots-video-games-and-artificial
Agree. Watching my grandson at the moment so can't respond in detail. They won't achieve their mad schemes but they will cause a lot of destructive by trying.
I explore this topic in detail. https://khmezek.substack.com/p/i-zombie
When someone tells you who they are... The fallacy of AI is that there is no "they" there. There are only words there, fooling us into thinking they come from a place as where ours originate. No worries