Mar 30, 2023·edited Mar 30, 2023Liked by Tree of Woe
Too optimistic, not enough Woe!
As someone who was a low level grunt working on Neural networks with several others, I can say with confidence that this stuff is “shiny sexy scientific secular utopia”-porn for the materialist types.
How so? Put simply- most of these entities are just great recursive mirrors that are just higher level “Narcissus is enamoured by his reflection”-boxtraps. It is actually a very sinister thing if you pause and think about it.
The pursuit of them by whole societies and civilizations would be akin to (say) how an individual mindlessly scrolls through social media for hours on end, using up what little time, energy and attention (the only true non-Renewable resources we possess) on fiction about “who he is and what people are like”. It corrupts without end.
The end result is thus far worse than “cold machines replacing a unique soulful humanity”. Rather, what you really get is said soulful humanity rejecting its innate disposition towards matters of the heart and spirit and trapping themselves in said boxtrap; which ultimately generates the posthuman hellhole of “toss out all value and pursue mere pains and pleasures”.
The false “AI god” will never come to be. We however will falsely think that he has arrived and will ritually cannibalize, necrophilize, etc to satiate his alleged whims. Think ritually sacrificing to Baal v2.0 except burnt offerings on the altar to clay and stone idols… that’s too “primitive”. Us modern posthumans will outperform every facet of that vile brutality.
I am most definitely in the lower right of your plane. I personally think this life is the Creator letting free willed agents choose whether to be worthy of higher duties. I will be writing on this in depth
in the future.
If AI is programmable, we have the problem of conflicting commands. Jack Williamson explored this in his Humanoids stories. The movie version of "I, Robot" owes more to Jack Williamson than it does to Isaac Asimov.
If AI is conscious, then creating AI is Slavery Version 2. Don't do that!
On the other hand, my experience with modern AI is that we are just doing curve fitting, albeit in a really high dimensional space. Curve fitting can be adequate for interpolating, but can blow up spectacularly for extrapolation. (My last day job involved working with Tensor Flow and other AI algorithms. including some I developed.)
On the gripping hand, fuzzy logic holds the promise of human programmed [pseudo] AI which doesn't go into a smoke producing loop like in an old Star Trek episode. But you still need the opaque
curve fitting stuff to turn data into concepts which can be subjected to fuzzy logic.
----
I side with the original writers of Star Trek as well as Niven and Pournelle when they wrote "The Mote in God's Eye". Too much automation is bad for humanity. Indeed, this is a problem with pure capitalism, a problem which the young Marx appreciated: disconnecting humans from their needs
produces alienation. Too much specialization, or too much automation, is bad. Better to do some meaningful work. (The Unabomber
manifesto is also worth reading in this regard.)
I have been writing computer code for over four decades. The initial thrill and challenge of computers was that they did *exactly what you told them to do". I utterly despise "smart" phones. I smashed one with large blunt objects as a stress relieving just the other week. I hated Wolfram Alpha upon first exposure . I am still clinging to Windows 7. I drive a quarter century old car because its computer is dumb. I cling to an older TV because it is not "smart."
The prospect of a neurolink with computers is terrifying to me. Yes, it could be a boon for quadriplegics, but it could be the ultimate torture device as well. (A young Jack Vance wrote on this.)
Computers aren't going away. So I am frantically working on evil-robot free computing. This means manual controls that are simple enough for the average human who is willing to put in some overhead. Our current manual controls are poorly designed. The QWERTY keyboard is a screaming example. These make evil robots, voice activation, and neuro links look tempting. Fix some legacy
bad design decisions and maybe we can convince humans to stay in charge.
I wonder, if any of these people who (say) they believe that, 'Mind' is only a by-product of, 'Brain', have children, how they explain this to their kids. "Well, offspring, because of Evolution, my programming dictates that I procreate. You are a chemical result of my chemical reactions. I must perform what appear to be loving actions to preserve my genome. Now, One story then time for bed."
People SAY all kinds of stupid shit that they only think that they believe.
If we *could* create 'A.I.' in the general sense, I am reasonably sure it has already happened. Just not publicly. In 2012 I took a course with a History Professor who specialized in the Dark Underbelly of U.S. History. He claimed to have a contact who was a retired NSA Agent, who worked from the late 1950's through the 1980's. This man said that in 1965, the NSA already had desk-sized computers with a clock speed of 650Mhz. Given that, publicly, the first 'Supercomputer' was built in 1969 & only had a speed of 36.4Mhz, that's nearly 20x the speed, 4 years earlier. We Schlubs didn't get that fast until 1999 & Intel's Pentium III CPU. So on a rough estimate, the Black World is using computers we wouldn't have until 2058.
In the, 'Art Imitating Life', vein, I would not be surprised that the 1966 Sci-Fi book, "Colossus", about a Scientist who creates a massive computer system in the 1990's that becomes intelligent, is essentially, a fictionalized account of something that has already been done. If so, then the primary purpose of the Internet (and all public A.I. systems) is for data collection and processing of human beings. They are the 'Eyes and Ears' of that Overlord system that already exists. We are like the American Indians, given shiny beads (smartphones) by the Europeans in exchange for Land, when the Tribes dealt with had no conception of Land Ownership. We have been given something of very dubious value in trade for something we didn't even know *Could* be traded.
However, "Deceiving and Being Deceived', the situation isn't what the Elites believe it to be. Mankind will never be able to create life, digital or otherwise. In a pre-computer Era, C.S. Lewis nailed it with the 3rd volume of his Space Trilogy, "That Hideous Strength" (1945). Where an elite group of scientists, philosophers & religious leaders believe that they have brought the Head of a Genius back to life & this Reanimated Person now rules over them.
But (Spoilers!) they are being lied to & the 'Head' is being controlled by Fallen Angels. Perhaps we will, or already have, created a machine that appears to us to be Sentient and a New Order of Life. It is, as with most things in this 'Schoolhouse Rock' version of reality we live in, a complete and total lie.
Meh. Or maybe I'm just Overmedicated. Perhaps Undermedicated, that would be more fun.
Well done piece...got me to subscribe. (Yes, we saw your subscription note, since you asked us to mention it in the comments.)
As a long time researcher in this space, we are a long, long ways away from real artificial intelligence...we have not yet really achieved artificial stupidity. These are more elegant parlor tricks than Eliza had half a century ago...but still the same parlor tricks. ChatGPT/Bard are easy to fool, easy to get to lie -- they are language engines who have no fundamental knowledge other than crowdsourcing which is often wrong. The code they write is (while sometimes operative) awful. But the face is pretty so there is that.
I've got a problem with this "computational" view of human reasoning and ALL it's adherents. These scary, scary people don't believe in "emotions" because emotions are a glitch within nominal, optimal entity communication. A glitch to be "filtered, deleted, discontinued as sub optimal".
This INCLUDES any "wasteful" sub optimal misdirection of resources to non-entities ie animals. As in pets, who can not have any "feelings" or indeed, can't REALLY feel pain or emotional distress. 😢 So, it IS OK for Bigpharma to torture animals on a scale only mirrored in Hell.
Have we cross - referenced the uptick in teen suicides etc yet, to Smartphone intro?
Just like abortions. Nobody can be classed as human unless they have had 20 State sanctioned injections, otherwise...subhuman - delete.
There's a plethora of neo-Aristotelian and phenomenological philosophers who, some in tandem with the cognitive sciences, are strongly opposed to computational theories of mind and the trajectory of present AI research.
It's a shame they aren't being paid more attention. The likes of Yudkowsky and Bostrom are waving their hands at what seems to me a distraction from the real threats posed by this technology.
I am sure it’s just because I am a stupid hick, but this is always hilarious: “As humans, our brains need the capacity to pretend that we could choose different things, so that we can imagine the outcomes, and pick effectively.”
Yeah pal. Pile enough words on top of “choose” and maybe I won’t notice that you keep sneaking it back into your argument that it can’t exist.
I gotta say, Yudkowsky sounds like the kind of person who had just enough education to get his head all the way up his ass.
If Free Will is an illusion, then literally nothing matters, including the opinions of Yudkowsky, who -according to himself- is also programmed to say what he says.
Well, what's the worst an unaligned AI could do? Realistically it could not break anything with human decision-makers in the loop--so no mischievous launches of nuclear missiles or release of pathogens. Plausibly, it could break the whole internet. I'm not sure that would be too big of a loss. It would ruin me and millions of others financially, but humanity would probably be in a better place afterwards.
I'm not gonna panic, anyway. ChatGPT is just a stupid toy. The demonic possession threat is real but it will only be able to operate on the souls of those who believe the AI is really talking to them--so spreading panic is counter-productive, as it increases the perception that machine sentience is possible.
Something else I wanted to add- I understand these experiences are not proof for anyone else but me (and in one example, the other person who was there), but it is still of anecdotal worth on the topic of, 'Does the Mind exist apart from the Brain?'
In 1997 while spending a night with my (now Ex) Fiancee', the Holy Spirit took me out of my Body to witness a watershed moment in her life. I did not just witness it, our Spirits were tied together and I experienced it with her.
From my Ex's perspective, it was as if I had died. My Body went cold, I wasn't breathing, my eyes had that 'flat' look that we see in dead people. She said this went on for no less than a minute, but no more than two. She was about to call 9/11 when I came back to myself.
In December of 2016, I nearly died when my Foot went septic. It was touch and go for a number of days, apparently. Those days I don't remember. But the next 3 I do and they were as strange as any DMT experience. For brevity's sake I won't go into the specifics, my main point is that as the link between my Mind & Body grew more tenuous, I became aware of things I could not normally perceive. As my health improved, those perceptions faded, but I am convinced what I saw was very real.
Lastly and perhaps Ironically (At least American Conservative Christians might think it ironic), I absolutely agree with those scientists that say the Brain is a 'Meat Computer'.
Yet despite being true, it's also incredibly derogatory. Each of our bodies contains trillions of cells. Each cell is a Micro-Miniaturized Automated Chemical Factory, more advanced than our best Automated Factories. Despite all the things that can go wrong with us, when you consider HOW MANY of those little factories have to work together, for life to exist for any length of time?
Life is a staggeringly statistical impossibility.
I'm not surprised as time has gone on that Materialists have continued to expand their canvas to make 'life-from nothing' more plausible. Going from an Earth of Thousands, to Millions, to Billions of years old, adding Panspermia, because Billions wasn't enough! Then the final load of Monkies on Typewriters- An Infinite Multiverse. I mean, in an infinite amount of universes, each with Billions of Galaxies, each with Billions of stars, with planets orbiting them, life HAD to come about by chance on ONE, right? Right?
I don't ascribe to the Samuel Clemens definition of 'Faith', but it certainly applies to that.
I believe all the pertinent questions brought up by AI fearmongers have been addressed by daily life. In short, nothing new. The current pseudo intellectual navel gazing from the usual suspects is so offensive and unoriginal I'm surprised they didn't get Neil DeGrasse to sign on.
Can humans be programmed? Yes. The vax has proven some far more than others. Television is called 'programming', the false flag events do inspire action. Anyone who owns a cat or dog can attest to even a dumb beast prompting humans to mechanistic action via simple growls and mewls. It's fundamentally the act of 'learning', which no one disputes we can do, detached from truth whether by lies or accident.
Do people have free will? Yes. All these LessThanWrong 'altruistic' money stealer cheerleaders (see that recent money embezzling from Sam Bankman) certainly act as if they do when the rubber hits the road. They opine all day about free will but then go ahead and run away from crimes, do damage control for their others, and give no sign of emotional detachment from their material reality. No Buddhist discipline or indifference here, just running away from responsibility for their actions by the erudite ''I dindu nuffin'... because free will is an illusion".
Can AI kill people? Yes. Liberals accept that other technologies, guns, can kill people. Runaway trains just killed people in Ohio. In China escalators have eaten possibly more people than have died in US school shootings. Buildings fall on people. It's quite marvelous of humanity that we manage to avoid short and brutish lives when we do.
Can AI be aligned against humans? Absolutely. Anyone who has worked for a baby boomer corporate beurocracy knows a system can be aligned against all it's members despite them all hating it.
You don't need 'consent' to make a bad system much like you don't need consent to make a shitty supply chain that fails when you declare war on China. Edward Deming proved that we are always making and managing systems that are aligned against us, out of sheer stupidity and ignorance, despite 'best intentions'.
Too optimistic, not enough Woe!
As someone who was a low level grunt working on Neural networks with several others, I can say with confidence that this stuff is “shiny sexy scientific secular utopia”-porn for the materialist types.
How so? Put simply- most of these entities are just great recursive mirrors that are just higher level “Narcissus is enamoured by his reflection”-boxtraps. It is actually a very sinister thing if you pause and think about it.
The pursuit of them by whole societies and civilizations would be akin to (say) how an individual mindlessly scrolls through social media for hours on end, using up what little time, energy and attention (the only true non-Renewable resources we possess) on fiction about “who he is and what people are like”. It corrupts without end.
The end result is thus far worse than “cold machines replacing a unique soulful humanity”. Rather, what you really get is said soulful humanity rejecting its innate disposition towards matters of the heart and spirit and trapping themselves in said boxtrap; which ultimately generates the posthuman hellhole of “toss out all value and pursue mere pains and pleasures”.
The false “AI god” will never come to be. We however will falsely think that he has arrived and will ritually cannibalize, necrophilize, etc to satiate his alleged whims. Think ritually sacrificing to Baal v2.0 except burnt offerings on the altar to clay and stone idols… that’s too “primitive”. Us modern posthumans will outperform every facet of that vile brutality.
Woo boy! That's a lot to contemplate!
I am most definitely in the lower right of your plane. I personally think this life is the Creator letting free willed agents choose whether to be worthy of higher duties. I will be writing on this in depth
in the future.
If AI is programmable, we have the problem of conflicting commands. Jack Williamson explored this in his Humanoids stories. The movie version of "I, Robot" owes more to Jack Williamson than it does to Isaac Asimov.
If AI is conscious, then creating AI is Slavery Version 2. Don't do that!
On the other hand, my experience with modern AI is that we are just doing curve fitting, albeit in a really high dimensional space. Curve fitting can be adequate for interpolating, but can blow up spectacularly for extrapolation. (My last day job involved working with Tensor Flow and other AI algorithms. including some I developed.)
On the gripping hand, fuzzy logic holds the promise of human programmed [pseudo] AI which doesn't go into a smoke producing loop like in an old Star Trek episode. But you still need the opaque
curve fitting stuff to turn data into concepts which can be subjected to fuzzy logic.
----
I side with the original writers of Star Trek as well as Niven and Pournelle when they wrote "The Mote in God's Eye". Too much automation is bad for humanity. Indeed, this is a problem with pure capitalism, a problem which the young Marx appreciated: disconnecting humans from their needs
produces alienation. Too much specialization, or too much automation, is bad. Better to do some meaningful work. (The Unabomber
manifesto is also worth reading in this regard.)
I have been writing computer code for over four decades. The initial thrill and challenge of computers was that they did *exactly what you told them to do". I utterly despise "smart" phones. I smashed one with large blunt objects as a stress relieving just the other week. I hated Wolfram Alpha upon first exposure . I am still clinging to Windows 7. I drive a quarter century old car because its computer is dumb. I cling to an older TV because it is not "smart."
The prospect of a neurolink with computers is terrifying to me. Yes, it could be a boon for quadriplegics, but it could be the ultimate torture device as well. (A young Jack Vance wrote on this.)
Computers aren't going away. So I am frantically working on evil-robot free computing. This means manual controls that are simple enough for the average human who is willing to put in some overhead. Our current manual controls are poorly designed. The QWERTY keyboard is a screaming example. These make evil robots, voice activation, and neuro links look tempting. Fix some legacy
bad design decisions and maybe we can convince humans to stay in charge.
PM me for details if you want to know more.
I wonder, if any of these people who (say) they believe that, 'Mind' is only a by-product of, 'Brain', have children, how they explain this to their kids. "Well, offspring, because of Evolution, my programming dictates that I procreate. You are a chemical result of my chemical reactions. I must perform what appear to be loving actions to preserve my genome. Now, One story then time for bed."
People SAY all kinds of stupid shit that they only think that they believe.
If we *could* create 'A.I.' in the general sense, I am reasonably sure it has already happened. Just not publicly. In 2012 I took a course with a History Professor who specialized in the Dark Underbelly of U.S. History. He claimed to have a contact who was a retired NSA Agent, who worked from the late 1950's through the 1980's. This man said that in 1965, the NSA already had desk-sized computers with a clock speed of 650Mhz. Given that, publicly, the first 'Supercomputer' was built in 1969 & only had a speed of 36.4Mhz, that's nearly 20x the speed, 4 years earlier. We Schlubs didn't get that fast until 1999 & Intel's Pentium III CPU. So on a rough estimate, the Black World is using computers we wouldn't have until 2058.
In the, 'Art Imitating Life', vein, I would not be surprised that the 1966 Sci-Fi book, "Colossus", about a Scientist who creates a massive computer system in the 1990's that becomes intelligent, is essentially, a fictionalized account of something that has already been done. If so, then the primary purpose of the Internet (and all public A.I. systems) is for data collection and processing of human beings. They are the 'Eyes and Ears' of that Overlord system that already exists. We are like the American Indians, given shiny beads (smartphones) by the Europeans in exchange for Land, when the Tribes dealt with had no conception of Land Ownership. We have been given something of very dubious value in trade for something we didn't even know *Could* be traded.
However, "Deceiving and Being Deceived', the situation isn't what the Elites believe it to be. Mankind will never be able to create life, digital or otherwise. In a pre-computer Era, C.S. Lewis nailed it with the 3rd volume of his Space Trilogy, "That Hideous Strength" (1945). Where an elite group of scientists, philosophers & religious leaders believe that they have brought the Head of a Genius back to life & this Reanimated Person now rules over them.
But (Spoilers!) they are being lied to & the 'Head' is being controlled by Fallen Angels. Perhaps we will, or already have, created a machine that appears to us to be Sentient and a New Order of Life. It is, as with most things in this 'Schoolhouse Rock' version of reality we live in, a complete and total lie.
Meh. Or maybe I'm just Overmedicated. Perhaps Undermedicated, that would be more fun.
Well done piece...got me to subscribe. (Yes, we saw your subscription note, since you asked us to mention it in the comments.)
As a long time researcher in this space, we are a long, long ways away from real artificial intelligence...we have not yet really achieved artificial stupidity. These are more elegant parlor tricks than Eliza had half a century ago...but still the same parlor tricks. ChatGPT/Bard are easy to fool, easy to get to lie -- they are language engines who have no fundamental knowledge other than crowdsourcing which is often wrong. The code they write is (while sometimes operative) awful. But the face is pretty so there is that.
I have a mouth and I am not screaming...
I've got a problem with this "computational" view of human reasoning and ALL it's adherents. These scary, scary people don't believe in "emotions" because emotions are a glitch within nominal, optimal entity communication. A glitch to be "filtered, deleted, discontinued as sub optimal".
This INCLUDES any "wasteful" sub optimal misdirection of resources to non-entities ie animals. As in pets, who can not have any "feelings" or indeed, can't REALLY feel pain or emotional distress. 😢 So, it IS OK for Bigpharma to torture animals on a scale only mirrored in Hell.
Have we cross - referenced the uptick in teen suicides etc yet, to Smartphone intro?
Just like abortions. Nobody can be classed as human unless they have had 20 State sanctioned injections, otherwise...subhuman - delete.
There's a plethora of neo-Aristotelian and phenomenological philosophers who, some in tandem with the cognitive sciences, are strongly opposed to computational theories of mind and the trajectory of present AI research.
It's a shame they aren't being paid more attention. The likes of Yudkowsky and Bostrom are waving their hands at what seems to me a distraction from the real threats posed by this technology.
If I ask Chat GPT 4 what I should have for breakfast and it replies Remdesivir, should I be worried?
I am sure it’s just because I am a stupid hick, but this is always hilarious: “As humans, our brains need the capacity to pretend that we could choose different things, so that we can imagine the outcomes, and pick effectively.”
Yeah pal. Pile enough words on top of “choose” and maybe I won’t notice that you keep sneaking it back into your argument that it can’t exist.
I gotta say, Yudkowsky sounds like the kind of person who had just enough education to get his head all the way up his ass.
If Free Will is an illusion, then literally nothing matters, including the opinions of Yudkowsky, who -according to himself- is also programmed to say what he says.
Dumbass.
Well, what's the worst an unaligned AI could do? Realistically it could not break anything with human decision-makers in the loop--so no mischievous launches of nuclear missiles or release of pathogens. Plausibly, it could break the whole internet. I'm not sure that would be too big of a loss. It would ruin me and millions of others financially, but humanity would probably be in a better place afterwards.
I'm not gonna panic, anyway. ChatGPT is just a stupid toy. The demonic possession threat is real but it will only be able to operate on the souls of those who believe the AI is really talking to them--so spreading panic is counter-productive, as it increases the perception that machine sentience is possible.
If someone creates the Evil AI, you might want to be one of the first to die. Consider Harlan Ellison’s _I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream_.
Calvinists absolutely fall into that box.
The Amish may outlast us all, and that is beautiful.
Really, ToW? I like to PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE 🤜🙈🤛 because, hey! They can't feel a thing. 🤗 FIGJAM.
Something else I wanted to add- I understand these experiences are not proof for anyone else but me (and in one example, the other person who was there), but it is still of anecdotal worth on the topic of, 'Does the Mind exist apart from the Brain?'
In 1997 while spending a night with my (now Ex) Fiancee', the Holy Spirit took me out of my Body to witness a watershed moment in her life. I did not just witness it, our Spirits were tied together and I experienced it with her.
From my Ex's perspective, it was as if I had died. My Body went cold, I wasn't breathing, my eyes had that 'flat' look that we see in dead people. She said this went on for no less than a minute, but no more than two. She was about to call 9/11 when I came back to myself.
In December of 2016, I nearly died when my Foot went septic. It was touch and go for a number of days, apparently. Those days I don't remember. But the next 3 I do and they were as strange as any DMT experience. For brevity's sake I won't go into the specifics, my main point is that as the link between my Mind & Body grew more tenuous, I became aware of things I could not normally perceive. As my health improved, those perceptions faded, but I am convinced what I saw was very real.
Lastly and perhaps Ironically (At least American Conservative Christians might think it ironic), I absolutely agree with those scientists that say the Brain is a 'Meat Computer'.
Yet despite being true, it's also incredibly derogatory. Each of our bodies contains trillions of cells. Each cell is a Micro-Miniaturized Automated Chemical Factory, more advanced than our best Automated Factories. Despite all the things that can go wrong with us, when you consider HOW MANY of those little factories have to work together, for life to exist for any length of time?
Life is a staggeringly statistical impossibility.
I'm not surprised as time has gone on that Materialists have continued to expand their canvas to make 'life-from nothing' more plausible. Going from an Earth of Thousands, to Millions, to Billions of years old, adding Panspermia, because Billions wasn't enough! Then the final load of Monkies on Typewriters- An Infinite Multiverse. I mean, in an infinite amount of universes, each with Billions of Galaxies, each with Billions of stars, with planets orbiting them, life HAD to come about by chance on ONE, right? Right?
I don't ascribe to the Samuel Clemens definition of 'Faith', but it certainly applies to that.
I believe all the pertinent questions brought up by AI fearmongers have been addressed by daily life. In short, nothing new. The current pseudo intellectual navel gazing from the usual suspects is so offensive and unoriginal I'm surprised they didn't get Neil DeGrasse to sign on.
Can humans be programmed? Yes. The vax has proven some far more than others. Television is called 'programming', the false flag events do inspire action. Anyone who owns a cat or dog can attest to even a dumb beast prompting humans to mechanistic action via simple growls and mewls. It's fundamentally the act of 'learning', which no one disputes we can do, detached from truth whether by lies or accident.
Do people have free will? Yes. All these LessThanWrong 'altruistic' money stealer cheerleaders (see that recent money embezzling from Sam Bankman) certainly act as if they do when the rubber hits the road. They opine all day about free will but then go ahead and run away from crimes, do damage control for their others, and give no sign of emotional detachment from their material reality. No Buddhist discipline or indifference here, just running away from responsibility for their actions by the erudite ''I dindu nuffin'... because free will is an illusion".
Can AI kill people? Yes. Liberals accept that other technologies, guns, can kill people. Runaway trains just killed people in Ohio. In China escalators have eaten possibly more people than have died in US school shootings. Buildings fall on people. It's quite marvelous of humanity that we manage to avoid short and brutish lives when we do.
Can AI be aligned against humans? Absolutely. Anyone who has worked for a baby boomer corporate beurocracy knows a system can be aligned against all it's members despite them all hating it.
You don't need 'consent' to make a bad system much like you don't need consent to make a shitty supply chain that fails when you declare war on China. Edward Deming proved that we are always making and managing systems that are aligned against us, out of sheer stupidity and ignorance, despite 'best intentions'.