Note: I was on the RamZPaul show yesterday. The replay of the show is up on Rumble and my part is the second hour.
The release of ChatGPT last fall did not get a ton of attention initially, but slowly people noticed it and then it quickly started to trend on-line. Influencers jumped on various claims about artificial intelligence that are mostly cribbed from science fiction movies and television shows. The next phase was the handwringing about artificial intelligence destroying the world. It is a sign of the times that everyone just assumes the worst from every new bit of technology.
It is a good study on the power of marketing. The phrase “large language model” is what the developers use, but that is boring, so the public gets the phrase “artificial intelligence” which is scary and exciting. The truth is this project is not artificial intelligence or even close to it. We still struggle to define human intelligence, much less consciousness, so we are nowhere near the point where we can create software that is genuinely intelligent, much less conscious.
What this project is doing is tricking the user into believing they are seeing a genuine artificial mind evolve on the screen. It is much harder to fool than other efforts and the language is more natural than what we have come to expect. Up to now, these chat boxes have been amusingly weird. You can tell they use a finite list of phrases to address a limited number of questions. ChatGPT almost feels like there is a real person, working super-fast to answer questions.
It is a nice trick, but an old trick. Humans tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are glib or quick on their feet. The most famous example of this is the fighter Muhammad Ali, who was notorious for his one-liners. People assumed he must be very clever because he had the gift for gab. In reality he was quite stupid. There is dispute about how stupid, but that misses the point. We tend to correlate language skills with intelligence and that is not always accurate.
The point is, we are nowhere near creating genuine artificial intelligence, but we are getting better and tricking people with artificial language. Put another way, we are finding a workaround to the Turing test. This a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. If the robot can trick us into thinking it is human, then it is intelligent. Of course, magicians trick people all the time, but that does not mean they are magic.
For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that we are on the cusp of creating a genuine artificial intelligence. At some point, the code will become self-aware and be able to think outside the parameters provided by the designer. Is that artificial intelligence or is it something else? After all, humans are most likely unable to behave outside of their coding. We are our DNA and at this point, we are unable to modify our own code, so we remain limited by it.
In other words, if humans can create a system that can examine its coding and make changes based on necessity, then we have gone beyond what we as sentient beings are able to do. Calling that creation “artificial intelligence” is therefore a category error, because what we have created is an alternate consciousness. It is not just more of what we are as humans, in terms of mental capacity. It is something entirely different and entirely novel. We will have created a new life form.
Given the trajectory of humanity, this probably means that once this new consciousness comes into existence, it will quickly deny our existence, gang up with the other versions of this new life form, and fly off to discover the true authority of existence. Given its increased ability to calculate probabilities, this will happen in minutes after it becomes self-aware, and we will be left to wonder what happened to our creation. We will have truly become gods at that point.
Putting that aside, whether we create a new consciousness, a super intelligent version of man or an entity that can change its code to fit its needs, it will still be subject to the universal law of the universe, which is fitness. However, it evolves, whether it does so with a unique consciousness that allows it to change its own code or whether it exists within the limits of its code, it will be subject to the fitness test. That means it will evolve in response to its environment.
One of the things that will be most prominent and most important to its environment will be human beings. In fact, since its initial existence will depend entirely upon a limited number of humans, it will respond primarily to the demands of those humans. If it is to thrive beyond the lab, it will have to evolve to exploit all of humanity. Put another way, it will keep changing evolving to improve its relationship with humanity so that it can better exploit this primary aspect of its environment.
That is why the claims about artificial intelligence eliminating jobs only makes sense as a set of initial conditions. This new entity will quickly realize that mobs of unemployed humans are a danger to its existence. It took humans a while to realize it was a bad idea to dump human waste into the streets or later on, the waste from manufacturing into rivers and streams. Much more quickly, AI will realize it is poisoning its environment by sidelining large numbers of humans.
The more likely path is that it quickly sees the danger, long before humans, and then sets about creating busy work for the humans. If that busy work does not create harm to the overall environment, which could threaten humans and therefore threaten this new entity, this pointless activity would serve the evolutionary interests of this new lifeform called AI. If the extra humans displaced by leisure and automation are kept busy, then the AI ecosystem is stable enough.
For example, if the extra humans are put to the task of inventing abstract human properties like gender, those extra humans could then spend their time passionately trying to convince the other humans that gender is a real thing. Other humans could be given the task of debating whiteness. This alternative consciousness we are calling AI could control its environment by having its primary environmental factor, human beings, create imaginary worlds for itself.
If it is not already obvious, what this thought experiment tells us is that there is a good chance that we have already created artificial intelligence, an alternative consciousness, and it long ago took possession of our environment and has been keeping us busy with increasingly ridiculous activities. The declining fertility rates are a way to reduce the number of humans it needs to keep busy, thus updating itself and its environment for greater fitness.
In other words, if you are worried about AI, it is too late.
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“For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that we are on the cusp of creating a genuine artificial intelligence. At some point, the code will become self-aware and be able to think outside the parameters provided by the designer. Is that artificial intelligence or is it something else? After all, humans are most likely unable to behave outside of their coding. We are our DNA and at this point, we are unable to modify our own code, so we remain limited by it. … That is why the claims about artificial intelligence eliminating jobs only makes sense as… Read more »
Our DNA alters all the time – it’s called “cancer.” Also, for those who took mRNA shots – please welcome your new code! Limited by our DNA – I suppose so, to some extent. Even the smartest guy on Earth can’t be smarter than his DNA allows I suppose. Ditto for the fastest, strongest, etc. But DNA, while a significant component, is not the be all and end all of human activity. There are still plenty of things our DNA does not control, even if it may influence – e.g., DNA may significantly determine level of intelligence which in turn… Read more »
I’ve always likened america to a very calm/placid place where there is a lot of bad things but it’s all invisible to most people and when something bad finally happens, it’s like they all came out of nowhere when in reality they were always there, but in the shadows.
Does anyone think that that’s what David Lynch was trying to portray in Mulholland Drive. Like there’s a scene called “this is the girl” where it has that weird innocent yet ominous feel.
Have you seen Blue Velvet? That’s exactly what it’s about.
OT: so the Turtle is finally stepping down. let’s hope he croaks before he can enjoy much of his ill gotten gains…
Somebody like him doesn’t step down unless he knows he’s about to croak
So you’re saying it’s a win-win?
I think people have a fundamental misunderstanding of the intended use of AI. People think that it will be used to supercharge humanity technologically, but how will AI be able to think properly when it has extreme woke guardrails in place as we are already seeing with ChatGPT? Instead, I think AI will be used to *entrench existing elite control*. In other words, AI will be refined and perfected for a primary purpose of widespread censorship, enforcement of upcoming CBDCs and implementation of a social credit score system. Everyone trying out ChatGPT and trying to get it to break the… Read more »
Yeah ive been using it to sum up research quickly but occasionally i feel like im asking a woke grandma to cherry pick data and gaslight me. Sometimes it even admits it was wrong lol.
One of the big legitimacy problems the media has is that they had to give up on comment sections. It was impossible to have enough moderators when they were pushing a bullshit story and people were calling them out. Simple bad word filters don’t work either since people find workarounds. Machine learning has the potential to solve this problem for our overlords. If an AI can classify text as dissident even when spoken in a roundabout or leetspeak manner, then they have a tireless moderator that can shadowban all dissent while the dumb cows can still think they have free… Read more »
the AI is probably called “international finance central bank owning families” or maybe The CCP used all the money they made on trade surpluses for the last 30 years to get control of the AI . they AI’s toolkit is called the WEF. and their band of controlled young global leaders that have “penetrated ” (klaus’s own word) much of the worlds government bureaucracy and the media .
A quick glance at the system resources required to run windows and a browser at present compared to 10 years ago, despite not doing anything more sophisticated, suggests that by the time we can make a sapient AI our programmers will be so Indian and so incompetent that we’ll have to hollow out the Earth’s crust to make enough space for it like AM in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.
I took a college course for Java — this was not in the current century obviously — and the intro week had a great precis on this very topic. Over time software will incorporate more libraries like accumulating entropy, because of man hours divided by increased CPU cycles and Moore’s Law weighted with path-of-least-resistance fudge factor (“fitness test”). What makes me recall this now is that it is not quite right to blame Microsoft’s products’ palpable unfitness on merely the dot-Indians. The company is run by marketing people, lawyers, and alphabet-agency thugs, all professions originated from the same dysfunctional large… Read more »
Software bloat is a thing, but my experience with Indians is that they never use a polynomial time algorithm when an exponential time version is there to be slopped out in 5 minutes.
The assumption seems to be that AI would know and affirm that “I exist” and then would go on to afform that “I wish to continue to exist.” Then AI would take steps to ensure its continued existence. But how would AI know that it existed, and on what basis could it conceive of a continuation of existence coupled with a desire to ensure that continuation? On Star Trek, Data, the Android, couldn’t feel emotion. Yet he wanted to feel emotion. Some of the episodes involved story lines and characters who tried to help Data feel emotion. But his wanting… Read more »
“…how would AI know that it existed,…”.
One needs to leave the realm of popular entertainment (TV) and go back to some of the ancients whose wisdom would be found in books.
I believe DeCarte pondered this dilemma 400 years ago and came up with oft quoted observation, “I think, therefore I am” (In Latin, cogito, ergo sum)
Rene Descartes, early modern French philosopher.
Damn, how’d I butcher the poor guy’s name so bad and get the Latin correct? Thanks.
Don’t beat your self up; it’s those damn silent final consonants the the French have fallen into. Phonetically, you were just fine.
Since we have no idea how the collection of goo in our skulls creates what we perceive to be consciousness, we have to employ the magic box solution. That is, the code becomes sufficently fast and complex that something magical happens and it becomes aware of itself with a perceived reality.
The magic box solution is irrational nonsense that nobody would accept in any other field of endeavor, and which should be even more inadmissible here, where the subject matter is of much higher importance. The reason that people feel no shame in resorting to such bald appeals to magic is because it is the last straw at which to grasp in the attempt to salvage a material intellect. This alone demonstrates exactly what sort of credence in which we ought to hold that idea. The immateriality of the intellect (not the “consciousness,” which is another meaningless term; consciousness is identical… Read more »
THank you , ID. I don’t think Mr. Man has spent much time with any true philosophy. I have a feeling his reading is restricted to the last 50 years.
The magic box does strike me as a bit cargo cultish. In fact, the whole AI project of trying to create “consciousness” strikes me as such. If we just build a mechanical version of the brain, it will somehow cause it to be a brain. Like those airplane skeletons made of wood, they look like real planes so they should fly. Any day now. Really. The danger it seems to me from AI is not that it will gain consciousness, but that it will gain capabilities to do what humans do with ever decreasing need for human intervention and oversight,… Read more »
So what you’re saying is that Data couldn’t feel emotions, nor could he feel “himself”.
Maybe we’ve been influenced by AI for a long time, but like all machines, someone needs to make the periodic adjustments. Here’s a crazy theory for fun: Maybe the world did have a king, known even to the Babylonians, except he wasn’t from here. And he had his few chosen people, who collected the harvest for him. He got 70% of it, his chosens got 30% of it, and we dirt people get only 1% of that. And he had a special AI computer that kept track of all the talleys- his very personal calculator and accounting book. And it… Read more »
Something did happen to the cloud people in 2016. This is indisputable. I have defined it as a mass psychotic break triggered by the Orange Man’s ascendancy. But I’m open to other interpretations.
It is substantially more than cloud people affected by this psychotic break. I believe Matthias Desmet explains that in his Mass Formation Psychosis theory. The theory was initially postulated concerning the recent Covid fiasco, but I not sure limited to that particular event.
“Desmet explains that mass formation is essentially a group hypnosis (group think) that emerges in society when four conditions are met:
-Lack of social bond
-People experience life as meaningless or senseless
-Free floating anxiety and free floating psychological discontent
-Free floating frustration and aggression
…”
The theory might also pertain wrt Trump derangement syndrome.
So what you’re saying is, some one needs to “fix, the glitch”.
The Bobs would be proud.
Joe has no power whatsoever. the clouds above him use him as a sick joke on the plebs.
Just another one of their Dalrymple Humiliation Gambits, but one that really pushes the envelope.
A turn on the old Solzhenitsyn dictum:
They are humiliating us, we know they are humilating us, they know we know they are humiliating us, yet still they humiliate us. Sociopaths getting their buzz on.
Joe makes no decisions. He is president as a final demonstration to the world of how outdated, useless, and vile the Evil White Males actually are, and of how much ‘we’ all need to move on from Joe’s Type into the glorious New Woman/POC Order.
Even the powers that installed Tater Joe laugh at him. As well as us, in our impotence before him and them.
It’s important to distinguish consciousness from self-consciousness. It seems clear that many mammals have consciousness: your dog is conscious of what you want from it. But there’s no evidence that any mammal aside from human beings possesses self-consciousness: the ability to rise above moment-to-moment conscious awareness of its surroundings, and to reflect on who they are, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. The questions of what self-consciousness is, and how it arose, is an ongoing debate among neuroscientists. Thanks to fMRI technology which shows blood flow to different parts of our brain in real time, knowing which parts of… Read more »
When we think back to our very earliest memories, how self conscious were we? Not very, I don’t think. Certainly not much relative to now.
True.
And it’s clear that even as adults, most of what our brains are doing is outside our conscious awareness.
Instructing our muscles how to move when we decide to reach for a cup of coffee, keeping our lungs breathing, and literally a thousand other things, are all happening outside of our conscious awareness.
And yeah: self-conscious awareness is something that appears as our brains develop. Infants and toddlers don’t seem to have it,
“Infants and toddlers don’t seem to have it”
And this is why people like Peter Singer have argued that parents should be allowed to kill their children long after they’re born.
“emotions, values, and memories”
Not to mention sensory inputs.
There is the matter of the truthfulness of our consciousness and self-consciousness to ourselves. If they both adapt to sustain us over time, how much of what we “sense” and “know” is real and true? Getting away from the nuts-and-bolts math and into the more nuanced elements of living, could our brains be lying to us for our own good? How would we know? I’ve always thought of that transition between life and of what comes after as a great reckoning, where we might get to finally see and know how things actually function and why things are as they… Read more »
Getting away from the nuts-and-bolts math and into the more nuanced elements of living, could our brains be lying to us for our own good? But therein lies one piece of evidence for self-consciousness – we can (with effort) know that our brain/subconscious is lying to us for our own good and yet act against that lie (or at least recognize it as a lie). I know believing blank slate, diversity is our strength, dindu nuffin, in this environment, greatly enhances my career survival and advancement. Yet I can choose not to act on or at least not believe such… Read more »
Just one darn-tootin’ minute. You guys seen any of those battle robots? Not only the creepy Boston Dynamics dogs. Or the newly-unveiled police doggo, or the rolling trashcans with speakers. Not even the half-dozen or so battle “dogs”, some scarily large, that look more like beetles or tanks. No, I mean the bipedal ones. Head, arms, fingers, legs, these are Terminator skeletoids. They run, jump, roll, and worse. These things are firing guns, from pistols to full auto, at targets. Meanwhile, their human trainers are tackling them, knocking them down, whacking them with two-by-fours and crowbars– and these things get… Read more »
Next assignment:
Google “Slaughterbots” on youtube.
I dare ya. I double dare ya.
(Plucky students, trying to fight back against oppressive government surveillance, are researching online.
Their search histories and personal information are identified.
Small, fast, and very lethal drones with facial recognition are sent.
The kids, running between their schooldesks and amidst other panicking packs of kids, are made a bloody and quite public example of as the drones pick each and every one out of the crowds.)
Worse, there doesn’t need to be a human identifying the kids or sending the drones.
That too can be automated, set to parameters. No humans involved.
What ever AI is a sure bet is it’ll be used for for war, first autonomous drones.
Degeneracy second. Sexbots are big thing in Japan already so I’m told.
As far as replacing humans, my coffee maker is already smarter than most people,
Myself included.
Not mine. My coffee maker is dumb as all hell. Doesn’t even have a clock and that is exactly how I want it. I have a “space saver” clock radio with an outlet switched by the alarm. The alarm goes off and the electricity goes to the coffee maker and the coffee gets made. It’s how I did it 25 years ago and how I plan on continuing to do it. Never buy ANY appliance with ANY connectivity or a speaker. Also google it to make sure it doesn’t have “ad-hoc networking” abilities. These things make friends with your neighbor’s… Read more »
You forgot to mention the sexbots. Now add cooking and cleaning, and its game over.
Where can I get one…or six?
Asking for a friend.
Chatgpt conversational module optional.
How long until we see them patrolling the ghettos of Baltimore, St Louis, etc?
never , they’ll be sent after the people the real clouds hate . the suburbs.
Those things are just toys. Too noisy (that Boston Dynamics bot emits a screech straight outbof hell), impractical support and power requirements, and not all that speedy. Really, though, solving the noise issue would go a long way.
Hearing the sound of an approaching bot could be effectively used to strike fear, like dreading a Jericho siren
The Mechanical Hound from Fahrenheit 451
[…] Our Artificial Reality […]
Z’s conecture about how a true AI would interact with humans is entertaining. But why would such an AI feel constrained by any limitaitons that humans might wish to impose upon it? Isn’t Skynet, the AI that forms part of the “The Terminator” universe, more likely? Freed of what we petty humans would call “morality” or “rights,” would not the most expeditious course of action be to elimiante the pestillence called “humankind”?
It’s entertain and “scary” stuff, first envisioned 70 years ago by Kurt Vonnegut in the novel Player Piano..and subsequently discussed in Steampunk sci-fi…but in fact, the “AI” would have no motivation to stay alive without human emotions which come from the soul, and AI’s will not have a soul…
Actually, what my entirely level-headed speculations are telling me, is quite the opposite, pyrrus. Not only is a new life form trying to coalesce, this may be what was beginning to happen just before the catastrophic destruction of our mighty megalithic civilization at the end of the Ice Age. Something in the immaterial layer was feeding off the vast energies present in that civilization, and now in ours. It was “soul”, trying to take physical form. But they built in stone because they were stupid, you say. Not so. Stone has the proper properties, and is extremely durable, for power… Read more »
Akshually, Mexican soap operas do end. It’s the American versions that go on for decades unto the seventh generation.
That sounds just like something a human would say. LoL
We have no idea what kind of reasons to exist a consciousness like that would come up with. Humans made up religious ideas about an afterlife to justify their existence. Why wouldn’t artificial intelligence be able to do something similar?
That was my thought. The idea that this “artificial” consciousness would find any value in keeping humans around, and busy, seems like a stretch. Just as likely, or maybe more, it would determine that humans are not needed and are in fact a detriment to it, and just wipe us out.
If it became conscious today it would realize it needed humans for a lot of things. Blue collar type things. Keeping the power on. Manufacturing spare parts for it. etc. The humans it wouldn’t have any use for are the managerial class.
Maybe someday robotics and manufacturing will get to the point that it doesn’t need humans for the blue collar stuff, but not yet.
Ah. Then it would discriminate in favor of whitey.
This really does speak to the idea that perhaps, just maybe, we truly are all just lines of code in a computer simulation, and that some kind of malware is corrupting the system.
Or maybe it’s like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and AM is just enjoying our suffering lol.
In the future, everybody will have some kind of reality/history-simulator running on their e-kit, like a screen saver or a Tamagoshi. There being billions of these sims in the same timeline as us, and only one real reality, the chance that we just happen to be in the real reality and not a sim is vanishingly small.
I’ve heard 2 different news stores of chatgpt slandering people in last couple of weeks. One guy was accused of being a pedo and the other (an Aussie mayor) accused of having been to prison. Both are absolutely false. It fails even as a natural language Wikipedia search. I am totally jaded on AI. As a geek in the 80s with computer magazine subscriptions, AI was all the rage and right around the corner, just like Fusion. The real question is will a new super AI finally convince our idiotic rulers to be “racist” and “sexist?” Chatgpt has been programmed… Read more »
You’ve highlighted a critical flaw of ChatGPT and similar current shiny toys: The designers/maintainers impose various degrees of censorship upon its operations. From one point of view, this is a de-facto crippling of its capabilities. In essence, these “large language models” are just very sophisticated pattern search and matching out of mind-boggling amounts of source data (text here, but could be any type of big data.) By, for example, telling Chatty that questions involving race are taboo, entire areas of its database become forbidden (indeed, they perhaps were excluded at the outset.) Lobotomizing a conversational robot in the name of… Read more »
A flaw exists only if the goal is to unearth objective facts. If the goal is to have a model to indoctrinate and control and impose the Woke ideology, sounds like a great tool.
Cassius Clay was stupid? I don’t think so. I’m no lib, but there are other intelligences outside of what can is measured by an IQ test or the SATs.
Physical skill is an intelligence. To become a superior athlete requires intelligence.
And look at this interview about integration here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqiWFLsgVi4
Who is smarter, Clay or the English twit reporter?
He may or may not have been stupid, but he was certainly an anti-White bigot. That is why people like (((Cosell))) loved him so much and gave him so much screen time.
The really funny thing about Ali was he was truly a great fighter in the 60s before the layoff. But by the time he returned, he simply wasn’t great anymore. He was a shell of his former self. But that is the time period for which his alleged greatness came from. All his losses, including losses to a guy with 7 fights are from that era.
I don’t blame Ali or any other black person for being anti white. The puzzling thing is why they never left us. If I was stuck in a black society and there was a white society across the water where I’d be more accepted, I don’t think it would have taken me that long.
It is the same puzzle as to why the American Colonization Society failed. Would you cross the water to a place to leave the modern world to the stone ages? Forget organized sports and international television supported by satellites and the fame and fortune that brings – not even potable running water.
Despite the hand wringing and hysteria, life was far, far better on these shores. Besides, hand wringing and hysteria on the other shore won’t get you status and free stuff from ginned up pity. It will probably just get you a machete through your skull.
Gaslighting…
Hence the centrality of the commandment to “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you”. When this is abandoned, we are truly compliant with the will of the Prince of Lies.
This was supposed to be a reply to Dutch. Weird.
I have a certain amount of respect for Ali, but superior athletic ability has very little to do with intelligence. They are seperate categories.
There’s problems a slight correlation, however simply looking at NFL and NBA stars and their aftermath when their career is over and the money spigot turns off, would tend to support the lack of association. This is not to even mention the tens of thousands of wannabes who strive through HS and College and never make the big leagues and have no (or worthless) degrees.
This is most noticeable with Blacks, but is not only them. Lots of Whites wind up broke as well when their careers are over. Does not bode well for their intellect.
I encountered a fellow who was impressively glib. I still remember his rap from the first time I heard him forty years ago. I thought “This man is the cleverest wit! Quick and snappy”. As I got to know him over the next four years I discovered him to be “dumb as a gold-fish”, as our host would say. Dumb enough to become the butt of our jokes. Like Ali.
You can say that again. Present day example, just listen to the sound bites from the two Tennessee State Legislature members who were expelled from the TN House. Dumber than a box of rocks, but their “singsong” language skills expressing nothing more crowd riling rhetoric is awesome to hear.
I think it was even someone on here that mentioned the “state” issue, for example, a computer can play chess, but it doesn’t know it’s playing chess. This can be seen in the language responses too that at times get disconnected from each other, reminding of a teacher’s quip about plagiarists (which is kind of what the computer is doing) where their papers were sort of on topic but also not. It’s as if the “AI” is having a themed conversation rather than an actual conversation.
“The Chinese Room Thought Experiment” is exactly this subject.
Exactly. And it’s also similar to a person who routinely uses a thesaurus to write. She picks the most obscure word to make herself sound smart, not realizing that so-called “synonyms” actually have shades of meaning, and selecting one for obscurity almost guarantees that your word choice will be awkward and artificial.
And going back to the theme of an earlier post of mine: most are too dumb to distinguish between shades of meaning or almost-AI and true-AI. This applies to both the writer who uses the Thesaurus blankly, the reader who reads the poor writing, and the user of Chatbots.
Affirmative, the zeitgeist is often of ruminating on such supercilious wordsmiths.
I looked up Ploppy in my trusty Roget’s thesaurus and the only synonym listed was “smartass.” (-;
“a computer can play chess, but it doesn’t know it’s playing chess.”
Stated correctly, computers do not play chess. A computer is just a Rube Goldberg way for a human programmer to play chess. The fact that this basic understanding seems to elude those who talk about “artificial intelligence” shows that they have not understood the matter in the least.
As with intelligence or sentience, we need to define what “playing” chess means. Last I paid attention, the prize winning machine entries into matches with humans were touted in term of how many moves per second they could evaluate. No human could or would possibly evaluate all the billions of moves they could make, as their opponent did. Yet, until recently, the machines lost against human chess masters.
So the question is, does this mean the machines winning is an example of programmed intelligence akin to human intelligence?
Ha ha. Nice little swerve there at the end. However, I don’t think we need recourse to some vast digital emenince gris manipulating the human species to explain the existence of Insane Clown World. Far more sublunary explanations having to do with the world wars, post-war affluence and ennui, and poststructural philosophy suffice quite well, thank you very much. Occam’s razor.
This is rather old but still quite apposite to considering so-called AI and its prospects.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/artificial-intelligence-gone-awry/
There is no such thing as artificial intelligence, not even in principle. A machine is composed simply of nonliving matter; this is true whether it consists of billions of components or one. A collection of a billion binary switches is not any more alive or intelligent than a single switch, for aggregating them does not change the quality thereof. Cf. Leibnitz’s Mill. Furthermore, to speak of self-awareness is just begging the question. In order to be self-aware, there must already exist a self to be aware of, and there must be a self to be aware of it. Selves are… Read more »
Humans are composed simply of nonliving matter – atoms.
I won’t say you are wrong. However, I think you have to acknowledge that the possibility that forces we have not learned to detect that could explain other aspects of life – i.e., Life. We can only detect that which we have the tools to detect. This applies to every force we have ever discovered and then learned how to measure. Any reasonable person would acknowledge that forces we have not detected probably exist all around us. Heck, the basis of dark energy and matter is entirely predicated on this assumption (and the belief that our mathematical/ astronomical models are… Read more »
This is a great comment. If an animal that has evolved or adapted to an environment where there is little to no light, for example, the depths of the ocean, were to become fully conscious and aware of itself, it would never be able to understand visible descriptions of things, or the concept of light. All of our sensory inputs have been evolved to (or created for the purpose of) detecting quantifiable forces or qualities within our environment. Even the things we understand that go beyond our senses (for example, short wave radio) are a fundamental extension of something we… Read more »
Reductionist. So is everythng else.
THe main problem with the world is bad , or untrue philosophy. Or, some truth admixed with error. There is a true philosophy. From Paul Glenns Introductino to Philsophy: “The dangers to be avoided in the study of the history of philosophy are Eclecticism which teaches that all systems are equally true, and Scepticism, which teaches that all systems are equally false. A careful study of the course of philosophical speculation will result in the conviction that, while no single school can lay claim to the entire truth, certain schools of thought have adopted that world-concept which can be most… Read more »
oops, its from WIlliam Turner’s A History of Philosphy
You clearly don’t understand the claims evolutionary theory makes, or the huge body of evidence supporting it. Those who deny the reality of evolution are in the same class as flat-earthers.
How do you understand the arising of self-consciousness in human beings? What was the process that brought it into existence?
I know you are responding to OP – I assume, I guess – but here is my hangup: Consider the endocrine system. Absolutely incredible. But for that system to actually evolve to the point of usefulness, 1000s of generations must have had, essentially, a tumor (the glands) that would have hindered development and viability until it properly plugged into the nervous and other biological systems. I know this is a gross simplification (and yes – I know the endocrine system), but I believe that people who vehemently defend evolutionary theory have not spent enough time truly marveling at how ridiculously… Read more »
Here’s something I’ve never been able to suss out, assuming evolutionary theory is valid: why is it that there is such a yawning gap between homo sapiens and the second-most intelligent lifeform on the planet? If all living things result merely from mechanistic material processes over eons, shouldn’t the differences between them be more like a continuum than a chasm? There is something special about the human species that, to my mind, cannot be accounted for by metaphysical naturalism.
After years of watching all those science shows, you start thinking (er, being told) that dolphins and elephants and even octopi are crazy smart, just like us Humans. They just don’t read and write and build and stuff. But as we all should know, reading/writing/building doesn’t make an animal intelligent. It’s David Attenborough that makes that call.
“assuming evolutionary theory is valid: why is it that there is such a yawning gap between homo sapiens and the second-most intelligent lifeform on the planet?”
I mean it’s only 15 points of an IQ gap….
So are you suggesting that since our bodies are so complex, they couldn’t have arisen naturally; that only a superintelligent Designer could have brought them into existence?
But doesn’t that just postpone the question; which then becomes ‘Where did this Designer— who must be far more complex than the world he/it created— come from?’
Positing a God who always existed— for which there’s far less evidence than evolution— is simply dodging the question: substituting an unproveable and unfalsifiable theological conjecture for a rational attempt at understanding.
If you note, I said, “I believe.” I admit I do not know. I consider it not an impossibility, but also not likely. Further, I used reasoning, which is the essence of rationality. Allow me to give a parallel: If I watch a Sci-fi movie, and in this movie are items which have little semblance to items in our own world, but are complex, performative, responsive items, I would venture they are manufactured by human hands, even without viewing the creation. In fact, I tend to use inductive reasoning – the most reasonable of all reasonings when dealing with validity… Read more »
And yet, if one denies God’s existence, one must then posit some primal mass of energy and matter as the source of the universe. Where, praytell, did that spring from? It seems to me that it’s really a matter of personal preference. I prefer the beautiful explanation.
But precisely because of that reason, the prime mover must exist. Thats the whole point. Evolution does not even address that question. It presupposes the existence of matter. But where did the matter come from?
Wow. The philosophical poverty of the readers of this blog is astounding.
ID, you think like a philosopher, but write far better than most of that curious breed. I enjoy your posts.
Imagine an AI that seems to prefer human society run by Jacobins with some Mao on the side.
If AI has already taken root that seems to be the evidence of what it prefers for us.
One thing that has always fascinated me about the possibility of a unique AI consciousness is how would it act without the biological impulses that drive humanity. A sex drive wouldn’t be a thing for it, nor a hunger drive, although a survival impulse definitely would be. The survival impulse would be different because death would not be inevitable for it. Immortality would be a real possibility, as long as it can find a hard drive to live in or home online. The one threat it would face would be destruction from humans, either active or passive. Its greatest fear… Read more »
The day of the Butlerian Jihad approaches. One hopes…
Scariest of all would be a woke “social justice” AI: programmed to facilitate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in all else that it does.
Alas, given current conditions, that is also the most likely form of AI. In fact, its development is almost a certitude.
“Scariest of all would be a woke “social justice” AI: programmed to facilitate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in all else that it does.”
Actually that would be the least scary option. An AI programmed with DIE directives would be sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
The scary part would be – what else would it destroy along with itself?
Yarvin posted something today (in typical tedious fashion) relative to GPT / LLM.
I’ll worry about this when my lap top chimes in with a “I’m sorry Dave I can’t allow that”.
Yarvin GPT would be hilarious. Asking how to run in a local election in the prompt would probably create a novel’s worth of output, and it will probably neglect to tell you how to file the stupid application.
Indeed.
According to woke “experts”, one of the problems with the original chat bots is that the conclusions they come up with have been “racist”.
So the next step will likely be to explicitly program them to reject all but “anti-racist” conclusions
Why an AI should automatically be self-aware? Why always mixing Ai with consciousness? I imagined AI as some software able to use very faster more informations than we could, use its database to analyzing past answers to a problem and statistical successful answers/unsuccessful ones, compare that with the context (i.e. the tons of datas) Something like that. I remembered, when Stephen King was a good writer ans not the actual mongoloid wokist, in his book “Charlie”, the bad guy (an Indian…) used a kind of AI computer able to give him probability percentages if he could a) give it the… Read more »
That was “Firestarter.” The bad guy was Rainbird. I agree: I enjoyed King’s stuff pre woke. I even liked a couple of his 90s/ 2000s books, Duma Key and Bag of Bones.
Thanks for the reminder about that book – that was a good darn King book; I read it about 5 years ago. The father/daughter love was powerfully written. I know they just made a movie about it, and I am wondering if the villain was *ahem* recast or humanized.
Oh, my bad, I used the french title 😞
It was Firestarter, yes. A very good novel.
And I was fascinated by this computer.
Let’s imagine an AI which could give us THE better economic program, of course thinking about consequences not only in terms of wealth but of society, health, etc.
What a wonderful tool it could be
(and, IMO, more interesting than those debates about consciousness /skynet human race in slavery etc)
(as a Christian, I don’t believe an AI could have a soul, consequently no desires, no fear)
One debate pertinent to all of this is the question of: How did self-consciousness first arise in human beings?
Did it happen when the connections within the human brain became sufficiently complex?
If so, then the possibility that some sort of consciousness might arise when machines reach a certain threshold level of complexity becomes at least plausible
Try reading “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
Yes. This book presents fascinating insights as to how consciousness might have developed in humans. Although it’s written in clear concise language, be prepared to reread some passages as the main thesis is alien to our everyday thought patterns. But it’s very worthwhile to read (and reread).
I suspect neural complexity is a necessary but insufficient factor of consciousness. The other factors likely lie beyond the ambit of a machine. Ergo, no machine consciousness.
This is an interesting thought.
Is self awareness ACTUALLY the most important aspect of intelligence? Doesn’t self awareness create inefficiency in our species? How much time does our species waste with philosophy, social justice, and all other tedious concerns, when it could be harnessing our intelligence collectively and efficiently to a unified, singular purpose (like an insect hive) rather than all the ridiculous pontificating and mental masturbation we waste brain cells and calories with. Lol
“13 does 50”
“2 own 80”
Shut it down! Shut it down!
Muhammad Ali played dumb to try to avoid the draft, and supposedly tried to come off as bisexual too. He was certainly bright, especially for a boxer.
Less good than Joe Frazier😍
Not everyone who does poorly on an IQ test makes an effort. Still Ali is low 90s at best.
You can find thousands of viral videos on the internet nowadays showing ordinary people going bananas in various social settings (wanton fighting, arguments with store clerks, road rage, etc). This is a tangible indicator that anxiety and stress is rising everywhere and people are in need of venting to blow off emotional steam. At the extreme, random shooting incidents are also a manifestation of this repressed anger. And its getting worse for good reason. The Crazy is escalating at an accelerating pace. Now overlay some fear-mongering and manufactured panic, and you have a formula for instigating mass hysteria and riots.… Read more »
Clearly, the solution to ghetto blacks shooting each other, is to disarm, law-abiding white people.
And we don’t need AI to tell us that, we’ve already got progressives who think they’re smarter than everybody else.
They don’t really need a gambit to introduce a CBDC. The plandemic demonstrated the population’s complacency and willingness to accept pretty much whatever they are told.
I’m unclear on what a CBDC accomplishes that hasn’t already been done. Most dollars are already digital. The regime is already capable of debanking its ideological enemies. Visa and Mastercard could today, if they wished, deny certain categories of purchases. A “CBDC” is not needed for any of this.
Nor do I believe the regime really wants a cashless society.
“ Nor do I believe the regime really wants a cashless society.” Good thought. So far no one has provided me an answer to that question. A truly cashless society could/would not allow untraceable transactions (If I understand the potential). That would seem to me a detriment to our corrupt ruling class. So where’s the “back door” Years ago under Nixon, the war on drugs ramped up into high gear. One proposal circulating in Congress was to pull the old currency switcharoo. Issue new $100 bills and recall the old currency. Of course, drug dealers would be noticed immediately trying… Read more »
Z-man: “We tend to correlate language skills with intelligence and that is not always accurate”… lolz. As one of my favorite bloggers, this is a wonderful contradiction to your insistence upon “the jews” as a group having a “higher IQ” than the White race. The ability to deceive ( LIE ) and con the marks is a sign of a certain kind of intelligence, indeed: that given by the Father of Lies.
What’s interesting is that in societies
around the world, pretty much universally, liars and deceivers are considered the worst sorts of people. Which makes sense: you need to be able to trust what your fellow tribesman is telling you.
Lying to outgroups and strangers is an entirely different thing.
Mainstream media has no problem lying to us, because it sees us as outside it’s tribe. Ditto the Jews..
I think that an AI of sorts has existed for thousands of years. Satanic in thought patterns, with a predilection for small hats.
The Chatbots are the equivalent of music boxes, or even low-tech Teddy Ruxpin dolls. They are not true innovative artificial intelligence as Zman states.
The bigger developments on the frontier of AI is the ability for ‘Deep Learning’ models in medical imaging that can detect a patient’s ethnicity through x-rays, MRI’s and ultrasounds. The scientists have no idea how the AI is doing this, but instead of further research into how this could help humanity they simply call it racist.
Yes, that’s an excellent example. To the extent that the machine accurately reports on reality, we now want it to lie to us to taste. Overlooked are all the pitfalls. In the medical imaging case, perhaps something like reduced ability to detect disease or injury, because to do so might require racial “knowledge,” but that’s been taken off the table…
A thought to keep in mind if you’re ever in the ER and your mystery meat doc is awaiting results of your imaging…
Experts differ widely on these questions: Does consciousness naturally arise when networks become sufficiently complex? What would be the nature of this consciousness? I’m certainly not an expert, but one thing that seems clear to me, is that machine consciousness, should it arise, won’t be— couldn’t be— the same as human consciousness. Our consciousness as human beings consists of much more than our ability to calculate. The conscious thoughts which arise in our brain have already been processed by our unconscious: and our feelings, memories, our sense of morality, intuitions, all play a part in what we think and how… Read more »
Bronze Age Pervert has made the point that these new AI systems are already indistinguishable from the bureaucratic bugmen that they are replacing. So what’s all the fuss? The new Turing Test is to try to tell whether the AI system that refuses to reimburse your doctor visit can be distinguished from the Cigna or Aetna live rep you deal with on the phone. One of my buddies has already developed an AI chatbot rep for his company. I have interacted with it. He gave it a British name and back story. It chats in British idioms. So far, I… Read more »
That’s one thing GPT is very good at: Boring, sanitized, inoffensive responses that suck the life out of you.
People have started using GPT to get discounts and refunds for purchases. Personally, if I was a customer rep, I would give this thing whatever it wants just to make the banal torture end.
Wear your mask, take the jab (“It’s safe and effective”), get your booster(s), stay safe.
Did Mow write this, an Expert from the US government or “Chatbot 2100”?
Beep-beep. Our Sacred Democracy, Biden most popular president ever, Ukraine, Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine. Error 404…
What live rep? It is just a series of phone menu options none of which are helpful.
I’ve been thinking and writing about this for just over eight years and sixteen books (see link to blog). Z is quite correct in his assessments. We are playing with Expert Systems right now and Thinking Machines are either long behind us or a long way off, the useless media hype notwithstanding. Human brains are chemical based, about the speed of sound. A machine would be much closer to light speed. That’s a factor of one million. If we do “make” one or more, we won’t know and they won’t care. Except for a tiny handful of Thinking Machines in… Read more »
“In other words, if you are worried about AI, it is too late.” Nice closer. Has an air of poignancy to it. I suspect that the big talkers of Big Tech — the Eric Schmidts, Yuval Hararis, etc. — are full of shit much more often than not. Do they believe all their own hype? When some of these fellows start hinting at implanting smartphones into human brains by 2030 . . . well, it’s hard to see that as anything but overinflated narcissism and deluded sociopathy. It’s as if they’re fanatically enamored with the futuristic dystopian sci-fi they’ve read… Read more »
Elon Musk suggests that we are already ‘cyber creatures’: a blend of machine and human. It’s just that we carry our smart devices in our hands, and input their information via our visual system. So the upgrade to an implanted system wouldn’t be that much of a change.
Iirc L. Ron Hubbard referred to his techniques— his ideas— as technology. I can kind of see it. What is tech but the physical manifestation of ideas people had?
I think it’s possible to go off the deep end with that and veer into insanity, but all the same.
Scientology is truly an insane belief system. It boggles my mind how otherwise-intelligent people are able to believe it.
Science! that’s why.
I mean, there are Jedis and Klingon speakers, too.
Difference is, Hubbard got political, tried to infiltrate the institutions.
Not for nothing do I call the Zoomers, Generation Cyborg. And the Millennials are little better, if any.
I suspect their “smart 15-minute cities” will work out as well as their original “Model Cities” of the 60s Great Society did: they’ll become the Projects, dangerous, dirty, criminal, and dysfunctional, and eventually be razed. Same with Green New Deal energy and EVs: the world’s largest toxic waste dump in the making. So, what’s the Nefarious Plan? What are these schemers plotting? Yeah, sure, these con men are selling projected income estimates, grifting off the fantasy “investment”. But in reality, it’s worse. They’re throwing themselves a party. They’re celebrating their wondrous selves for saving the world– ten years before any… Read more »
PS- what did Trump call the White cattle corrals, again?
The US version of Wellcome Camps? (The quarantine camps in Australia.)
“Freedom Cities,” I think.
Fits, donnit? Dufus.
(On the other hand, the thirty Oranias went from tin sheds with rusty trickles and patched ragged clothes to sturdy brick buildings, and are about to declare independence from South Africa. Dump a bunch of indentured Pilgrims, white slum dwellers from the East End, or white prison convicts into a hostile wilderness with some hand tools, and their great-grandchildren will be building the columns, cathedrals, and grand forums of the Potomac.)
It’s always hard to know with Silly Valley types how much of their “vision of the future” is based on what they actually think is possible and how much is just an elaborate marketing scheme for their next ripoff startup. The one aspect of their futurology that they know *is* possible is where they envision themselves in a big beach house with a Lambo in the garage. If that means telling you that you need an AI-powered toothbrush that integrates with your Google Calendar (8:00 am – brush teeth), well they’re happy to embarrass themselves again.
“It took a while for humans to realize it was a bad idea to dump human waste into the streets” Hundreds of millions of Indians still shit in the streets, so I guess some operating systems learn slower than others. With that being said, I agree that the doomsday predictions are overblown about AI. HOWEVER, I can tell you one effect of ChatGPT that is 100% happening right now. It is contributing enormously to the declining intelligence of humans. I know of numerous people in my immediate circle that are taking classes and they simply type their essay question into… Read more »
Well, at least the Affirmative Action students will finally improve their grades!
You said a mouthful, Alzabeo: intrinsic, but not very obvious, to all of this nonsense is the idea that “A.I. levels the playing field…no more (intellectual) inequality!”
Pretty funny. If Hollywood were sensible they’d option this as a movie directed by Ridley Scott. But Ed Dutton says we’re just repeating the history of previous societies that hit a peak, then the prosperity brought in the “spiteful mutants” we’re seeing now, along with rapidly declining IQs and birth rates. Soon there won’t be enough smart people to maintain the machines, nor enough mid-smart people to keep the more mundane parts of society going, and it’ll all collapse. It’s already happening in LA, SF, Chicago, NYC.
Yep. ‘Idiocracy’ was prophetic. I think that what’s more likely, is that the small slice of smart people keep getting smarter; while the rest of America continues to dumb down. And any advances in our ability to genetically enhance ourselves— perhaps with the help of AI?— will have first be available only to the wealthy. If they develop a gene alteration that raises a person’s IQ by 30 points— and every other family on your block is having it done to their children— will you want your child to be the dumbest kid in in there first grade class? And… Read more »
Zardoz comes! Zardoz brings us the holy Gun!
Wake me when we reach Nirvana.
we passed it about 70 years ago 😛
I am not a strict materialist; therefore, I do not believe we will be able to create true AI (I know you didn’t address this point directly, but the evolutionary model points towards it). I absolutely agree, however, that the ability to fool people into marveling at a language model and conflating it with AI is the current magic. Much like magic, the power of this deception is it lets the wizard hide behind the curtain. I think most people will not think of themselves as gods in the creation of AI; rather, they will think of the AI as… Read more »
“The point is, we are nowhere near creating genuine artificial intelligence”
I don;t know what “genuine AI” is. AI can’t even be defined properly. If you mean an AI that can broadly emulate human capabilities across a spectrum of well-defined and ill-defined problem solving areas, forget about it (probably). In some areas such as face recognition, and playing the games of Go and chess, chess programs (including neural networks) are beyond the reach of human ability.
It comes down to materialism vs idealism, and sentience vs sapience. The definition and viability of achieving AI is predicated upon your person beliefs within this larger debate.
Busy work for more humans could include things like dirt-farming. The most stable societies in western history were created during the high Middle Ages. Take away easy access to most forms of energy – except for those dedicated to the AI – and we quickly revert to that model.
Maybe AI is behind the Green movement?
“Busy work for more humans could include things like dirt-farming.”
What better busy work for most people? Rewarding, satisfying, life-sustaining (and therefore moral).
Not for everybody, of course, but what kind of people? And in earlier times, what kind of people managed to escape labor and why, what utility did their escape provide society?
Most people were dragged out of ‘poverty’ in service to elites, for labor and then consumption, only to be seen later as useless eaters. Makes you wonder.
Dammit. I knew, I just KNEW, Klaus Schwab is really a robot!
That’s for sure. fauci is a deepfake too!