In the past few days I’ve been in deep thought about the role and potential of Artificial Intelligence to take over the world as it were. Being somebody who routinely works with these systems and whose livelihood is ironically under threat from it, I am aware of the benefits and limitations of those systems that have been rolled out to the public thus far. I’ve tended to lean towards the idea that this is a useful tool but not necessarily a game changer for life on Earth as we know it, perhaps akin to the invention of the automobile making horse and buggies obsolete.
I have been in a certain existential crisis over the technology as it is capable of besting what I can do on so many fronts. For a brief time I was a starving artist selling portraits on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, for example. The technology was already there back then, with a camera and photoshop edits, to create an artistic representation of a person in many different styles, so clearly the business was not viable. I’ve been meaning to use my time away from smart phone scrolling to finish an oil painting of a leopard, but have lacked the motivation since Gabby AI can whip up something of quality in less than 10 seconds.
Leopard and cub I painted many moons ago. Gabby AI came up with this one below in 10 seconds: it’s not great but it sure didn’t take it 15 hours:
AI obviously endangers an entire swath of the creative class from writers, editors, film editors, musicians and the like. I can imagine a place in the not too distant future where the AI could be tasked with writing a hit song, say. If programmed correctly it could comb through google search trends to determine the current cultural zeitgeist, then combine this with popular music trends to determine the correct genre. It can then proceed to make a music video that is the most relevant and hard hitting to the greatest number of people with perfectly in tune vocals. If this song is then boosted by search trends and suggested video boxes it could climb the charts in no time. Good bye woke culture! Or perhaps hello to even more of it. It is all about the inputs that programmed the system.
If the Covid crisis has taught me anything in the past three years, it is that the inputs, however, are all about creating division and consolidating control. Of course to allow bad ideas contrary to human dignity and progress to flourish they needed to be promoted constantly while others were suppressed. The search algorithms and social media companies were all set to the task of behavior modification. The end goal of the test seemed to be to get Covid vaccines into as much of the human species as possible. And now to pretend that nothing ever happened.
There are alarm bells being raised regarding AI:
An open letter, published by Future of Life Institute and signed by Elon Musk and other tech industry leaders, called for a six month moratorium on developing AI more powerful than GPT-4. MIT professor and head of Future of Life Institute, Max Tegmark, commented, “It is unfortunate to frame this as an arms race. It is more of a suicide race. It doesn’t matter who is going to get there first. It just means that humanity as a whole could lose control of its own destiny.” AI expert at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Eliezer Yudkowsky, calls for an “absolute shutdown,” warning of what may happen when AI becomes sentient and more intelligent than humans, stating, “the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die… Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ‘that is the obvious thing that would happen.’” Yudowksy argues that a super-intelligent, self-aware AI “would not value us” or any other life on Earth, and could opt for building “artificial life forms.” Meanwhile, Bill Gates dismissed calls for a moratorium on developing AI, stating that a pause would not “solve the challenges” that super AI poses.
Now we seem to be in the mop up stage of cooling the marks, if you will. The mRNA technology was not perfect, and maybe targeting the spike protein of the Covid virus wasn’t such a good idea, and hey look over there! There’s some not a virus conspiracy loons! Let’s argue!
As I have said before, I do believe those bioresearch people in white coats with the microscopes are indeed looking at something. I also believe that they are tinkering with something. I think they’ve probably run thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of experiments. Whether AI is capable of achieving any sentience or not it is extremely useful for tracking, tagging and sorting of the mass of humanity. But could it really represent something else? I’m back to the microchips.
Hmmm. Where have a heard something about graphene before?
I personally believe that AI cannot and will not, achieve any type of sentience in its current form. The reason for this is because the things that comprise human consciousness are inherently tied to biological functions of which AI does not have any knowledge or capability of understanding. Things like breathing, sleeping, eating, peeing, drinking water and a whole host of automatic reactions that occur in our bodies daily are all part of an inherently complex biological reality. When you combine that with the biological complexity of just the space we occupy it already exceeds computing power. It’s infinite.
AI is excellent at controlling the screens we stare at and a sort of two dimensional space of hearing and sight. I suspect that its capability at producing deepfake videos or perhaps even holographic projections of people or things will grow exponentially. What they’ve actually been able to achieve by trying to make a humannoid robot are laughable so far when you see the actual display. We’re a long way from creating puppies entirely out of circuitry and I don’t think life can be made entirely out of circuitry. To be realistic the puppy would have to then grow up hopefully grow old and eventually die. The inevitability of death is certainly not programmed into the AI. For the longest time I’ve viewed it as the tinkering of crazy old billionaires who dream of immortality for themselves.
The only way such sentience could try to achieve human consciousness though is by somehow merging with actual people. Would anybody have been interested in running those tests? There certainly would have been a lot of interest in the idea, even by sincerely well meaning people who supposedly want to save the world. I really laughed at the ending of this video.
Of course it hasn’t exactly gone to plan on that. We can argue all we want on the ineffectiveness and not safety of the Covid vaccines. One thing I think we all will agree on is not a single jabbed person suddenly morphed into some type of super intelligent live forever Marvel super hero character due to them. I believe this is because such interventions are ultimately incompatible with what consciousness is. They block consciousness not add to it. I don’t think there is a fix for that.
But since these supercircuitry can now be only a few atoms thick could they be intentionally added to certain batches of say Covid jabs? Could there have been attempts to get mRNA to reproduce them in the body? This is speculation and an entirely open question. Hey maybe I’ll finally get a factchecker to notice me! Actually factcheckers, can I get a job? I think the AI in even ChatGPT could definitely take their place!
What do you all think?
For all the vaunted speed of technical execution, everything I’ve seen produced by these things is *soulless*. I would take your painting over the bot fart in a heartbeat. That’s something that I don’t think can be approached by any neural net or machine learning. The good stuff—the art and music that moves and touches you—has soul. That’s what gives it its power.
As a corollary, I think biology is much more complex than we currently understand it, or at least pretend that we do. It’s the hidden mystery, vast as an ocean (and as unexplored), that will stymie even the fastest, most accurate calculations. Complexity isn’t about speed or even accuracy. We’re at a point now where they’re playing with lego blocks…and creation, suffice to say, is infinitely more complex.
AI is a reflection of how stupid humanity has become. Like a dog that drops the bone from is mouth when it sees it's reflection in a pond of another dog with a bigger bone in its mouth. Welcome to digital oriborus