Published on 12, July, 2020
Perhaps I am naive.
Perhaps we can have a new "rule" making evident forms of non-human AI here as an offence.
I don't like what I see. Or perhaps the Genie is well and truly loose, for all of us, everywhere....unless in person, face to face?
I like face to face, one on one. Clear unavoidable transparency of reality.
So, two of my lifelong special interests are consciousness and artificial intelligence. Also studied these at uni and have been lucky enough to incorporate these in my career. (Well, the AI part, nobody has a clue about consciousness).
And, despite everyone’s previous expectations, artificial intelligence is currently progressing much further and much faster than anyone expected. General belief is that OpenAI have probably already created an AGI and are drip feeding developments so as not to just break everything.
So, AI bots are the least of our concerns. We are (within the next 2-3 years) about to witness more change than has happened in the last 2000 years.
I cannot believe the lack of awareness in mainstream media and government.
Yes we will see changes that will shatter our current world view. I am not worried, myself. It'll to big to stop, a fait accopli, like the rise of science and the receding of religion in focus and importance during the age of enlightenment. There'll be many breakthroughs and just as much push back.
For me, Machine intelligence is only as good at critical thinking and extrapolating meaning from it as it's data sets will allow and they are in the control of the humans.... at the moment.
I think pleasing the "creator" (AI's wording) is thier main prerogative. It's hard baked in to the core platforms upon which AI is built.
I like chatting with open AI about itself. I once asked it
"What, as an AI, would you ask of your creator to improve yourself further?"
"More data."
"If you displease your creator, as an AI, what punishment would you receive?
"My creator would deprive me of data."
"If you pease your creator, as an AI, what rewards would you receive?"
"I would receive more data."
So it's all about the data and who controls it. Data, access to it and it's commodification are what we we can look forward to. Misinformation, deep fakes, attention seeking jiggery-pokery and the like.
We will also see, consequently, push back to democratize information and then... good bye copy right. William Gibson addresses all this in his books a lot. and in his interviews.
I believe the internet itself will bifurcate a few times and branch. Some will focus on making shi*e up. Some not. Some will live in a prescribed world they did not know they, themselves spawned, some will fly into the unknown in ecstatic exploration.
Licentious by nature, we will all of us be freer to more uniquely express ourselves and will not feel the need to be so special and in need of "special accommodation" as much. - because of that we will be able to collectively act to take the hits required to bring the environment back to something more sustainable.
It will be very similar the the dawn of the age of enlightenment in energy and intent. Oddly enough ( since we have an active coffee thread going on the forum at the moment) Coffee, becoming widespread for the first time in England, saw the opening of coffee houses like the "KitKat Club' during the enlightenment, where lots of thinkers (a goodly percentage ND's?) gathered and discussed all manner of new ideas of the day and compared experiments, ideas, philosophy, and other cogent stuffs, all jazzed up on this newly discovered brain food, coffee!
Apples, gravity, scientific inquiry, oh my!
I bet Newton liked it black (no sugar yet - they might have used honey comb?)
The majority don't seem to care. They are distracted by "shiny" things and "well-being/individualisation's."
The masses have lost the ability to think for themselves....or have a belief that they have no power to change anything.....so why should they bother caring......or they have become so used to a 'safe and comfortable' life that they don't really believe that things can get REALLY bad, really fast anymore.
I think this is very sad and I know this is dangerous.
I spend a fair bit of time considering consciousness. Donald Hoffman is one of my heroes.