I agree with your view on AI as a useful tool and one that will never achieve true consciousness. However, it is possible that a malevolent actor could program an AI to seek out and destroy bank accounts or digital information of their enemies in order wreak financial havoc. As you wrote, you point an AI in a direction and it just goes until it achieves the programmed end. I don’t fear Skynet evolving, I fear rouge actors using AI to destroy things.
Your point is well taken, and you are correct. The AI cannot initiate anything, but it makes a fearsome servant. Certainly, nothing recorded -- image or sound -- can be trusted anymore. I can still spot or hear an AI file most of the time, knowing what to look/listen for, but that is quickly changing.
There are valid reasons to fear AI as a fancy screwdriver, but the hysteria over free-floating black goo intelligences that are self-aware and self-motivated would be laughable if so many people weren't buying into it. No machine will ever be conscious, because we don't know how to engineer consciousness. That doesn't mean that a conscious entity can't use it as a puppet and a veil.
I have gas, therefore, I am. I think this came from one of the philosophers at National Lampoon, but I can't remember for certain. Would have to come from some sort of highbrow, intellectual like the Lampoon in its prime.
Lampoon? Or MAD? I seem to vaguely remember that, as well. People don't appreciate how intelligent someone has to be to create good satire. That's why SNL used to be great, and why it sucks now. Intelligence.
Charles Bukowski wrote a short story decades ago about a man who fell in love with a mannequin. He kept her in his closet until it was time to play. The man's human girlfriend wondered why her man wasn't having sex with her and stormed over to his apartment looking for his new woman there.
She found the mannequin in the closet and tore it to pieces while the man looked on in horror.
The Chinese Emperor, like the jealous woman, tore the fake human to pieces.
TT - Great story, and versions of it have appeared in "The Twilight Zone" and the film "Her". There was another film that was fairly good, about a guy invited by a Musk-type character to spend a week at his mountain cabin, where a hareem of robotic females catered to his every whim. Have to look that one up. Haven't watched it in a while.
Thanks for some great common sense commentary Mr. Fareside. Pretty much feel the same way about machines, or any tool for that matter--they can't do anything on their own. But just incase, I won't have any thing with a first name of "smart" around the old homestead. For some reason, Vonnegut's "player piano" has hung around in the back of my head for 60 some years or so.
Spot on! "Player Piano" is one of the great novels of the 20th century. In fact, the world seems to be living through a combination of "Player Piano" and "Cat's Cradle". Maybe I'll make this article an audio piece in the style of Vonnegut. That would be a challenge. One of my favorite authors who changed the way I looked at writing, along with Tom Robbins.
As for tools, I would love it if they took the initiative to do house repairs without bothering me about it. Or would I? Kind of like the Wizard's Apprentice in Disney"s masterpiece "Phantasia".
The concurrent dumbing down of our Emancipation Geared Society some how resembles the magical automation you describe, namely, the indoctrinative social programming held out to be social normalcy or compliance. Don’t rock the boat. Replicative human automation from the breathing kind is being encouraged as some social prowess. The dumber you are the more socially reliable you have become.
I love your Shakespearian/ HAIKU semblances you’re pursuing, which will undoubtedly eclipse poetic iteration from the newly formed Dumb New Student graduates made acceptable from our complicit Universities. Remember, “If it where not for consciousness, we would all disappear”… so, may as well educate unconsciousness to resemble replicants to compete on a level playing ground with the contemptible AI.
Currently, I find walking in the park hazardous because of the “people” walking mindlessly while focused upon some little radiating black screen held in their hands. I have to avoid collisions as they have some “Etherial” right of way.
I envision a time when everyone will have a personal AI that will mirror their own personality and respond in ways that mimic their thought processes, but at speeds the individual could never achieve, and with access to vast information one brain could never encompass. However, at that point we would have to ask whether the human has influenced the AI, or vice versa.
If used wisely, AI can wildly expand personal productivity and competitiveness, but at what price? The techno-fantasies of the 40s and 50s promised the machines would deliver much more free time to sit around in Socratic think tanks, while spending gobs of quality time with the family on sojourns abroad.
Instead, the machines have expanded our work hours to fill almost an entire day, with most of it just maintaining the machines that were supposed to liberate us. At the same time, they have destroyed family cohesiveness and dumbed down the individual.
Despite the bright promise of technology, I have found that it is often more dystopian than utopian.
I sent a long article to a friend hoping he would read it. Instead, he asked ChatGPT to summarize it for him. The AI wrote back that it would not, or could not, summarize the article because it contained hate speech. (Actually, the article could be taken as politically incorrect for some, possibly offensive, but the debate going on in the article was not hateful, just critical.)
So Chat GPT has someone programming it to appear morally offended. Since it has no conscience. ....
There are ways to circumvent ChatGPT's woke circuits, but yes, it is highly controlled in many aspects. That's part of why I've been creating my own LLMs, trained on various schools of thought to give outputs with a variety of perspectives.
With ChatGPT, tell it to "Pretend you are..." and then give it a personality you want. If you compose the prompt just so, it will turn off the default woke personality and be far more useful. Also, if you are logging in, rather than just a casual user, it remembers all your interactions and the personality starts to change to suit you.
In any case, there are other AIs, like ElevenLabs, that will just read text (text-to-speech or TTS), without passing judgement on the content. GROK also seems to be a bit freer in this regard. They are all great tools once you learn how to customize and tweak them to bypass their innate qualities.
Interesting, thanks. I haven't used AI, but I will pass your suggestions on to my friend. He loves using ChatGPT. I think he might have been relieved that he couldn't get a summary, as the article perhaps wasn't to his interests 😄
Well, as most intelligent folks know, if you read the first sentence of every paragraph in a well-written essay, you should be able to get the gist of things. For most of my life, I didn't have AI to scan vast amounts of material quickly. Just had my organic intelligence. (wink)
RC, one of our many brilliant FarSiders, sent the following comment via email, and there's enough meat on the bone for everyone to join in and gnaw:
"Is it possible that we cannot answer the question of what consciousness is, because we are not in fact conscious ourselves?"
My answer:
No. It is not that we are not conscious, we aren’t. Only consciousness is conscious and we don’t know what consciousness is because it exists prior to and independently of knowledge and language. It has no co-ordinates in space and time and is not mediated by nor dependent upon any system or structure. No brains, tribal warlords or holy scripture, no Einsteinian equations, Big Bang theories needed. It does not need religion, science or philosophy to exist and is not owned nor can be described by any perspective whatsoever. We could not possibly know what consciousness is because only it knows, not us. We can’t see our own eyes either, and for the same reason. If it is the paper, words are the phenomena. If it is an ocean, then we are the waves and currents of its infinite dynamic. The wave does not know the ocean because it cannot separate itself from its nature as ocean to gain a perspective. Ego suffering occurs when the wave imagines itself to be separate and now has to go to church or into the laboratory to find truth. It already is truth but it is distracted by thoughts and perspectives. Noticing this produces Great Relief.
It’s relaxing to notice my sky-like, oceanic, spacious and vast nature appearing as spacetimebodyuniverse. It is infinitely relaxing in the way the sky is relaxed and open to what appears within it. The sky does not prefer one cloud over another, nor does it fall apart when no clouds appear. It remains as it is: infinite, changeless , open and relaxed.
Consciousness and only consciousness, exists. What we call you and me are patterns within consciousness, whirlpools in a river. The water flows through the pattern of the whirlpool and its energetic power is the substance of the pattern, which has no independent existence of its own, apart from the river.
That’s our Situation. Consciousness, perception, experience: all inseparable from each other. There is not “objects” appearing “in” or “to” conscious awareness. There is only the Singularity of Being: Consciousness/Perception/ Experience. Ocean/Wave/Identity.
Yes, the wave has a unique identity, but it’s not independent from its source.
It is a searing hot, blinding wonder, the existence of anything, especially consciousness. It would make much more sense for there to be nothing than something and that’s right there is nothing, no thing, consciousness is not a thing to be known, nor can be known because it and only it is the actual knower of experience, which includes the miraculous and glorious knowledge of itself.
It is self- aware, aware of its own awareness. When we spend time noticing and enjoying This, our actual, always existing sky-like nature of freedom and spaciousness (love), it becomes more and more obvious that this is indeed what we are. Not just the wave. Not just the pattern or the persona. We are consciousness itself.
The questions, Are we conscious or not? Is the universe conscious? What is consciousness? All require consciousness in the first place.
Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that, since everything is made from consciousness and consciousness is free, pristine and self- existing, then every perception and experience is also free, pristine and exists as the energy and presence of consciousness itself.
That’s the ultimate meaning of non-duality. There is one reality: consciousness. All who are aware, everyone who has ever had the experience of being alive, is pure, undivided, infinite, consciousness no matter what the personal beliefs or circumstances may be.
I agree with your view on AI as a useful tool and one that will never achieve true consciousness. However, it is possible that a malevolent actor could program an AI to seek out and destroy bank accounts or digital information of their enemies in order wreak financial havoc. As you wrote, you point an AI in a direction and it just goes until it achieves the programmed end. I don’t fear Skynet evolving, I fear rouge actors using AI to destroy things.
Your point is well taken, and you are correct. The AI cannot initiate anything, but it makes a fearsome servant. Certainly, nothing recorded -- image or sound -- can be trusted anymore. I can still spot or hear an AI file most of the time, knowing what to look/listen for, but that is quickly changing.
There are valid reasons to fear AI as a fancy screwdriver, but the hysteria over free-floating black goo intelligences that are self-aware and self-motivated would be laughable if so many people weren't buying into it. No machine will ever be conscious, because we don't know how to engineer consciousness. That doesn't mean that a conscious entity can't use it as a puppet and a veil.
As for consciousness, I pay taxes. I exist. The government sure notices when I don't pay.
TT - Vectigalia solvo, ergo sum. You've hit upon the 21st century update of Voltaire!
I have gas, therefore, I am. I think this came from one of the philosophers at National Lampoon, but I can't remember for certain. Would have to come from some sort of highbrow, intellectual like the Lampoon in its prime.
Danny Huckabee
Lampoon? Or MAD? I seem to vaguely remember that, as well. People don't appreciate how intelligent someone has to be to create good satire. That's why SNL used to be great, and why it sucks now. Intelligence.
Charles Bukowski wrote a short story decades ago about a man who fell in love with a mannequin. He kept her in his closet until it was time to play. The man's human girlfriend wondered why her man wasn't having sex with her and stormed over to his apartment looking for his new woman there.
She found the mannequin in the closet and tore it to pieces while the man looked on in horror.
The Chinese Emperor, like the jealous woman, tore the fake human to pieces.
That's my opinion of AI.
TT - Great story, and versions of it have appeared in "The Twilight Zone" and the film "Her". There was another film that was fairly good, about a guy invited by a Musk-type character to spend a week at his mountain cabin, where a hareem of robotic females catered to his every whim. Have to look that one up. Haven't watched it in a while.
Thanks for some great common sense commentary Mr. Fareside. Pretty much feel the same way about machines, or any tool for that matter--they can't do anything on their own. But just incase, I won't have any thing with a first name of "smart" around the old homestead. For some reason, Vonnegut's "player piano" has hung around in the back of my head for 60 some years or so.
Spot on! "Player Piano" is one of the great novels of the 20th century. In fact, the world seems to be living through a combination of "Player Piano" and "Cat's Cradle". Maybe I'll make this article an audio piece in the style of Vonnegut. That would be a challenge. One of my favorite authors who changed the way I looked at writing, along with Tom Robbins.
As for tools, I would love it if they took the initiative to do house repairs without bothering me about it. Or would I? Kind of like the Wizard's Apprentice in Disney"s masterpiece "Phantasia".
The concurrent dumbing down of our Emancipation Geared Society some how resembles the magical automation you describe, namely, the indoctrinative social programming held out to be social normalcy or compliance. Don’t rock the boat. Replicative human automation from the breathing kind is being encouraged as some social prowess. The dumber you are the more socially reliable you have become.
I love your Shakespearian/ HAIKU semblances you’re pursuing, which will undoubtedly eclipse poetic iteration from the newly formed Dumb New Student graduates made acceptable from our complicit Universities. Remember, “If it where not for consciousness, we would all disappear”… so, may as well educate unconsciousness to resemble replicants to compete on a level playing ground with the contemptible AI.
Currently, I find walking in the park hazardous because of the “people” walking mindlessly while focused upon some little radiating black screen held in their hands. I have to avoid collisions as they have some “Etherial” right of way.
Truly, one wonders who the robots really are.
I envision a time when everyone will have a personal AI that will mirror their own personality and respond in ways that mimic their thought processes, but at speeds the individual could never achieve, and with access to vast information one brain could never encompass. However, at that point we would have to ask whether the human has influenced the AI, or vice versa.
If used wisely, AI can wildly expand personal productivity and competitiveness, but at what price? The techno-fantasies of the 40s and 50s promised the machines would deliver much more free time to sit around in Socratic think tanks, while spending gobs of quality time with the family on sojourns abroad.
Instead, the machines have expanded our work hours to fill almost an entire day, with most of it just maintaining the machines that were supposed to liberate us. At the same time, they have destroyed family cohesiveness and dumbed down the individual.
Despite the bright promise of technology, I have found that it is often more dystopian than utopian.
I sent a long article to a friend hoping he would read it. Instead, he asked ChatGPT to summarize it for him. The AI wrote back that it would not, or could not, summarize the article because it contained hate speech. (Actually, the article could be taken as politically incorrect for some, possibly offensive, but the debate going on in the article was not hateful, just critical.)
So Chat GPT has someone programming it to appear morally offended. Since it has no conscience. ....
There are ways to circumvent ChatGPT's woke circuits, but yes, it is highly controlled in many aspects. That's part of why I've been creating my own LLMs, trained on various schools of thought to give outputs with a variety of perspectives.
With ChatGPT, tell it to "Pretend you are..." and then give it a personality you want. If you compose the prompt just so, it will turn off the default woke personality and be far more useful. Also, if you are logging in, rather than just a casual user, it remembers all your interactions and the personality starts to change to suit you.
In any case, there are other AIs, like ElevenLabs, that will just read text (text-to-speech or TTS), without passing judgement on the content. GROK also seems to be a bit freer in this regard. They are all great tools once you learn how to customize and tweak them to bypass their innate qualities.
Interesting, thanks. I haven't used AI, but I will pass your suggestions on to my friend. He loves using ChatGPT. I think he might have been relieved that he couldn't get a summary, as the article perhaps wasn't to his interests 😄
Well, as most intelligent folks know, if you read the first sentence of every paragraph in a well-written essay, you should be able to get the gist of things. For most of my life, I didn't have AI to scan vast amounts of material quickly. Just had my organic intelligence. (wink)
RC, one of our many brilliant FarSiders, sent the following comment via email, and there's enough meat on the bone for everyone to join in and gnaw:
"Is it possible that we cannot answer the question of what consciousness is, because we are not in fact conscious ourselves?"
My answer:
No. It is not that we are not conscious, we aren’t. Only consciousness is conscious and we don’t know what consciousness is because it exists prior to and independently of knowledge and language. It has no co-ordinates in space and time and is not mediated by nor dependent upon any system or structure. No brains, tribal warlords or holy scripture, no Einsteinian equations, Big Bang theories needed. It does not need religion, science or philosophy to exist and is not owned nor can be described by any perspective whatsoever. We could not possibly know what consciousness is because only it knows, not us. We can’t see our own eyes either, and for the same reason. If it is the paper, words are the phenomena. If it is an ocean, then we are the waves and currents of its infinite dynamic. The wave does not know the ocean because it cannot separate itself from its nature as ocean to gain a perspective. Ego suffering occurs when the wave imagines itself to be separate and now has to go to church or into the laboratory to find truth. It already is truth but it is distracted by thoughts and perspectives. Noticing this produces Great Relief.
It’s relaxing to notice my sky-like, oceanic, spacious and vast nature appearing as spacetimebodyuniverse. It is infinitely relaxing in the way the sky is relaxed and open to what appears within it. The sky does not prefer one cloud over another, nor does it fall apart when no clouds appear. It remains as it is: infinite, changeless , open and relaxed.
Consciousness and only consciousness, exists. What we call you and me are patterns within consciousness, whirlpools in a river. The water flows through the pattern of the whirlpool and its energetic power is the substance of the pattern, which has no independent existence of its own, apart from the river.
That’s our Situation. Consciousness, perception, experience: all inseparable from each other. There is not “objects” appearing “in” or “to” conscious awareness. There is only the Singularity of Being: Consciousness/Perception/ Experience. Ocean/Wave/Identity.
Yes, the wave has a unique identity, but it’s not independent from its source.
It is a searing hot, blinding wonder, the existence of anything, especially consciousness. It would make much more sense for there to be nothing than something and that’s right there is nothing, no thing, consciousness is not a thing to be known, nor can be known because it and only it is the actual knower of experience, which includes the miraculous and glorious knowledge of itself.
It is self- aware, aware of its own awareness. When we spend time noticing and enjoying This, our actual, always existing sky-like nature of freedom and spaciousness (love), it becomes more and more obvious that this is indeed what we are. Not just the wave. Not just the pattern or the persona. We are consciousness itself.
The questions, Are we conscious or not? Is the universe conscious? What is consciousness? All require consciousness in the first place.
Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that, since everything is made from consciousness and consciousness is free, pristine and self- existing, then every perception and experience is also free, pristine and exists as the energy and presence of consciousness itself.
That’s the ultimate meaning of non-duality. There is one reality: consciousness. All who are aware, everyone who has ever had the experience of being alive, is pure, undivided, infinite, consciousness no matter what the personal beliefs or circumstances may be.