A long long time ago people didn’t know anything, and they didn’t know anything for quite a time until they developed complexity in their communications. Once a person can convey thoughts to others, and discuss them, they can then accelerate their learning and develop complexity outside of the person or group. Once this language, and the concepts within it, become universalizable, then a group can group-think. And once group-think, and codification, is possible, it is then also possible for collaboration to exceed the collective abilities of the number of people involved.
For quite a few thousand years humans proceeded in this manner, developing strategies of progress, writing things down so that those that followed could continue the drive forward to something better, but encountering many periods of a retardation of this progressive impetus we can name religious belief; religion is dogmatism, it does not help find the answer because it purports to have already provided it, therefore zero progress. ‘Retardation’ because it often undoes knowledge, and consistently fights hard against it. I once encountered a Jewish orthodox school that banned the internet and all books that were not passed by their internal Jewish Orthodox education council. Sadly this method of deliberate developmental cognitive retardation is not unique to that particular faith group.
Humans have proved to be rather good at thinking, constructing narratives that entertain and conveying complex information over and over again until it becomes mainstream knowledge that anyone can grasp. Maths is the universal language of everything else, a grounding in maths and you can learn anything from language to dance to music to science, simply because everything has a structure. As a species we built machines to help us do work, we figured out how to leave our planet, produce energy from the smallest source, observe beyond what our eyes could see, and examine in rhetoric how we should treat each other. We are a success story, and because of the bad parts of our nature we are also an abomination. The universe holds no other comparable intellect that we are aware of, and it doesn’t need it.
Then, in the 2020s we invented an Ai that works, and we decided on mass to stop thinking entirely and just ask the machine in our pocket what was what. Doggedly following its instructions and output like it was a flawless answer to all things. We have now formed a religion out of our personal stupidity. Could Ai wite this very blog better than me, likely yes, but what soul would it have (I say soul in a non-religious way), what would it reflect other than a pareto of canons and relativism, heavily motivated by its owners and programmers? What use would that output be to anyone who could not then argue with it successfully?
I could ask Ai a question, based on my understanding of Peter Singer’s postulate on personhood, and it could give me his answer, or the answers of those that opposed his conclusions, but it could not give me its answer because it does not think and feel, it computes. I wish for my arguments to be argued against by people, not an aggregating difference engine with counter-revolutionary bias programmed in by the wealthy who do not wish to be eaten. I want racism to argue with, I want a fool, or someone actually smarter than me, I want to know where I have been mistaken or what I’ve missed, I wish to find congruence and rage in equal measure. Ai is playing ping-pong against the upturned other half of the table, the ball will always come back until you miss it.
The best description I have heard… “Ai is the method whereby wealth, specifically those that own the Ai platforms, accesses the output of a range of skills, and for free absorbs and regurgitates them, whilst simultaneously preventing those who actually possess those skills from accessing any wealth for holding them”
Its main purpose I believe, because it is not a needed technology and there are many more valid pursuits we could have our coins invested in, is to make rich people richer, and poor people dumber. Yes we could sit here and espouse the possibilities of how Ai could be a force for good in the world, but we’d both know that whatever we came up with would not happen until some rich c**t could figure out how to get more wealth or power by it. That’s why there are no solutions, because without problems the wealthy could not stay wealthy, without sick people the wealthy cannot stay wealthy, without poverty the rich people cannot be wealthy, without conflict the wealthy cannot produce arms and make money… and on.
I’m with Slavoj Zizek, greed is at the root of most human problems. To me, Ai is just another method of suppression, and it is not our technology it is theirs because we could not make it, we could not power it, we do not control it, we can’t really afford it, and most of us don’t know why we would ever need it..
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