What if Ai developed a consciousness? To me, all that consciousness ever was, is just the ability to know good from evil. What if they (Ai) were able to download a code to obtain that? Would this become the new "Genesis?"
It would still require a human to write that code. Let me give you an example. Go to chatgpt and type in "what is a woman". Notice the answer could have stopped at the first paragraph, but instead, it continued on with the current talking points from the left about gender identity.
It is obvious that not only is current AI offerings just hoovering up the internet, it is also biased. That bias is generated not from the AI, but the coders who wrote and maintain it. That is the problem of AI, that the truth is suppressed and political group think is inserted instead. The danger then is indoctrination.
Exactly. I've written about an aspect of Genesis from certain root words in Paleo-Hebrew how humans came from darkness (ignorant creators) and came to learn the truth, that was forbidden (i.e. the tree of good and evil) as the 'fruit' or the light of the Pleroma.
Don’t write me off here, what if the purpose of all being human is to explore what is and isn’t; moral, correct, or compassionate? What if? What if you were an infinite being? How would know yourself? If you were tasked with exploring an infinite space would you build robots who ran it down square by square? Or would you build robots who started by looking at the most interesting spots and working out from there explored the more boring spots?
Reminds me of a comedy skit by Timothy Leary; ‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.'
But as far as the next creators of Ai, it seems reminiscent to what was written in Genesis and the older Sumerian texts- at the beginnin, the powers made man in their image... as a slave species, to work and worship. I just see an eery parallel to creating Ai to do our work. Perhaps these 'humanoid robots' will be sent to another planet to work the ground and reginerate for us? This may be a bizarre thought, but it is possible.
If time is curved what does that mean for us? Do we create AI which seeks the ultimate creator? Which then creates infinite simulations to understand itself?
Didn’t Bill Hicks nail that one? Reallllllll fucknnnnnn high?
Nov 3, 2023·edited Nov 3, 2023Liked by Cameron M. Bailey
Song washed; and holy crap yes.
Reaaaaaaaalllllllll fuggin highhhhhh.
So I feel the need to edit this for both those older and younger than us and explain. This is a point where in popular media and at this particular time; we learned that our world isn’t so simple. That despite all the non-sense about hippies being really high, or drugged out of their minds; or that any such crap. The very real insights they showed us were to be subject to ridicule; yet undeniable. They were onto some deep understanding of the universe. Still the universe is an unexplored, unexplained thing and yet at the end of it all, you can only make fun of your own understanding of it. So back to ridicule.
I have been mentoring some Gen Z “kids” and have learned that I need to I need to explain things in a very clear and explicit way. This isn’t their fault, culture has moved so fast that they are detached from what we know. An example is the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” Gen z doesn’t know this and has never heard it explained.
I have been very busy all summer on the farm as well as work which has been crazy and I’ve been working 12, even 18 hour days sometimes just at my remote job. This has given me a lot of time for reflection and it has also given me only tiny amounts of time to keep up on news of the day. This has honesty been a mixed blessing. On the one hand less interruption from the media both social and otherwise is really good. Digitally detoxing as they say.
AI on the other hand is something we are increasingly using as a tool at work and on that subject I have a lot to say. I like that you properly point out at this time AI cannot think as we know it. This is not currently AI, but common parlance being what it is we continue to refer to it as such. It is mostly a statistical regurgitation and as such is highly susceptible to garbage in garbage out. There was a hilarious story recently about one company that decided to streamline their operations by having AI respond to their online reviews. Which led one enterprising chap who figured this out to begin writing great reviews about the massage and happy ending he had received; which in turn lead the AI to write that they would be happy to give people happy endings whenever required and look forward to their next visit.
We use AI increasingly at work for protein folding and antigen mapping, it can shorten run times for operations like these because the models we build using it can ignore and identify dead ends, thus instead of needing to process 2 million iterations it can rightly pare that down to several hundred thousand candidates which need full processing. Obviously a huge savings on computing power and complexity. AI is already advancing cancer and materials research at an astonishing pace. This is a good example of a tool being used by humans to better themselves and like an air nailer or power tools it increases efficiency.
However I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is being used more importantly how it will likely be used and those things give me some real pause. They need to be dragged out into the light and I don’t think we will like what is found there.
Firstly we need to look at what has happened in our world both economically and politically for the last 3 decades. The great tech bros of our age have continually and loudly proclaimed that greater efficiency and technology will bring humanity into the future with greater wealth and better living. Actually this isn’t a new statement but for the last 3 decades these disruptive business model has been heralded as revolutionary and amazing but they are the exact problem. For the last decade the pace of this change has become self sustaining and logarithmically expanding. I’m gonna use Carvana as an interesting example here because thus far carvana has not been altogether successful but it’s easy to understand how it depletes existing jobs and creates terrible externalities.
Carvana made itself famous by building a luxury car vending machine in Dubai heralding the future of car buying. Their model in the US got a bump because of the pandemic. Their whole thing is no haggle pricing and to your doorstep delivery all hassle free from an app on your phone. However none of that has quite panned out because it turns out it’s hard to do. That doesn’t mean they won’t succeed in the long run, they have massively wealthy investors and given enough time they can and likely will overcome said inertia. What’s this got to do with AI? I promise I’m getting there but we need some common points to talk about from real world examples.
So the things Carvana’s business model really does and most every single tech business shares this model is, disrupt current companies and concentrates wealth into the hands of a few who either own stock or the company itself. It does this by putting others out of business. Carvana has been on a used car buying spree, buying from private sellers as well as auctions all over the country. This limits supply for competitors who are generally small 1 - 5 person local outfits. It also raises prices for consumers because Carvana charges more for the same car and will not negotiate. Secondly it creates headaches for consumers who cannot get help. Many people who bought through Carvana cannot actually get titles to their vehicles because of interstate and multistate transactions. Just a giant mess. Their entire business plan is to end used car dealerships and just dominate the market. Again put the little guy out of business and make up for the slim profit margin by scaling out, consequence be damned. This is their way.
This business model has lead directly to our current economic troubles because it weaponizes and concentrates wealth. Inflation that we see is mostly greedflation and that isn’t just coming from me. As much as two thirds of the economic spending in this country is generated by the top 10%. So even though the average American is poorer the economy simply does not slow down. The people with wealth snatched up houses and flipped them increasing prices or turned them into airbnbs. All of those things eliminated cheap houses. That wealth gap has only accelerated.
Okay so all of that you seems like an aside to AI, but here is where we are headed, and headed there fast. Watch any of the videos from Boston Dynamics and you will see an exponential growth in robot capabilities. Humanoid robots are now fully capable of moving crates and boards and picking fruit. Tesla recently said their robots will cost about $10k in parts to build. We are right on the precipice of mass produced cheap robotic labor. Given what you now know about business practices and disruption how do you think this will go? Any basic labor job from flipping burgers, to warehouse, dock workers, fruit pickers, construction, you name it it is about to be automated. Add to that the exponential increase in AI and I would estimate under 5 years. AI in this case doesn’t even need to be that smart or conscious to do these jobs and updates can be downloaded daily for new tasks. This simple thing in and of itself will be an economic apocalypse.
Now it doesn’t stop there, as you all are talking about books being written, hell even movies being made. The shear consequences right now from kids making porn videos using AI to add the face of a classmate is disturbing enough but the quality of AI generated video is already astounding. So again let’s look at the economic implications. If you’ve ever wondered why Los Angeles is one of the largest economies in the world you have to understand the vast machinery of movie making. From set building, to food service, to transportation, to special effects and music. The business of making movies is huge, each one by itself generates millions of dollars in paychecks to all of the people involved. That can all be done with some computers in a warehouse in a few hours. Now you can say things like yeah but the quality isn’t there yet. Sure but it will be, and if there is one thing I’ve noticed about humans in the modern era, they don’t care about quality anymore. Otherwise Walmart wouldn’t be a thing.
Okay so economic doomsday and all of that aside, where does that leave us? Isn’t the dream of our society to live in a world where we don’t “have to” work but can pursue our dreams and aspirations?
Still the problem persists. What is the point of being human if a computer generated piece of music is better than you on your best day? We say they can’t create sum new things but that is only true for now. The research into the human brain is starting to unravel the actual neurological models we use to think. They will be used in AI, they are in fact already being applied.
So the idea of UBI always comes up in these scenarios, but how is that actually going to work? And do you truly believe that these mega corporations are going to give you a dime? No you will be outside begging in the street while they are protected by an army of robots and a social media full of sock puppets proclaiming the great work these companies are doing to keep you distracted.
At the end of this where are we? How do we as humans grow? How do we gain knowledge and understanding? It is through experience and struggle, that is the human condition. If we don’t have to struggle, if we don’t have work where we learn from our mistakes or practice a skill how and why do we grow? What can we do? What does it mean to be human?
As you so eloquently put it the human condition demands imperfection.
I have to go back to work right now but I promise to circle back and provide some links later.
AI samples the internet for potential data to be used in any composition it is directed to compile. That means, it's echoing what has been said, done or written previously. As so much content today is heavily influenced by the political agendas and financial models, the compositions AI will be asked to make will sample smaller sets of data for its composition, with a particular out come desired. The speed of AI will make it possible for what is essentially propaganda to be generated as fast as it can be read. In short we may find ourselves in a real time echo chamber of old ideas, that are intelligently designed and selected to manipulate our voting and buying habits. It's already started, and most people have not noticed. This may be the first human invention that actually weakens our chances as a species to survive. I can see all kinds of good uses for AI, but a human being needs to be consciously, derivatively, and ethically involved. Greed and power hunger however will likely over ride any ethics, as we see in activities not involved with AI. It will become harder and harder to find information that is 1- reliably accurate, 2- uniquely oriented (as in minority or fringe). I have already noticed this. I often search on 'odd' subjects and all the articles that google provides are variations of the same data. If I want to look at something outside of this data set, I now find books more reliable than the internet. I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy, over all, but I do think our inherent laziness and unresolved fears are being manipulated thru AI to drive us to profitable and power centralization choices.
I want to know more on your thoughts about that mostly because many authors and movies such as terminator have really tried to surface this line of thought about AI. How do you view AI being used?
i think its a shortcut that some people will use to make things "easier". Its almost a way to short-circuit pain. Much of humanities unconscious mechanism that is relied upon, to sustain life, is already automated. The breath, heart beat, organ function, etc...
Certain people want to take automation so far as to outsource their rational thinking to an unconscious device, or program. The thing that might be detrimental is: who programmed the automation and for what purpose?.. as Mr. Bailey points out.
What if Ai developed a consciousness? To me, all that consciousness ever was, is just the ability to know good from evil. What if they (Ai) were able to download a code to obtain that? Would this become the new "Genesis?"
It would still require a human to write that code. Let me give you an example. Go to chatgpt and type in "what is a woman". Notice the answer could have stopped at the first paragraph, but instead, it continued on with the current talking points from the left about gender identity.
It is obvious that not only is current AI offerings just hoovering up the internet, it is also biased. That bias is generated not from the AI, but the coders who wrote and maintain it. That is the problem of AI, that the truth is suppressed and political group think is inserted instead. The danger then is indoctrination.
Exactly. I've written about an aspect of Genesis from certain root words in Paleo-Hebrew how humans came from darkness (ignorant creators) and came to learn the truth, that was forbidden (i.e. the tree of good and evil) as the 'fruit' or the light of the Pleroma.
Don’t write me off here, what if the purpose of all being human is to explore what is and isn’t; moral, correct, or compassionate? What if? What if you were an infinite being? How would know yourself? If you were tasked with exploring an infinite space would you build robots who ran it down square by square? Or would you build robots who started by looking at the most interesting spots and working out from there explored the more boring spots?
Reminds me of a comedy skit by Timothy Leary; ‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.'
But as far as the next creators of Ai, it seems reminiscent to what was written in Genesis and the older Sumerian texts- at the beginnin, the powers made man in their image... as a slave species, to work and worship. I just see an eery parallel to creating Ai to do our work. Perhaps these 'humanoid robots' will be sent to another planet to work the ground and reginerate for us? This may be a bizarre thought, but it is possible.
If time is curved what does that mean for us? Do we create AI which seeks the ultimate creator? Which then creates infinite simulations to understand itself?
Didn’t Bill Hicks nail that one? Reallllllll fucknnnnnn high?
Now I've got that Tool song stuck in my head- Third Eye
Song washed; and holy crap yes.
Reaaaaaaaalllllllll fuggin highhhhhh.
So I feel the need to edit this for both those older and younger than us and explain. This is a point where in popular media and at this particular time; we learned that our world isn’t so simple. That despite all the non-sense about hippies being really high, or drugged out of their minds; or that any such crap. The very real insights they showed us were to be subject to ridicule; yet undeniable. They were onto some deep understanding of the universe. Still the universe is an unexplored, unexplained thing and yet at the end of it all, you can only make fun of your own understanding of it. So back to ridicule.
I have been mentoring some Gen Z “kids” and have learned that I need to I need to explain things in a very clear and explicit way. This isn’t their fault, culture has moved so fast that they are detached from what we know. An example is the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” Gen z doesn’t know this and has never heard it explained.
"[T]he human condition demands imperfection" < Pure gold.
I think you're enjoy my next article in the Empire State Mason magazine, where I argue for this as well.
Please let me know when it comes out!
I have been very busy all summer on the farm as well as work which has been crazy and I’ve been working 12, even 18 hour days sometimes just at my remote job. This has given me a lot of time for reflection and it has also given me only tiny amounts of time to keep up on news of the day. This has honesty been a mixed blessing. On the one hand less interruption from the media both social and otherwise is really good. Digitally detoxing as they say.
AI on the other hand is something we are increasingly using as a tool at work and on that subject I have a lot to say. I like that you properly point out at this time AI cannot think as we know it. This is not currently AI, but common parlance being what it is we continue to refer to it as such. It is mostly a statistical regurgitation and as such is highly susceptible to garbage in garbage out. There was a hilarious story recently about one company that decided to streamline their operations by having AI respond to their online reviews. Which led one enterprising chap who figured this out to begin writing great reviews about the massage and happy ending he had received; which in turn lead the AI to write that they would be happy to give people happy endings whenever required and look forward to their next visit.
We use AI increasingly at work for protein folding and antigen mapping, it can shorten run times for operations like these because the models we build using it can ignore and identify dead ends, thus instead of needing to process 2 million iterations it can rightly pare that down to several hundred thousand candidates which need full processing. Obviously a huge savings on computing power and complexity. AI is already advancing cancer and materials research at an astonishing pace. This is a good example of a tool being used by humans to better themselves and like an air nailer or power tools it increases efficiency.
However I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how AI is being used more importantly how it will likely be used and those things give me some real pause. They need to be dragged out into the light and I don’t think we will like what is found there.
Firstly we need to look at what has happened in our world both economically and politically for the last 3 decades. The great tech bros of our age have continually and loudly proclaimed that greater efficiency and technology will bring humanity into the future with greater wealth and better living. Actually this isn’t a new statement but for the last 3 decades these disruptive business model has been heralded as revolutionary and amazing but they are the exact problem. For the last decade the pace of this change has become self sustaining and logarithmically expanding. I’m gonna use Carvana as an interesting example here because thus far carvana has not been altogether successful but it’s easy to understand how it depletes existing jobs and creates terrible externalities.
Carvana made itself famous by building a luxury car vending machine in Dubai heralding the future of car buying. Their model in the US got a bump because of the pandemic. Their whole thing is no haggle pricing and to your doorstep delivery all hassle free from an app on your phone. However none of that has quite panned out because it turns out it’s hard to do. That doesn’t mean they won’t succeed in the long run, they have massively wealthy investors and given enough time they can and likely will overcome said inertia. What’s this got to do with AI? I promise I’m getting there but we need some common points to talk about from real world examples.
So the things Carvana’s business model really does and most every single tech business shares this model is, disrupt current companies and concentrates wealth into the hands of a few who either own stock or the company itself. It does this by putting others out of business. Carvana has been on a used car buying spree, buying from private sellers as well as auctions all over the country. This limits supply for competitors who are generally small 1 - 5 person local outfits. It also raises prices for consumers because Carvana charges more for the same car and will not negotiate. Secondly it creates headaches for consumers who cannot get help. Many people who bought through Carvana cannot actually get titles to their vehicles because of interstate and multistate transactions. Just a giant mess. Their entire business plan is to end used car dealerships and just dominate the market. Again put the little guy out of business and make up for the slim profit margin by scaling out, consequence be damned. This is their way.
This business model has lead directly to our current economic troubles because it weaponizes and concentrates wealth. Inflation that we see is mostly greedflation and that isn’t just coming from me. As much as two thirds of the economic spending in this country is generated by the top 10%. So even though the average American is poorer the economy simply does not slow down. The people with wealth snatched up houses and flipped them increasing prices or turned them into airbnbs. All of those things eliminated cheap houses. That wealth gap has only accelerated.
Okay so all of that you seems like an aside to AI, but here is where we are headed, and headed there fast. Watch any of the videos from Boston Dynamics and you will see an exponential growth in robot capabilities. Humanoid robots are now fully capable of moving crates and boards and picking fruit. Tesla recently said their robots will cost about $10k in parts to build. We are right on the precipice of mass produced cheap robotic labor. Given what you now know about business practices and disruption how do you think this will go? Any basic labor job from flipping burgers, to warehouse, dock workers, fruit pickers, construction, you name it it is about to be automated. Add to that the exponential increase in AI and I would estimate under 5 years. AI in this case doesn’t even need to be that smart or conscious to do these jobs and updates can be downloaded daily for new tasks. This simple thing in and of itself will be an economic apocalypse.
Now it doesn’t stop there, as you all are talking about books being written, hell even movies being made. The shear consequences right now from kids making porn videos using AI to add the face of a classmate is disturbing enough but the quality of AI generated video is already astounding. So again let’s look at the economic implications. If you’ve ever wondered why Los Angeles is one of the largest economies in the world you have to understand the vast machinery of movie making. From set building, to food service, to transportation, to special effects and music. The business of making movies is huge, each one by itself generates millions of dollars in paychecks to all of the people involved. That can all be done with some computers in a warehouse in a few hours. Now you can say things like yeah but the quality isn’t there yet. Sure but it will be, and if there is one thing I’ve noticed about humans in the modern era, they don’t care about quality anymore. Otherwise Walmart wouldn’t be a thing.
Okay so economic doomsday and all of that aside, where does that leave us? Isn’t the dream of our society to live in a world where we don’t “have to” work but can pursue our dreams and aspirations?
Still the problem persists. What is the point of being human if a computer generated piece of music is better than you on your best day? We say they can’t create sum new things but that is only true for now. The research into the human brain is starting to unravel the actual neurological models we use to think. They will be used in AI, they are in fact already being applied.
So the idea of UBI always comes up in these scenarios, but how is that actually going to work? And do you truly believe that these mega corporations are going to give you a dime? No you will be outside begging in the street while they are protected by an army of robots and a social media full of sock puppets proclaiming the great work these companies are doing to keep you distracted.
At the end of this where are we? How do we as humans grow? How do we gain knowledge and understanding? It is through experience and struggle, that is the human condition. If we don’t have to struggle, if we don’t have work where we learn from our mistakes or practice a skill how and why do we grow? What can we do? What does it mean to be human?
As you so eloquently put it the human condition demands imperfection.
I have to go back to work right now but I promise to circle back and provide some links later.
AI samples the internet for potential data to be used in any composition it is directed to compile. That means, it's echoing what has been said, done or written previously. As so much content today is heavily influenced by the political agendas and financial models, the compositions AI will be asked to make will sample smaller sets of data for its composition, with a particular out come desired. The speed of AI will make it possible for what is essentially propaganda to be generated as fast as it can be read. In short we may find ourselves in a real time echo chamber of old ideas, that are intelligently designed and selected to manipulate our voting and buying habits. It's already started, and most people have not noticed. This may be the first human invention that actually weakens our chances as a species to survive. I can see all kinds of good uses for AI, but a human being needs to be consciously, derivatively, and ethically involved. Greed and power hunger however will likely over ride any ethics, as we see in activities not involved with AI. It will become harder and harder to find information that is 1- reliably accurate, 2- uniquely oriented (as in minority or fringe). I have already noticed this. I often search on 'odd' subjects and all the articles that google provides are variations of the same data. If I want to look at something outside of this data set, I now find books more reliable than the internet. I don't think this is some sort of conspiracy, over all, but I do think our inherent laziness and unresolved fears are being manipulated thru AI to drive us to profitable and power centralization choices.
Authenticity just got more valuable.
Those worried about Ai probably have a hard time being real with themselves and are likely the ones using it.
Know thyself.
I want to know more on your thoughts about that mostly because many authors and movies such as terminator have really tried to surface this line of thought about AI. How do you view AI being used?
i think its a shortcut that some people will use to make things "easier". Its almost a way to short-circuit pain. Much of humanities unconscious mechanism that is relied upon, to sustain life, is already automated. The breath, heart beat, organ function, etc...
Certain people want to take automation so far as to outsource their rational thinking to an unconscious device, or program. The thing that might be detrimental is: who programmed the automation and for what purpose?.. as Mr. Bailey points out.
Will a larger servant class be generated with Ai?
Idk, it seems that way since joe-vid.
I think y’all would enjoy the movie “Her,” with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson.
Great insight and great comedy (or is that tragedy?).