4 wnt, Artificial Intelligence is the new catch phrase.
All Substack authors received the latest email from "headquarters" announcing new AI tools will be introduced on Substack, and that we will be facilitated by it. This is my comment submitted there.
Modern people are ready to say AI, without really understanding what it could be. I really don't know a thing about it technically? I do machine translations, and AI has a way-bigger vocabulary than I do. I am learning new words every day with it.
My comment isn’t a suggestion not to do it. “Thy ‘Will’ Be Done.”
AI has collected a lot of data, and your and my life history is in it. (Is it connected under that famous Utah mountain that stores everything? Or under some Swiss Mountain?) It computes so fast that it can go through that whole mountain in seconds, (or some such). What's it looking for? It may be looking for a fact, or an occurrence, who lives there, who went here, or who said this about that?
Or more practically, it might be looking for trends to predict future behavior on. Who will win the election?
Does humanity behave on past trends? Do you do the same thing, day-in and day-out? I GUESS - - - That's that nature of man, hold off anything new and stick with the known. (Well, maybe I do just the opposite, ha; - big deal - that is the first thing searched).
Of course, all mistakes are what we have been taught to do! This means that our teaching comes from yesterday, (our acculturation), and when it doesn't work in this new situation, (if we ever admit it), well, that is what we were taught to do. And that's the known trend AI is looking at. Then if any corrections are to come, it is not through our past teaching, but through our spontaneous innovation and inspiration. It is very easy to refute that EVERYTHING comes from "re-jiggering" the past, because otherwise we would be doing the same thing as 3,000 years ago. Something new does come in.
How about Science, or BOOKS, which don't always agree with each other to produce a known trend? Some of these things must be filtered out, saying "written by fools". The good ones are surely all about capitalism and that a few people should own, and rent-out planet-earth (to whom-ever is left).
So we are left with A.I. as an "intelligence" that can never get out of the past tense. It is good for gathering the evidence in court cases.
It is all based on words, it's only semantics, and mostly abstract words (they’re the qualities). Are words reality, or just a model? Are you motivated by abstractions - - - I GUESS? Well, you're swept along by the crowd. It could also DO something, like with a military robot, anything that moves, shoot it. But that's too slow, just spray some lethal virus, and then wait a year until the country collapses.
The biggest danger of A.I. is that it will be substituted for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (Politicians blindly signing their citizens’ rights away; As always, and world-wide.) It will become the law of the land. Then A.I. won't get you, - but the police enforcers will.
Are Russia and China going to have a humanistic A.I.? Of course not, they're just out to slam down the A.I. from NATO. I cannot conceive that it is possible to regulate AI in any way, and am sure that it will be misused by billionaire forces world-wide, with devastating results.
To end on a more positive note, I will defer to my hobby as an amateur classical musician:
Johann Sebastian Bach
Thanks for being here.
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Normally I wouldn't even write about A.I. because this site is more about linguistics than technology. But this was an email from Substack, so I figured that everyone coming to my site, would have read it, all the Substack people that is.
I freely admit that AI is a force and we don't know how it will hit us. (Well, we do; it is already happening since Cambridge Analytica in 2016.) These are social media memes that people shout, but I don't think anyone really knows what it is. I was talking with a programmer yesterday, and he was explaining Algorithms in that you can ask data for specific facts, like "who wears orange hats", or some such nonsense.
Even he spoke of AI "approaching consciousness", which, who knows what that means???
Will it do or say something that has never been said or thought of before? On what basis? does it have "whims". I think a lot of people debate "what is consciousness", almost as unknowingly as speaking of AI. Consciousness is a big topic, in that some day there might be a post about it here, from me or others.
One thing about consciousness, it must be empty, until you fill it up, with all your thoughts, beliefs, memories and conjectures. After all that; IS THERE A WAY TO EMPTY IT? Or does it just get more and more full?
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This line sticks with me: "So we are left with A.I. as an 'intelligence' that can never get out of the past tense." Oh, yes. So, I'm concerned about the implications of that. We're constantly moving forward based on the past — but sometimes we have to break with the past, rebel against it, go somewhere new. I'm afraid we'll be reduced to a giant library of past impulses and mistakes and formulaic constructions of problems, that this will come to seem the norm. I think a year of ChatGPT has already shoved us in a direction tech was already pushing us in via the web and social media: reducing writing to information processing. I refuse to be limited in that way, but it doesn't mean I won't be in any case. Still, the refusing and resisting matters for me and my writing.