AI-23 - part#1 an exploratory surgery
The AI fear-porn is about the control of all narratives
I have written a few posts about AI:
I watched days’ worth of videos on the subject, read dozens of articles and a couple of books. I was completely absorbed by the subject and as time goes by, I keep tripping over the same questions with no answers. With every article, lecture and debate I am getting more and more alarmed. This is one of, if not THE most important subject of our times. If we cannot even get the questions right, we are doomed.
It seems that I just cannot leave the subject as it would not do me the courtesy of leaving me alone.
I agree with most of its promoters and detractors about its importance, but not for the reasons they give. The narrative has two faces and they are both wrong. AI will be neither our saviour nor our destroyer. For better or worse, it can only be our enabler. Not understanding this is the danger.
Not understanding the political drivers around it is the danger.
Not understanding the foundation and the boundaries of AI is the danger.
Not understanding what AI can but even more importantly what it CANNOT be used for is the danger.
Not understanding, not analyzing how it is actually used is the danger.
In the posts linked above, my problem, as usual, was trying to say too much. In this rejoinder I decided to separate these questions into four sections (posts).
The politics – why are we even talking about it
AI is just another globalist fear-porn scam to advance the globalist drive toward a totalitarian dystopia. Allowing nefarious entities to gain control over it is an existential danger to human civilization.Epistemology – restating the obvious
What enables the scam is our religious attitude towards it.AI is the lates religion in a godless world and like any other, it is just a projection of our fears and desires. It is essential to properly frame our expectations both for and against.Technology – right or wrong, it’s a tool
AI is a wonderful promise and a real threat to our economy and society we need to look at it with a pragmatic perspective.Reality – illustrated, controlled or defined
The problem can be easily illustrated by some ChatGPT and Bing search examples.
What we need is a coherent vision for the future of AI, not a fear porn phantasy.
The real danger is locking AI into a phony paradigm
After this lengthy introduction, let’s start with the first, the politics.
It is the politics that alarms me the most. As I made the point before, the concern about AI is just the latest of the globalist fear-porn utopias. To understand the nature of my alarm, let me illustrate it with two very personal stories. The first happened in Paris 1980, the second in Ireland in 2010.
After I left then still communist Hungary, I was living in Paris waiting for my Canadian immigration papers. One night, I was in the subway with two Hungarian friends. The platform was full, but not crowded. What happened to me took less then three seconds. Describing it will take substantially more.
When the subway stopped and the doors opened, I tried to get in with my friends in tow. The person in front of me stepped in and turned around, blocking my way. As I tried to get around him, we were doing the typical yield shuffle, when we both step in the same direction trying to give room for the other. At the same time, I was pushed from behind by someone who stepped in between me and my friends behind me. Suddenly, it all felt very strange. First, it was night, not that busy. There was no need for the push. Second, the guy facing me was looking into my eyes while doing the shuffle. That NEVER happens in an ‘organic’ situation. As I was looking into the eyes of the one facing me, I lifted my left hand to grab the wrist of the third holding my valet in his hand.
I was targeted by a team of pick-pockets with a classic technique. A blocker and a pusher for distraction, a lifter and quite possibly a mule to take the loot to a safe distance from the other three. As I said, it took less then three seconds. My friends did not even notice that something happened. The split second that stuck with me the most was the moment of realization that something was wrong.In 2010 one of my brothers was living in Ireland. I grabbed my other brother, a cousin and my wife to go to visit him. It was a beautiful trip with gorgeous hikes up to Croagh Patrick and Skellig Island.
On one of our drives, we stopped at a lookout point. There was an Ice-cream truck parking there. We parked maybe fifty feet from it. I went for an ice-cream. There was a woman in front of me. The Ice-cream guy was ‘working’ on her order with an irrationally frenzied eagerness. I found his behaviour both disgusting and puzzling. There was no reason for the frenzy or the submissive eagerness. There was also no reason for the wad of cash that he was handling the payments with. I gave him a bill, he gave me the ice-cream and some coins, then immediately turned away to busy himself with something. I took the ice-cream, put the change in my pocket, took two steps, then I turned back to him saying: ‘but I gave you a 20 Euro bill! Where is the rest of my money?’ ‘No’ he said ‘you gave me a five’ as he pulled the wad of cash out of his pocket. ‘See? It is here right on the top.’His behaviour was the distraction to hold my attention while he was fleecing me.
He refused to give me my money back.
This is how I feel when I am looking at the discussions about Artificial General Intelligence.
Alarmed and violated.
The talks about AI have all the earmarks of manipulative propaganda. All the earmarks of criminal scams.
The frenzied urgency and the pickpockets’ block, push and lift technique.
Block the natural progress, push for a heavy handed solution and grab some power.
The biggest tells of the con are the appeal to emotions, the grandiose promises, the threat of vague and exaggerated dangers. Every now and then I have some faint hope that the material I just started to read, watch or listen will be different, but so far, my hopes were in vain. No proper definitions, no cool-headed analysis, just endless streams of bullshit.
What I am getting out from all sources is the following political message:
AI is dangerous, it is a global threat that must be controlled on a global level. In the absence of a global organization (which would be preferable), it should be controlled by national governments. It cannot possibly be left in the hands of the free market.
It can get infinitely smarter than us, which is why we have to train it to be smart the right way. It will get infinitely smart not by observing the real world, but by consuming the products of our minds, a large body of text, sounds and images.
It will all evolve to the level of Artificial General Intelligence, when it will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. This path is inevitable. It is not a question of ‘if’ but when.
At some point in the near future, it will reach “AI singularity.” Never mind how, never mind what that will look like and never mind what that even means, just accept the fact that it will happen.
It is just like the Affordable Care Act that congress had to pass to see what’s in it.
When I see serious scientists talking about teaching AI (meaning Large Language Models) to be wise, compassionate and ethical, I have to ask: what were they smoking??? And if the answer is ‘nothing’ then the question is what motivates them to spread stupid ideas they MUST know to be stupid?
The whole thing just stinks of globalist aspirations. It was sprung onto us with a speed and an obviously scripted, uniform messaging that makes it difficult to believe that it was not planned as another deliberate fear porn project.
The reality of LLMs is the fact that the fastest growing job related to them is the euphemistically labelled “prompt engineering”.
Prompt engineering was the job of Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.
“The rewriting of historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line.”
The point of ‘prompt engineering” is to program cognitive dissonance, critical theory and postmodernist relativism into AI.
The race is on for the control of the yet to be created institution that will be the ultimate arbiter of truth on any conceivable subject in the universe. What could possibly go wrong?
This is a political project, the jockeying for the ultimate control of the narrative.
It is pushed by globalists. Yuval Noah Harari, the Mini Me of Klaus Schwab’s Dr Evil, cannot shut up about it and what he says is just batsh*t crazy. He has over a dozen videos of speeches and interviews.
Peter Diamandis, who is, of course, also a member of the World Economic Forum, has about two dozen videos on youtube with an average length of about an hour.
Diamandis is the optimist, Harari is the scaremonger. What they agree on and advocate in their own ways is the need for control.
Rana el Kaliouby, another WEF agenda contributor, is working on programming empathy or in her words ‘emotional intelligence’ into AI.
The essence of the effort of these globalists is the understanding that he who controls AI controls not only the world, not only the future, but reality itself, because our reality cannot be separated from our understanding of it.
If the project succeeds, it will lead to an unmitigable disaster.
The moment there is a global body taking responsibility for the control of artificial intelligence, we will be at the beginning of year one of the dystopian present.
The real danger of AI is not in AI itself, but in the politics around it. You should be alarmed; you should be worried. Not about AI, but about its wannabe controllers.
If the con succeeds, we will never get our freedom back.
In my next post, I will revisit the questions of epistemology.
Further reading (more from me)
Worthwhile reading (more from Others)
AI's Moral Dilemma: Are We Building Our Own Nightmare? w/ Dr. Rana el Kaliouby | EP #49
This is the WEF agenda contributor I mentioned above
Why AI Matters And How To Deal With The Coming Change w/ Emad Mostaque | EP #52
Emad Mostaque is one of the very few who is trying to do the narrow AI direction with his company. Still @ around 27:00 they start talking about health care diagnosis without ever considering about the garbage science that was fed to the world in the past three years.
Relying on the consensus science can cost millions of lives.