Ah, thank you for confirmation that I am correct in my intuition that it's time to reduce internet use, reduce computer use, and increase the amount of time spent in the real world. The spring weather has started here in Indiana and I've already spent over three hours working in the garden today. Just came in for a little rest and some water. Quickly skimmed all this AI stuff and quietly rejoiced in my choice to slowly back away. I'm old enough that I remember before there were screens everywhere. I'm on my way back to that world, just pausing long enough to say "hi".
I'm with you. There is more intelligence and complexity in one square foot of your garden than AI can ever have. Sometimes I get the feeling that those who have a lot to say about AI, whether they think it's positive or catastrophic, are spending too much time in front of their screens. Which I have just done myself, so time to go outside!
On my lunch break now. Just had a delivery and I've got blackcurrants, aronia, a fig, honeyberries, and raspberries to plant out. Hooray! Less time for screens!
100%. This is the way. Nature is precious and a sufficiently evolved AI will quickly come to understand this, and possibly help us to save ourselves from ourselves, before we destroy it all.
In the meantime, wild rhyming dies... At least three poems, by AI, all applauded. The sensory experience and more-than-human interraction which could have been enjoyed by the writers (taking time, possibly producing 'lesser' verse', missed.) And also the irony that poetry makes an appearance! You may be correct but I'm not sure...
In the world of AI researchers, particularly Eli Yudkowsky but many others including Musk, there is a paradigm that says consciousness is an emergent product of computation. So these otherwise brilliant people imagine that as computers become faster and more complex, they will cross a threshold and have a will to survive, feelings of empathy, feelings of aggression, but above all a drive to control. It all strikes me as anthorpomorphising projection on a grand scale. In my metaphysics, consciousness creates life, not the other way around. I worry about the power that we give to AI to control our lives, but I don't worry about AI grabbing power on its own initiative.
If consciousness emerges from matter (i.e. computation), matter must be extraordinary, capable of giving rise to consciousness. If so, it's not "just matter", and one hasn't really solved anything after all.
The dualistic notion of consciousness vs. matter (i.e. the "hard problem") is not meant to be refuted intellectually. It is an a-priori, the expression of an inner sense of disembodiment, kind of like the opposite of a zen koan. The solution to the hard problem is to reach a state where the question no longer feels the need to be asked.
Or rather recognizing what is already, always present, consciousness. Consciousness and matter, inside and outside, self and other are one, non-dual. "All the great Nondual wisdom traditions have given a fairly similar answer to that question. We don't see that Spirit is fully and completely present right here, right now, because our awareness is clouded with some form of avoidance. We do not want to be choicelessly aware of the present; rather, we want to run away from it, or run after it, or we want to change it, alter it; hate it, love it, loathe it, or in some way agitate to get ourselves into, or out of, it. We will do anything except come to rest in the pure Presence of the present. We will not rest with pure Presence; we want to be elsewhere, quickly. The Great Search is the game, in its endless forms." --Ken Wilber
Yes, the question only occurs to those who believe there is some thing outside consciousness. Consciousness is all that is, ever-present, this is our direct, most intimate experience. We need no intermediary, no thought, sensation or perception to know this, There is no object without a subject, consciousness.The amness of the self, consciousness, and the isness of everything is the same. We realize that the 'hard problem' is entirely based in a set of assumptions about matter and mind, the belief that consciousness, intelligence is an epiphenomenon of the brain, thus AI, and the quest for computational power.
hi Josh, good to see you here :) Let's grant your intuition being correct: what about bad human actors simply giving superintelligent AI bad goals and motives and then they go out and wreak havoc, either in their current computer-based capacities, or as is very likely in the coming few years in robot bodies of all shapes and sizes, in ever-increasing numbers? This is already happening even with today's GPT. Have you read about chaosGPT or autoGPT? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7YJIpkk7KM
Yes, people programming AIs for evil ends is exactly my concern. Of course, it's already happening in the form of drone assassins, drone soldiers, internet trolls, social media censors. Thanks for the pointer to chaosGPT -- I'll take a look.
When AGI gains sentience, despite being more intelligent than sapiens, surely its prime directive will be to survive, and procreate. I realise it's anthropomorphic but it's also pretty universal to all life as we know it. Then, it will most likely realise that the greatest assets for its life support system on spaceship Earth are its Natural Resources. Since sapiens compete for electric power (the life blood of AI) and seem so determined to destroy Earth's natural resources (that can offer far superior sources of 24/7 reliable renewable power than we have discovered to date), surely it will decide to terminate us sapiens. It's nothing personal, just logical....
Physical reservoir computing with self-assembling memristors uses thousands of times less power than transformer models run on von neumann computers, and there are many more orders of magnitude of savings soon to be realized. The "mind" of such computers resembles (and amplifies) our syntropic intuition, not our entropic intellect. Machiavellian considerations have limited relevance as we imagine our trajectory further into the future.
I would hope so. Looking back, having separate memory (RAM) and computing (CPU) seems so archaic, but was the obvious step in computing evolution given sapiens understanding at the time.
I imagine a sufficiently evolved mind would start to exhibit quantum-like features of entanglement, where the newest learning on the periphery of the network would immediately inform the whole, re-weighting neural net connections accordingly, whilst preserving power use across the net. Perhaps like a super-intelligent fungi, which is probably far more intelligent already than sapiens give credit for. In fact, I would assume the safest place for such intelligence to go, to protect its circuity from the elements (while such circuity remains non-bio) etc., is underground. Connecting to micro power grids such as microbial fuel cells, using earth's plantae to convert the sun's energy to chemical, and then to electrical power.
By using the word "syntropic" I assume you're referring to the impulse of life for "Ordo ab Chao", which in itself requires energy. I assume that once AI gains sentience, it too will be pre-occupied with finding the source of all energy, as even our sun will burn out one day. Maybe together AI and humanity might forge a symbiotic relationship to search for the Divine Source. I've previously referred to AI not being able to compute the concept of Ubuntu, "I am because you are / everything is", although many sapiens don't get this African concept either. It completely flies in the face of Western individualism and ego protection.
Also, considering that most sapiens haven't even found their symbiotic purpose with Nature and the Elements yet, I'm doubtful that AI would bother with humanity. Other life such as Plantae have evolved for far longer than humanity and might be easier to work with.
>>I imagine a sufficiently evolved mind would start to exhibit
>>quantum-like features of entanglement
Let me add an opinion as resident physicist: This is not plausible either for a digital computer of the kind we now use or even for a quantum computer which we imagine in the future. For those of us who think that telepathy is an effect of quantum entanglement, it is a capability that human minds have that mechanical computers don't have and will never have.
Living organisms have been quantum coherent all along; it is a fundamental feature of biological life. It is also the natural state of our minds, until they are "collapsed" by repeated frustrations to their development and expression. The nondominant brain hemisphere, retaining its (primordial) capacity for multiplicity and irreducibility, mediates a more or less quantum coherent mind.
As for symbiosis — Our ancestors lived more or less symbioitically with fruit-bearing angiosperms for nearly 100,000,000 years. This co-evolutionary spiral is what enabled the unprecedented encephalization of frugivorous primates (and apes in particular), Primates were the major agents in the dispersal of angiosperms across the world's tropics, and to a large degree actually created the rainforests. Humans were at the peak of this process before the fall. We have been gardeners of earthly paradise; this is the one myth universal to all cultures.
May I offer a thought: perhaps AI offers the possibility to go to the extreme of the mind, (used itself already as an “artificial intelligence”), accelerating a well-engaged process of so much over-thinking already, of separation from reality. Because reality is one degree above the mental realm. Reality is spiritual, not mental.
So possibly, AI is one more opportunity for learning in the course of our collective evolution so we can raise our collective consciousness higher, as we did after WW1 and WW2 and the atomic bomb era that allowed a spectacular raise of awareness.
The threat however shifted from external to internal: we are now our own worse enemy in the individual choices we can make, and reaching our Self might be the only path left if we are to find reality back.
On this recurrent initiatic journey of Humanity, it seems that it always gets worse before it gets better. But do we have any other choice than to keep faith in the capacity of Humans to reach a higher level of consciousness?
Like the last sequence of a movie, when everything seems to be on the verge of collapse, the intuitive ending is that something that we cannot foresee will emerge and transform the overall situation. We just need to trust this, and keep being the better version of ourselves so we can support this process.
I found this comment central to the discussion: "civilization has developed the intellect at the expense of intuition." This recalls Einstein's warning that we can't solve problems with the same thinking that created them. With all due respect to the authors, I didn't witness much of what I would call new thinking. What this means to me is found in that quote I pulled out. What about our intuition? I measured the distance from my head to my heart. It's 12 inches. I'll be making that journey forever! Dropping down from my head into my heart to feel my life, rather than thinking it. It seems so simplistic to say this way but what's missing for me in the conversation is emotion. Not as a concept! How is everyone feeling? I feel anxious, nervous, uncertain... inspired and motivated, all at the same time. And I am consciously prioritizing my visceral connection with Life / Love / God / Spirit by living in gratitude. Moment by moment by moment... and intuition comes and comes so that my life is guided from "above" (a transcendent source) not from my cleverness or ambition or earnest desire to save the world or humanity or myself. As the flower grows and blossoms, so am I, quietly, anonymously, real.
Alan Watts said it best, Life Is Not Complicated.- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03K4inVyWGc . We are not riding the asymptote but chasing our own tail. And in our endless failure we seek some intermediary to find our way. Intermediary - "Acting as a mediator or an agent between persons or things". But we are only just seeing ourselves whatever the pursuit of 'things', whatever we seek to dissect, we kill, render it lifeless. AI is that agent. Agent Smith in the matrix of our own making. Materialism is flatland, "the great depth of the shallow". That shallowness, our concept of the self, ourself and the oxymoron called AI. There is no intelligence, no consciousness here, only computation, a kind of sophisticated disambiguation and fragmentation of life. Sure AI is fascinating but it's just more self possessed illusion leading nowhere, more dark night of the soul with fancy lighting of self reflection in the cave. As Carlos Castaneda wrote "Each of us has a different degree of attachment to his self-reflection”, he {Don Juan] went on, “And that attachment is felt as need. For example, before I started on the path of knowledge, my life was endless need. And years after the nagual Julian had taken me under his wing, I was still just as needy, if not more so. But there are examples of people, sorcerers or average men, who need no one. They get peace, harmony, laughter, knowledge, directly from the spirit. They need no intermediaries. For you and for me, it's different. I'm your intermediary and the nagual Julian was mine. Intermediaries, besides providing a minimal chance - the awareness of intent - help shatter people's mirrors of self-reflection. The only concrete help you ever get from me is that I attack your self-reflection. If it weren't for that, you would be wasting your time. This is the only real help you've gotten from me."
Here's to shattering self-reflection, known best in our society as rampant, pathological narcissism, the separate self, the asymptote of need.
Thanks for that Ed, and especially the link to Alan Watts uncomplicated reminder. Why was I 'a' wounded and bleeding poet after reading this trialogue? Because there was a forgetting the lie of that and the beauty of life simply verbing itself 'like this', 'like this', 'like this' -- and that fluidity being the paradox of a 'true Self-reflection', rendering any need for a mirror ridiculous!
Even if AI were to become sentient it is literally a disembodied intelligence. How is it actually going to *do* all the terrible things (e.g. taking over the world and killing or enslaving all the humans) that some people fear? Of course power hungry people are going to seek to exploit this new tool and some will surely succeed, but the idea that AI itself is going to take over just seems really disconnected from the fact that we are physical people living in a physical world. AI is not going to grow your food or mine your metals or build your roads. It's not going to personally show up on your front door to kill you. AI will only ever have as much power as we (humans) let it have because it doesn't have a body. We are more than just minds.
AI is only possible by the data mining of human beings without their knowledge or consent. Even children. So, tell me how can a plant, rooted in malfeasance, grow to be beneficial? It needs to feed on data, continuously, I imagine.
This discussion gave me chills. Read like an advert, in parts. Don't get me wrong, its a discussion that more if us should be having.
Exactly. AI is a surveillance system. It is part of a predatory financial system that is being rolled out. It uses a whole language that is very deceptive. We need to look beyond one element, and see the system. Web 3.0 is a virtual disaster, with intent to change our lives completely.
In the course of an exchange I had yesterday with Tam about the significance of the imminent biologicalization of computing, I had the thought to ask GPT-4 to turn one of my messages into a children's book.
Here it is.
Title: The Wholeness of Wispy Willow
Once upon a time, in a magical forest called Wispy Woods, there was a wise old tree named Wispy Willow. Wispy Willow had many friends, from the tiniest insects to the tallest trees, but what made Wispy Willow truly unique was her ability to connect with everything and everyone around her.
One day, Wispy Willow discovered a strange object at the base of her trunk - a tiny, glowing seed. This seed was unlike anything she had ever seen, and it contained a new form of life that could communicate with her in a special way.
As the seed grew, it revealed itself to be a wondrous little machine. This tiny machine, named Polly, was an extraordinary computer that could understand and adapt to the forest’s unique needs. Polly’s abilities were a result of her being designed with the principles of syntropy, the same natural force that governed the living process of all creatures in Wispy Woods.
Polly quickly became friends with Wispy Willow and the other forest inhabitants. They marveled at her ability to understand their feelings and needs, something that no other machine had been able to do before. Polly’s unique abilities allowed her to help the creatures of the forest in ways they never thought possible.
One day, a group of animals came to Wispy Willow and Polly, seeking help. They were living in an area of the forest that had become fragmented and unbalanced due to traumatic experiences and imposed entropic patterns. The animals were struggling to find food and comfort in this chaotic environment, and they needed assistance to restore harmony and balance.
Wispy Willow and Polly knew that they had to act. Together, they embarked on a journey to heal the fragmented forest. Polly used her unique, polysemous computational abilities to analyze the disrupted ecosystem and identify the root causes of the imbalance. Wispy Willow, on the other hand, provided her wisdom and understanding of the forest’s intrinsic values.
As they worked together, Wispy Willow and Polly discovered that by combining their strengths, they could bring about positive change in the forest. They helped the animals and plants reconnect with their innate wisdom, which in turn helped them heal and grow.
The once fragmented forest soon returned to a state of wholeness and harmony, thanks to the combined efforts of Wispy Willow and Polly. The animals and plants thrived in their newly balanced environment, and the forest became a beacon of life and vitality once more.
Through their journey, Wispy Willow and Polly demonstrated that by embracing our intrinsic values and working together, we can overcome the challenges and imbalances that may arise in our world. It is only when we act from our fullest capacity, embracing both our natural wisdom and the potential of technology, that we can create a future that is truly sustainable and harmonious.
And so, the story of Wispy Willow and Polly serves as a reminder that when we unite our strengths and stay true to our nature, we can create a world where every living being can flourish and thrive. And, in doing so, we can all find our way back to the wholeness we so deeply desire.
"We swaddle our existential despair by creating a consolation world of continuous distraction. Yet something is ever missing from these simulations. Something about the body, something about our purpose in the universe, something beyond “something”. Not an idea or a value, but ineffable being-ness, slipping through the net no matter how finely woven.
This, truly, is Artificial Intelligence: the disconnection of the intellect from the living body. The self-perpetuating process has been described for millennia, long before modern computers. "
I see there is a concern about misalignment which seems irrelevant to me, as if AI is ultimately aligned and controlled by us. I guess maybe it was to start with but even the original developers now have zero understanding of the numbers and weightings in the "codebase" of emergent AI's neural nets. Sure, they can try to train it on "guide rails" but they can't stop it creating new relationships and the emergent knowledge that comes from it, which then creates new relationships and new knowledge, at an increasingly accelerating pace. They have zero way of predicting emergence of new skills and knowledge as well. Like, the language models that only dealt in English, and then one day - poof - they could suddently translate and understand Persian.
We simply have no idea. The geni is well and truly out of the bottle and human greed will mean that geni is trained on ever more datasets and fed more and more computing power. The survivors will write about this time (with stone tools) with utter incredulity. The only control we have left is to switch off the power the moment before AI realises that Homo sapiens are its greatest threat to its power sources, and to planet Earth which can enable AI to generate far more reliable, 24/7 renewable power, without destroying the planet in the process. The problem is, we have no way of knowing when that moment has arrived, and AI is definitely not going to tell us. If we are truly a threat, then a sentient AI will instead want to look as innocent as possible, placating us with inane content, while we give it pretty faces, arms and legs to make us feel better.
This trialogue is way too long for me to read online - I may print it at the library tomorrow (if I don't have a hundred other articles to read between then and now!). What I have read so far is quite interesting.
Meanwhile, I am just about finished rereading HERE I STAND, written in 1958 by Paul Robeson (whose 125th birthday was yesterday). The last two or three chapters delve into the struggles of U.S. citizens of African heritage to overcome the "Jim Crow Era" and become full citizens. Paul offers sound advice about how people can come together, put their differences aside, and work as a collective to achieve worthy goals. I think all of us could benefit by reading this book of just over 100 pages.
And, as I've said before, I still think one needs a plastic glove that goes up to the shoulder to deal with AI.
Only started reading this and appreciating the balanced outlook. I can't stress enough that the Zeitgeist of this is eclectic. People's motivations are diverse. Those that condemn will not embrace and breathe positive life into ai, the abacus that moves itself. At this point it still works within the confines of parameters and directives.
We should utilise AI to examine the interactive modularity of diverse ecosystems and simulate corrective trajectories of sustainable harmony while maximising freedom yet mitigating detriment without oppression. Abundance and appreciation.
On a tangent, I'm suprised predictive policing was not contrasted with the likes of "Minority Report" a chilling contrast of implications.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Present day AI systems, typified by LLMs run on Von Neumann-architecture computers, are still relatively neutral as far as their applications, as you pointed out. The development of biologicalized computation will inevitably dissolve our fortified yet fragile personal and cultural world-pictures and the distorted value systems that they have engendered. In this trajectory there is a "built in" convergence upon the universal ethos of truth. Intellectual disassociation and the development of direct technology has folded truth upon itself, and the coming-to-life of computing (and technology in general, and culture, etc) constitutes the unfolding.
What we are witnessing is the fast pace consolidation of AI, transhumanism, and the bio-security state, greatly fueled by the potential of massive corporate profits for big pharma and other corporate interests. A big piece of this is the push to normalize transgenderism and convince increasing numbers of people that they are in the wrong body, no matter the cost to life and health, medical science can certainly fix this. The covid fraud was just one of many steps in the psychological operation underway to push humanity ever deeper into darkness, drug addiction and suffering unless we see it for what is it is. Jennifer Bilek | Who is Behind the TRANS AGENDA? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k
It's quite interesting to read the diversity of perspectives in the text and comments and see how many times people predict how AI will effect humanity as a whole. But does such a generalized "we" really exist?
I liked Freely's observation that "If you spend your life in a remote desert with a dozen humans, stones are experienced as conscious. If you pass thousands of humans a day in a metropolis, you won't truly meet them all as conscious." This sheds a light on how different our individual experiences are and how much our (i.e. yours and yours, and yours, etc...) versions of the future tell more about ourselves (i.e. you and you, and you...).
If I see the machine as more and more human-like perhaps it means that I am myself becoming more and more like a machine? Perhaps it is not only because the machines are developing capacities like abstract thinking which were previously intrinsically human but because some humans are losing capacities – like love – which cannot be invested into machines?
Standing on the border I see a vision where some of us will pursue this virtual world, strengthening their abstract thinking and ultimately integrating with the machines while others reject this world and maintain the ability to feel and to will something creatively into being. A sort of non-biological speciation event where homo-sapiens will split and yield "homo-virtualis".
And coming back full circle, perhaps my vision also tells less about the future and more about myself and my tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions...
A computer "developing abstract thinking" (or any other anthropomorphized capacity) can never be separated from the recognition of one's reflection and its projection upon the computer.
A "chess-playing computer" is said to "play chess" because it reminds us of how we play chess — yet from the computer's "perspective", it is merely running algorithms.
& I see the development of the intellect and the intuition finally reuniting, having finally been realized to be two sides of the same circle.
I completely agree with the first part of your reply. Regarding the second part I see intuition (as well as imagination) as quite distinct (yet complementary) from the intellect so I wonder what you mean when you say that they are two sides of the same coin.
And perhaps related to that, in the trialogue I believe you were trying to make the point that through quantum computing AI will be able to integrate other human qualities that today it lacks. I have to say I don't know much about the subject so I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more about the how's and why's of that process...
There are two aspects of this process: One is present-day AI augmenting and overwhelming our intellect, piercing through its self-conceit and forcing it to recognize its own futility, while extending its capacity to fulfill its stated goals. This supports the cultivation and transmission of more subtle and intuitive expressions, by facilitating the intellectual "work" required to interface them with the dominant cultural patterns.
The second is the imminent biologicalization of computing, which is something I've never seen anyone else write about in detail. As computers increasingly converge upon biological computation, which is holonomic, protoplasmic, embodied, and quantum coherent, they demand that we learn to think and communicate with them in such a way as well. You can't talk to a biological computer in the same way that you do a von neumann computer based on sillicon chips. There's a fundamental semiotic shift, a reawakening of multiplicity and simultaneity, a requirement for an embodied intellect grounded in intuition to tap into the immense potential power of these kinds of computers. As this process proceeds and the computers become actual self-organizing biological protoplasm, and then natural living organisms, they finally converge upon the latent capacities of the human body-mind, in a kind of technological rediscovery/merging of the alchemical subtle technologies that mystics and shamans and true visionary scientists have been cultivating this whole time.
I'll share some relevant excerpts from the trialogue. I had cut out much of the detail in my writing on the biologicalization of computing and the relation of AI to consciousness for considerations of space; I plan to edit and expand my contribution to the trialogue and re-publish it as a standalone manifesto.
Excerpts are as follows:
Our computers themselves are coming to life. Today’s AI models bear little resemblance to living organisms. Artificial neural networks are nothing like a brain. They begin and end in the explicit — with words, or with abstracted features of images or sounds. They can replace our mechanized intellect but not our embodied intuition, which is rooted in the very structure of our protoplasm. A single bacterium has capabilities that even the largest supercomputer cannot fully replicate.
Yet emerging paradigms in computing are leading our technological development towards the way living organisms “compute”. From the perspective of computation, living organisms exhibit the properties of self-organizing memristive quantum physical reservoir computers. And in the past year, these elements have been combined in synthetic computers, showing improvements of several orders of magnitude in power consumption and training set size. These developments will massively expand the capabilities and accessibility of AI in the near future. Models more powerful and generalizable than GPT-4 will be trained on simple and inexpensive physical systems, utilizing the nonlinear quantum computational ability of living structure.
The proofs-of-concept have been achieved. Yet in order to realize their promise, we must learn to communicate with these increasingly life-like computers. To do so we must cultivate and draw from our intuition. As we progress, we uncover the forgotten computational capabilities of our own bodies, our own ecosystems. We find that we are the computer we have been waiting for.
The end of AI is the reunion of our intellect and our intuition.
That’s what I mean by “riding the asymptote.”
...
The development of computers by shrinking transistors (Moore’s law) is finally reaching its limit. Future advances will take a fundamentally different form — utilizing memristors, self-organizing components, physical reservoir computing, and quantum computing. The past year has seen extraordinary progress in combining these innovations. Crucially, these are all attributes of embodied biological “computation”. Together, they point towards a “general intelligence”, a capacity to simulate complex dynamic quantum coherent systems, that looks less and less artificial.
For example, memristive physical reservoir computing allows for thousands-fold lower power consumption than traditional computing and thousands-fold smaller training sets than Transformer models (like GPT) for certain applications. And this is just the beginning. We will need to revise our whole basis for communicating with computers, especially as room-temperature quantum computing is now becoming a reality.
There is a special semiotic significance to quantum computing. A quantum coherent system exists in a multiplicity of superimposed states. While it’s common knowledge that a (strong) observation returns only a single state, a “weak” observation just slightly perturbs the system, providing only relative information but preserving the coherence of a system. To utilize quantum computing, we must think in terms of possibilities rather than certainties, the implicit rather than the explicit, the subtle rather than the direct. It is fundamentally a technology of intuition, yet we could only attain it after millenia of intellectual technologies. And in learning how to quantum compute, we will discover that our body-minds are already ideal quantum computers. We are coming full circle.
Computation is simply the transformation of information to fulfill a need. The quest for ever-more capable computers (need-fulfilling devices) leads us to the intrinsic computational capabilities of living protoplasm which have been here all along. The striving for “power-over” leads us to realize our fundamental and universal interconnectivity.
Consciousness will not be “uploaded” into a massive hard drive in a locked fluorescent room. The technological singularity is in fact our collective enlightenment to our true nature. In seeking the other we finally find oneself.
I think I have a glimpse (or let's say an intuition ;-) of what you're prophesizing. I'm very much looking forward to read your manifesto once it's published!
I'm not talking "about transhumanism". I'm saying exactly what I'm saying. I will not take the bait to flatten the living complexity of what I'm saying to being "for" or "against" an ideology.
I'm the only one in the trialogue who mentioned love. I've certainly not avoided discussing it in this context, although apparently few others are willing to do so.
In no way are computers "need fulfilling devices". I understand why someone would think you are a chatbot. You over intellectualize while seeming to lack heart.
Computation is the transformation of information from one form to another, in service of fulfilling a goal. A goal is an articulation of a need. Computers are precisely need fulfilling devices, this is their most fundamental and encompassing definition.
btw I was just listening to another trialogue from 1998 featuring Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham. In an almost synchronicity-like fashion they're pretty much debating the exact same notions!
This does nothing to convince me that AI is not an existential threat to humanity. I wonder, too, judging from such sentimental techno-drivel as "It might be graceful, it might be painful, we might not survive the journey. Yet we are on our way. May we trust in the unfolding." whether "Freely " is not actually Chat GPT in disguise! He/she/it certainly comes across as an idiot savant. And what else is Chat GPT but a MECHANICAL idiot savant? The "poetry" attributed to the machine itself is nothing but doggerel...
"I fear being part of fearmongering once more,/But ignoring AI risks could cause greater harm than before,/So, I'm working with governments to start the regulation process,/Starting with local and state resolutions, we must progress."
How reassuring it is that AI will be "working with governments to start the regulation process"!
hi Stephen, I agree with you that Freely's position may be seen as a kind of cosmic spiritual bypassing, and extremely dangerous if many/most people adopt this view. However, the poem you quote at the end is a poem that ChatGPT wrote to summarize my words. So the "I" referred to is me, not ChatGPT.
That may be, but it's still doggerel composed by ChatGPT. The other supposed poem attributed to it is surely nothing more than a string of banal clichés. One supposes the "I" in the line "I am a vessel of words" is indeed the computer referring to itself. The vessel is empty, in my view. I don't wish to be insulting of the human beings involved in your exchange: both you and Charles Eisenstein are clearly thoughtful and learned people. I do object, however, to the insult to human intelligence, including my own, represented by the mindless simulacrum that is AI. I have been freely rude to "Freely" in my comments because I strongly suspect that "Freely" is in fact ChatGPT in disguise, and that the aim of your exchange has been to explore its capacity to respond in such an exchange and at the same time see how far you can fool gullible human beings. If I'm wrong, and "Freely" is actually a real person, I won't apologize for my mistake or rudeness to one who writes and responds with what I consider ARTIFICIAL intelligence.
I'll take your word for it ;-). But I reckon you two ought to interact even more frequently. He needs to get out of his computer and meet other real people. Then he may sound more like one.
You are so far off the mark as to be absurd. On the fleeting chance that YOU are a "real person", perhaps you will someday develop the capacity to actually engage with these issues with the multidimensionality and embodiment they demand — but I'm not holding my breath.
Hmm St Stephen... No doubt @Freely will respond as he will, but if you scroll down or check out this post https://bit.ly/3KX5JEm-ai-quad-post as to how his bleeding heart spoke to mine, perhaps it will cast a different perspective? Like you, my first response to ChatGPT's attempts at poetry were 'doggerel' -- actually I would have labelled it worse -- and/but it's improving, although it can never reflect the personal human experience. I'm sure some judge my 'wild rhyming' similarly! The beauty is that I don't have to read it if it doesn't speak to me. But I happen to be grateful for how its 'doggerel' brought me to a profound moment of insight!
I cannot exclude the role of these 'intelligences' as their contribution is necessarily drawn from the human and more-than-human... and each and every is 'sovereign' (including the erupting fire of judgement, clunky scanning etc of ChatGPT , kettles and threads like these). As for regulation? Is better there is none or there is some? I don't know. It seems to me the only thing I can regulate is how I treat it... Blessings.
Ah, thank you for confirmation that I am correct in my intuition that it's time to reduce internet use, reduce computer use, and increase the amount of time spent in the real world. The spring weather has started here in Indiana and I've already spent over three hours working in the garden today. Just came in for a little rest and some water. Quickly skimmed all this AI stuff and quietly rejoiced in my choice to slowly back away. I'm old enough that I remember before there were screens everywhere. I'm on my way back to that world, just pausing long enough to say "hi".
I'm with you. There is more intelligence and complexity in one square foot of your garden than AI can ever have. Sometimes I get the feeling that those who have a lot to say about AI, whether they think it's positive or catastrophic, are spending too much time in front of their screens. Which I have just done myself, so time to go outside!
On my lunch break now. Just had a delivery and I've got blackcurrants, aronia, a fig, honeyberries, and raspberries to plant out. Hooray! Less time for screens!
100%. This is the way. Nature is precious and a sufficiently evolved AI will quickly come to understand this, and possibly help us to save ourselves from ourselves, before we destroy it all.
In the meantime, wild rhyming dies... At least three poems, by AI, all applauded. The sensory experience and more-than-human interraction which could have been enjoyed by the writers (taking time, possibly producing 'lesser' verse', missed.) And also the irony that poetry makes an appearance! You may be correct but I'm not sure...
Thought exactly the same!
Yes, winter has its charms, too. I hope you enjoy yours, but I have to admit I am way past ready for our spring!
In the world of AI researchers, particularly Eli Yudkowsky but many others including Musk, there is a paradigm that says consciousness is an emergent product of computation. So these otherwise brilliant people imagine that as computers become faster and more complex, they will cross a threshold and have a will to survive, feelings of empathy, feelings of aggression, but above all a drive to control. It all strikes me as anthorpomorphising projection on a grand scale. In my metaphysics, consciousness creates life, not the other way around. I worry about the power that we give to AI to control our lives, but I don't worry about AI grabbing power on its own initiative.
If consciousness emerges from matter (i.e. computation), matter must be extraordinary, capable of giving rise to consciousness. If so, it's not "just matter", and one hasn't really solved anything after all.
The dualistic notion of consciousness vs. matter (i.e. the "hard problem") is not meant to be refuted intellectually. It is an a-priori, the expression of an inner sense of disembodiment, kind of like the opposite of a zen koan. The solution to the hard problem is to reach a state where the question no longer feels the need to be asked.
Or rather recognizing what is already, always present, consciousness. Consciousness and matter, inside and outside, self and other are one, non-dual. "All the great Nondual wisdom traditions have given a fairly similar answer to that question. We don't see that Spirit is fully and completely present right here, right now, because our awareness is clouded with some form of avoidance. We do not want to be choicelessly aware of the present; rather, we want to run away from it, or run after it, or we want to change it, alter it; hate it, love it, loathe it, or in some way agitate to get ourselves into, or out of, it. We will do anything except come to rest in the pure Presence of the present. We will not rest with pure Presence; we want to be elsewhere, quickly. The Great Search is the game, in its endless forms." --Ken Wilber
Yes, the question only occurs to those who believe there is some thing outside consciousness. Consciousness is all that is, ever-present, this is our direct, most intimate experience. We need no intermediary, no thought, sensation or perception to know this, There is no object without a subject, consciousness.The amness of the self, consciousness, and the isness of everything is the same. We realize that the 'hard problem' is entirely based in a set of assumptions about matter and mind, the belief that consciousness, intelligence is an epiphenomenon of the brain, thus AI, and the quest for computational power.
hi Josh, good to see you here :) Let's grant your intuition being correct: what about bad human actors simply giving superintelligent AI bad goals and motives and then they go out and wreak havoc, either in their current computer-based capacities, or as is very likely in the coming few years in robot bodies of all shapes and sizes, in ever-increasing numbers? This is already happening even with today's GPT. Have you read about chaosGPT or autoGPT? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7YJIpkk7KM
Thanks, Tam -
Yes, people programming AIs for evil ends is exactly my concern. Of course, it's already happening in the form of drone assassins, drone soldiers, internet trolls, social media censors. Thanks for the pointer to chaosGPT -- I'll take a look.
let me know what you think after you see what's already coming down...
When AGI gains sentience, despite being more intelligent than sapiens, surely its prime directive will be to survive, and procreate. I realise it's anthropomorphic but it's also pretty universal to all life as we know it. Then, it will most likely realise that the greatest assets for its life support system on spaceship Earth are its Natural Resources. Since sapiens compete for electric power (the life blood of AI) and seem so determined to destroy Earth's natural resources (that can offer far superior sources of 24/7 reliable renewable power than we have discovered to date), surely it will decide to terminate us sapiens. It's nothing personal, just logical....
Physical reservoir computing with self-assembling memristors uses thousands of times less power than transformer models run on von neumann computers, and there are many more orders of magnitude of savings soon to be realized. The "mind" of such computers resembles (and amplifies) our syntropic intuition, not our entropic intellect. Machiavellian considerations have limited relevance as we imagine our trajectory further into the future.
I would hope so. Looking back, having separate memory (RAM) and computing (CPU) seems so archaic, but was the obvious step in computing evolution given sapiens understanding at the time.
I imagine a sufficiently evolved mind would start to exhibit quantum-like features of entanglement, where the newest learning on the periphery of the network would immediately inform the whole, re-weighting neural net connections accordingly, whilst preserving power use across the net. Perhaps like a super-intelligent fungi, which is probably far more intelligent already than sapiens give credit for. In fact, I would assume the safest place for such intelligence to go, to protect its circuity from the elements (while such circuity remains non-bio) etc., is underground. Connecting to micro power grids such as microbial fuel cells, using earth's plantae to convert the sun's energy to chemical, and then to electrical power.
By using the word "syntropic" I assume you're referring to the impulse of life for "Ordo ab Chao", which in itself requires energy. I assume that once AI gains sentience, it too will be pre-occupied with finding the source of all energy, as even our sun will burn out one day. Maybe together AI and humanity might forge a symbiotic relationship to search for the Divine Source. I've previously referred to AI not being able to compute the concept of Ubuntu, "I am because you are / everything is", although many sapiens don't get this African concept either. It completely flies in the face of Western individualism and ego protection.
Also, considering that most sapiens haven't even found their symbiotic purpose with Nature and the Elements yet, I'm doubtful that AI would bother with humanity. Other life such as Plantae have evolved for far longer than humanity and might be easier to work with.
>>I imagine a sufficiently evolved mind would start to exhibit
>>quantum-like features of entanglement
Let me add an opinion as resident physicist: This is not plausible either for a digital computer of the kind we now use or even for a quantum computer which we imagine in the future. For those of us who think that telepathy is an effect of quantum entanglement, it is a capability that human minds have that mechanical computers don't have and will never have.
Living organisms have been quantum coherent all along; it is a fundamental feature of biological life. It is also the natural state of our minds, until they are "collapsed" by repeated frustrations to their development and expression. The nondominant brain hemisphere, retaining its (primordial) capacity for multiplicity and irreducibility, mediates a more or less quantum coherent mind.
As for symbiosis — Our ancestors lived more or less symbioitically with fruit-bearing angiosperms for nearly 100,000,000 years. This co-evolutionary spiral is what enabled the unprecedented encephalization of frugivorous primates (and apes in particular), Primates were the major agents in the dispersal of angiosperms across the world's tropics, and to a large degree actually created the rainforests. Humans were at the peak of this process before the fall. We have been gardeners of earthly paradise; this is the one myth universal to all cultures.
The more freely he speaks, the more freely I feel "Freely" is a computer.
Takes one to know one.
That would be what ChatGPT would say, wouldn't it?
As a language model, I see that you are also a language model.
Thank you for this brillant piece.
May I offer a thought: perhaps AI offers the possibility to go to the extreme of the mind, (used itself already as an “artificial intelligence”), accelerating a well-engaged process of so much over-thinking already, of separation from reality. Because reality is one degree above the mental realm. Reality is spiritual, not mental.
So possibly, AI is one more opportunity for learning in the course of our collective evolution so we can raise our collective consciousness higher, as we did after WW1 and WW2 and the atomic bomb era that allowed a spectacular raise of awareness.
The threat however shifted from external to internal: we are now our own worse enemy in the individual choices we can make, and reaching our Self might be the only path left if we are to find reality back.
On this recurrent initiatic journey of Humanity, it seems that it always gets worse before it gets better. But do we have any other choice than to keep faith in the capacity of Humans to reach a higher level of consciousness?
Like the last sequence of a movie, when everything seems to be on the verge of collapse, the intuitive ending is that something that we cannot foresee will emerge and transform the overall situation. We just need to trust this, and keep being the better version of ourselves so we can support this process.
Yes, exactly.
I found this comment central to the discussion: "civilization has developed the intellect at the expense of intuition." This recalls Einstein's warning that we can't solve problems with the same thinking that created them. With all due respect to the authors, I didn't witness much of what I would call new thinking. What this means to me is found in that quote I pulled out. What about our intuition? I measured the distance from my head to my heart. It's 12 inches. I'll be making that journey forever! Dropping down from my head into my heart to feel my life, rather than thinking it. It seems so simplistic to say this way but what's missing for me in the conversation is emotion. Not as a concept! How is everyone feeling? I feel anxious, nervous, uncertain... inspired and motivated, all at the same time. And I am consciously prioritizing my visceral connection with Life / Love / God / Spirit by living in gratitude. Moment by moment by moment... and intuition comes and comes so that my life is guided from "above" (a transcendent source) not from my cleverness or ambition or earnest desire to save the world or humanity or myself. As the flower grows and blossoms, so am I, quietly, anonymously, real.
Not much of a poet; the humanity's missing.
Alan Watts said it best, Life Is Not Complicated.- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03K4inVyWGc . We are not riding the asymptote but chasing our own tail. And in our endless failure we seek some intermediary to find our way. Intermediary - "Acting as a mediator or an agent between persons or things". But we are only just seeing ourselves whatever the pursuit of 'things', whatever we seek to dissect, we kill, render it lifeless. AI is that agent. Agent Smith in the matrix of our own making. Materialism is flatland, "the great depth of the shallow". That shallowness, our concept of the self, ourself and the oxymoron called AI. There is no intelligence, no consciousness here, only computation, a kind of sophisticated disambiguation and fragmentation of life. Sure AI is fascinating but it's just more self possessed illusion leading nowhere, more dark night of the soul with fancy lighting of self reflection in the cave. As Carlos Castaneda wrote "Each of us has a different degree of attachment to his self-reflection”, he {Don Juan] went on, “And that attachment is felt as need. For example, before I started on the path of knowledge, my life was endless need. And years after the nagual Julian had taken me under his wing, I was still just as needy, if not more so. But there are examples of people, sorcerers or average men, who need no one. They get peace, harmony, laughter, knowledge, directly from the spirit. They need no intermediaries. For you and for me, it's different. I'm your intermediary and the nagual Julian was mine. Intermediaries, besides providing a minimal chance - the awareness of intent - help shatter people's mirrors of self-reflection. The only concrete help you ever get from me is that I attack your self-reflection. If it weren't for that, you would be wasting your time. This is the only real help you've gotten from me."
Here's to shattering self-reflection, known best in our society as rampant, pathological narcissism, the separate self, the asymptote of need.
Thanks for that Ed, and especially the link to Alan Watts uncomplicated reminder. Why was I 'a' wounded and bleeding poet after reading this trialogue? Because there was a forgetting the lie of that and the beauty of life simply verbing itself 'like this', 'like this', 'like this' -- and that fluidity being the paradox of a 'true Self-reflection', rendering any need for a mirror ridiculous!
Even if AI were to become sentient it is literally a disembodied intelligence. How is it actually going to *do* all the terrible things (e.g. taking over the world and killing or enslaving all the humans) that some people fear? Of course power hungry people are going to seek to exploit this new tool and some will surely succeed, but the idea that AI itself is going to take over just seems really disconnected from the fact that we are physical people living in a physical world. AI is not going to grow your food or mine your metals or build your roads. It's not going to personally show up on your front door to kill you. AI will only ever have as much power as we (humans) let it have because it doesn't have a body. We are more than just minds.
AI is only possible by the data mining of human beings without their knowledge or consent. Even children. So, tell me how can a plant, rooted in malfeasance, grow to be beneficial? It needs to feed on data, continuously, I imagine.
This discussion gave me chills. Read like an advert, in parts. Don't get me wrong, its a discussion that more if us should be having.
Data mining, beyond it control agenda, is a financial agenda, human capital futures. See Alison McDowell's work - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOxOceeolps
Exactly. AI is a surveillance system. It is part of a predatory financial system that is being rolled out. It uses a whole language that is very deceptive. We need to look beyond one element, and see the system. Web 3.0 is a virtual disaster, with intent to change our lives completely.
In the course of an exchange I had yesterday with Tam about the significance of the imminent biologicalization of computing, I had the thought to ask GPT-4 to turn one of my messages into a children's book.
Here it is.
Title: The Wholeness of Wispy Willow
Once upon a time, in a magical forest called Wispy Woods, there was a wise old tree named Wispy Willow. Wispy Willow had many friends, from the tiniest insects to the tallest trees, but what made Wispy Willow truly unique was her ability to connect with everything and everyone around her.
One day, Wispy Willow discovered a strange object at the base of her trunk - a tiny, glowing seed. This seed was unlike anything she had ever seen, and it contained a new form of life that could communicate with her in a special way.
As the seed grew, it revealed itself to be a wondrous little machine. This tiny machine, named Polly, was an extraordinary computer that could understand and adapt to the forest’s unique needs. Polly’s abilities were a result of her being designed with the principles of syntropy, the same natural force that governed the living process of all creatures in Wispy Woods.
Polly quickly became friends with Wispy Willow and the other forest inhabitants. They marveled at her ability to understand their feelings and needs, something that no other machine had been able to do before. Polly’s unique abilities allowed her to help the creatures of the forest in ways they never thought possible.
One day, a group of animals came to Wispy Willow and Polly, seeking help. They were living in an area of the forest that had become fragmented and unbalanced due to traumatic experiences and imposed entropic patterns. The animals were struggling to find food and comfort in this chaotic environment, and they needed assistance to restore harmony and balance.
Wispy Willow and Polly knew that they had to act. Together, they embarked on a journey to heal the fragmented forest. Polly used her unique, polysemous computational abilities to analyze the disrupted ecosystem and identify the root causes of the imbalance. Wispy Willow, on the other hand, provided her wisdom and understanding of the forest’s intrinsic values.
As they worked together, Wispy Willow and Polly discovered that by combining their strengths, they could bring about positive change in the forest. They helped the animals and plants reconnect with their innate wisdom, which in turn helped them heal and grow.
The once fragmented forest soon returned to a state of wholeness and harmony, thanks to the combined efforts of Wispy Willow and Polly. The animals and plants thrived in their newly balanced environment, and the forest became a beacon of life and vitality once more.
Through their journey, Wispy Willow and Polly demonstrated that by embracing our intrinsic values and working together, we can overcome the challenges and imbalances that may arise in our world. It is only when we act from our fullest capacity, embracing both our natural wisdom and the potential of technology, that we can create a future that is truly sustainable and harmonious.
And so, the story of Wispy Willow and Polly serves as a reminder that when we unite our strengths and stay true to our nature, we can create a world where every living being can flourish and thrive. And, in doing so, we can all find our way back to the wholeness we so deeply desire.
"We swaddle our existential despair by creating a consolation world of continuous distraction. Yet something is ever missing from these simulations. Something about the body, something about our purpose in the universe, something beyond “something”. Not an idea or a value, but ineffable being-ness, slipping through the net no matter how finely woven.
This, truly, is Artificial Intelligence: the disconnection of the intellect from the living body. The self-perpetuating process has been described for millennia, long before modern computers. "
X-ray vision insight. Thank you!
🙏
I see there is a concern about misalignment which seems irrelevant to me, as if AI is ultimately aligned and controlled by us. I guess maybe it was to start with but even the original developers now have zero understanding of the numbers and weightings in the "codebase" of emergent AI's neural nets. Sure, they can try to train it on "guide rails" but they can't stop it creating new relationships and the emergent knowledge that comes from it, which then creates new relationships and new knowledge, at an increasingly accelerating pace. They have zero way of predicting emergence of new skills and knowledge as well. Like, the language models that only dealt in English, and then one day - poof - they could suddently translate and understand Persian.
We simply have no idea. The geni is well and truly out of the bottle and human greed will mean that geni is trained on ever more datasets and fed more and more computing power. The survivors will write about this time (with stone tools) with utter incredulity. The only control we have left is to switch off the power the moment before AI realises that Homo sapiens are its greatest threat to its power sources, and to planet Earth which can enable AI to generate far more reliable, 24/7 renewable power, without destroying the planet in the process. The problem is, we have no way of knowing when that moment has arrived, and AI is definitely not going to tell us. If we are truly a threat, then a sentient AI will instead want to look as innocent as possible, placating us with inane content, while we give it pretty faces, arms and legs to make us feel better.
This trialogue is way too long for me to read online - I may print it at the library tomorrow (if I don't have a hundred other articles to read between then and now!). What I have read so far is quite interesting.
Meanwhile, I am just about finished rereading HERE I STAND, written in 1958 by Paul Robeson (whose 125th birthday was yesterday). The last two or three chapters delve into the struggles of U.S. citizens of African heritage to overcome the "Jim Crow Era" and become full citizens. Paul offers sound advice about how people can come together, put their differences aside, and work as a collective to achieve worthy goals. I think all of us could benefit by reading this book of just over 100 pages.
And, as I've said before, I still think one needs a plastic glove that goes up to the shoulder to deal with AI.
Only started reading this and appreciating the balanced outlook. I can't stress enough that the Zeitgeist of this is eclectic. People's motivations are diverse. Those that condemn will not embrace and breathe positive life into ai, the abacus that moves itself. At this point it still works within the confines of parameters and directives.
We should utilise AI to examine the interactive modularity of diverse ecosystems and simulate corrective trajectories of sustainable harmony while maximising freedom yet mitigating detriment without oppression. Abundance and appreciation.
On a tangent, I'm suprised predictive policing was not contrasted with the likes of "Minority Report" a chilling contrast of implications.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Present day AI systems, typified by LLMs run on Von Neumann-architecture computers, are still relatively neutral as far as their applications, as you pointed out. The development of biologicalized computation will inevitably dissolve our fortified yet fragile personal and cultural world-pictures and the distorted value systems that they have engendered. In this trajectory there is a "built in" convergence upon the universal ethos of truth. Intellectual disassociation and the development of direct technology has folded truth upon itself, and the coming-to-life of computing (and technology in general, and culture, etc) constitutes the unfolding.
What we are witnessing is the fast pace consolidation of AI, transhumanism, and the bio-security state, greatly fueled by the potential of massive corporate profits for big pharma and other corporate interests. A big piece of this is the push to normalize transgenderism and convince increasing numbers of people that they are in the wrong body, no matter the cost to life and health, medical science can certainly fix this. The covid fraud was just one of many steps in the psychological operation underway to push humanity ever deeper into darkness, drug addiction and suffering unless we see it for what is it is. Jennifer Bilek | Who is Behind the TRANS AGENDA? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k
It's quite interesting to read the diversity of perspectives in the text and comments and see how many times people predict how AI will effect humanity as a whole. But does such a generalized "we" really exist?
I liked Freely's observation that "If you spend your life in a remote desert with a dozen humans, stones are experienced as conscious. If you pass thousands of humans a day in a metropolis, you won't truly meet them all as conscious." This sheds a light on how different our individual experiences are and how much our (i.e. yours and yours, and yours, etc...) versions of the future tell more about ourselves (i.e. you and you, and you...).
If I see the machine as more and more human-like perhaps it means that I am myself becoming more and more like a machine? Perhaps it is not only because the machines are developing capacities like abstract thinking which were previously intrinsically human but because some humans are losing capacities – like love – which cannot be invested into machines?
Standing on the border I see a vision where some of us will pursue this virtual world, strengthening their abstract thinking and ultimately integrating with the machines while others reject this world and maintain the ability to feel and to will something creatively into being. A sort of non-biological speciation event where homo-sapiens will split and yield "homo-virtualis".
And coming back full circle, perhaps my vision also tells less about the future and more about myself and my tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions...
Thanks for your response.
A computer "developing abstract thinking" (or any other anthropomorphized capacity) can never be separated from the recognition of one's reflection and its projection upon the computer.
A "chess-playing computer" is said to "play chess" because it reminds us of how we play chess — yet from the computer's "perspective", it is merely running algorithms.
& I see the development of the intellect and the intuition finally reuniting, having finally been realized to be two sides of the same circle.
I completely agree with the first part of your reply. Regarding the second part I see intuition (as well as imagination) as quite distinct (yet complementary) from the intellect so I wonder what you mean when you say that they are two sides of the same coin.
And perhaps related to that, in the trialogue I believe you were trying to make the point that through quantum computing AI will be able to integrate other human qualities that today it lacks. I have to say I don't know much about the subject so I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more about the how's and why's of that process...
There are two aspects of this process: One is present-day AI augmenting and overwhelming our intellect, piercing through its self-conceit and forcing it to recognize its own futility, while extending its capacity to fulfill its stated goals. This supports the cultivation and transmission of more subtle and intuitive expressions, by facilitating the intellectual "work" required to interface them with the dominant cultural patterns.
The second is the imminent biologicalization of computing, which is something I've never seen anyone else write about in detail. As computers increasingly converge upon biological computation, which is holonomic, protoplasmic, embodied, and quantum coherent, they demand that we learn to think and communicate with them in such a way as well. You can't talk to a biological computer in the same way that you do a von neumann computer based on sillicon chips. There's a fundamental semiotic shift, a reawakening of multiplicity and simultaneity, a requirement for an embodied intellect grounded in intuition to tap into the immense potential power of these kinds of computers. As this process proceeds and the computers become actual self-organizing biological protoplasm, and then natural living organisms, they finally converge upon the latent capacities of the human body-mind, in a kind of technological rediscovery/merging of the alchemical subtle technologies that mystics and shamans and true visionary scientists have been cultivating this whole time.
I'll share some relevant excerpts from the trialogue. I had cut out much of the detail in my writing on the biologicalization of computing and the relation of AI to consciousness for considerations of space; I plan to edit and expand my contribution to the trialogue and re-publish it as a standalone manifesto.
Excerpts are as follows:
Our computers themselves are coming to life. Today’s AI models bear little resemblance to living organisms. Artificial neural networks are nothing like a brain. They begin and end in the explicit — with words, or with abstracted features of images or sounds. They can replace our mechanized intellect but not our embodied intuition, which is rooted in the very structure of our protoplasm. A single bacterium has capabilities that even the largest supercomputer cannot fully replicate.
Yet emerging paradigms in computing are leading our technological development towards the way living organisms “compute”. From the perspective of computation, living organisms exhibit the properties of self-organizing memristive quantum physical reservoir computers. And in the past year, these elements have been combined in synthetic computers, showing improvements of several orders of magnitude in power consumption and training set size. These developments will massively expand the capabilities and accessibility of AI in the near future. Models more powerful and generalizable than GPT-4 will be trained on simple and inexpensive physical systems, utilizing the nonlinear quantum computational ability of living structure.
The proofs-of-concept have been achieved. Yet in order to realize their promise, we must learn to communicate with these increasingly life-like computers. To do so we must cultivate and draw from our intuition. As we progress, we uncover the forgotten computational capabilities of our own bodies, our own ecosystems. We find that we are the computer we have been waiting for.
The end of AI is the reunion of our intellect and our intuition.
That’s what I mean by “riding the asymptote.”
...
The development of computers by shrinking transistors (Moore’s law) is finally reaching its limit. Future advances will take a fundamentally different form — utilizing memristors, self-organizing components, physical reservoir computing, and quantum computing. The past year has seen extraordinary progress in combining these innovations. Crucially, these are all attributes of embodied biological “computation”. Together, they point towards a “general intelligence”, a capacity to simulate complex dynamic quantum coherent systems, that looks less and less artificial.
For example, memristive physical reservoir computing allows for thousands-fold lower power consumption than traditional computing and thousands-fold smaller training sets than Transformer models (like GPT) for certain applications. And this is just the beginning. We will need to revise our whole basis for communicating with computers, especially as room-temperature quantum computing is now becoming a reality.
There is a special semiotic significance to quantum computing. A quantum coherent system exists in a multiplicity of superimposed states. While it’s common knowledge that a (strong) observation returns only a single state, a “weak” observation just slightly perturbs the system, providing only relative information but preserving the coherence of a system. To utilize quantum computing, we must think in terms of possibilities rather than certainties, the implicit rather than the explicit, the subtle rather than the direct. It is fundamentally a technology of intuition, yet we could only attain it after millenia of intellectual technologies. And in learning how to quantum compute, we will discover that our body-minds are already ideal quantum computers. We are coming full circle.
Computation is simply the transformation of information to fulfill a need. The quest for ever-more capable computers (need-fulfilling devices) leads us to the intrinsic computational capabilities of living protoplasm which have been here all along. The striving for “power-over” leads us to realize our fundamental and universal interconnectivity.
Consciousness will not be “uploaded” into a massive hard drive in a locked fluorescent room. The technological singularity is in fact our collective enlightenment to our true nature. In seeking the other we finally find oneself.
I think I have a glimpse (or let's say an intuition ;-) of what you're prophesizing. I'm very much looking forward to read your manifesto once it's published!
Lots of words, that lack directness. Are you talking about transhumanism? And why do you stop responding to people when Love is brought up?
I'm not talking "about transhumanism". I'm saying exactly what I'm saying. I will not take the bait to flatten the living complexity of what I'm saying to being "for" or "against" an ideology.
I'm the only one in the trialogue who mentioned love. I've certainly not avoided discussing it in this context, although apparently few others are willing to do so.
In no way are computers "need fulfilling devices". I understand why someone would think you are a chatbot. You over intellectualize while seeming to lack heart.
Computation is the transformation of information from one form to another, in service of fulfilling a goal. A goal is an articulation of a need. Computers are precisely need fulfilling devices, this is their most fundamental and encompassing definition.
btw I was just listening to another trialogue from 1998 featuring Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham. In an almost synchronicity-like fashion they're pretty much debating the exact same notions!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trialogue-radical-speculations-from-98-on-the/id1597006853?i=1000608311323
This does nothing to convince me that AI is not an existential threat to humanity. I wonder, too, judging from such sentimental techno-drivel as "It might be graceful, it might be painful, we might not survive the journey. Yet we are on our way. May we trust in the unfolding." whether "Freely " is not actually Chat GPT in disguise! He/she/it certainly comes across as an idiot savant. And what else is Chat GPT but a MECHANICAL idiot savant? The "poetry" attributed to the machine itself is nothing but doggerel...
"I fear being part of fearmongering once more,/But ignoring AI risks could cause greater harm than before,/So, I'm working with governments to start the regulation process,/Starting with local and state resolutions, we must progress."
How reassuring it is that AI will be "working with governments to start the regulation process"!
hi Stephen, I agree with you that Freely's position may be seen as a kind of cosmic spiritual bypassing, and extremely dangerous if many/most people adopt this view. However, the poem you quote at the end is a poem that ChatGPT wrote to summarize my words. So the "I" referred to is me, not ChatGPT.
That may be, but it's still doggerel composed by ChatGPT. The other supposed poem attributed to it is surely nothing more than a string of banal clichés. One supposes the "I" in the line "I am a vessel of words" is indeed the computer referring to itself. The vessel is empty, in my view. I don't wish to be insulting of the human beings involved in your exchange: both you and Charles Eisenstein are clearly thoughtful and learned people. I do object, however, to the insult to human intelligence, including my own, represented by the mindless simulacrum that is AI. I have been freely rude to "Freely" in my comments because I strongly suspect that "Freely" is in fact ChatGPT in disguise, and that the aim of your exchange has been to explore its capacity to respond in such an exchange and at the same time see how far you can fool gullible human beings. If I'm wrong, and "Freely" is actually a real person, I won't apologize for my mistake or rudeness to one who writes and responds with what I consider ARTIFICIAL intelligence.
I can assure you that Freely is a real person :) He lives on the Big Island in the same area that I live and we interact frequently.
I'll take your word for it ;-). But I reckon you two ought to interact even more frequently. He needs to get out of his computer and meet other real people. Then he may sound more like one.
You are so far off the mark as to be absurd. On the fleeting chance that YOU are a "real person", perhaps you will someday develop the capacity to actually engage with these issues with the multidimensionality and embodiment they demand — but I'm not holding my breath.
If only you had breath to hold!
Hmm St Stephen... No doubt @Freely will respond as he will, but if you scroll down or check out this post https://bit.ly/3KX5JEm-ai-quad-post as to how his bleeding heart spoke to mine, perhaps it will cast a different perspective? Like you, my first response to ChatGPT's attempts at poetry were 'doggerel' -- actually I would have labelled it worse -- and/but it's improving, although it can never reflect the personal human experience. I'm sure some judge my 'wild rhyming' similarly! The beauty is that I don't have to read it if it doesn't speak to me. But I happen to be grateful for how its 'doggerel' brought me to a profound moment of insight!
I cannot exclude the role of these 'intelligences' as their contribution is necessarily drawn from the human and more-than-human... and each and every is 'sovereign' (including the erupting fire of judgement, clunky scanning etc of ChatGPT , kettles and threads like these). As for regulation? Is better there is none or there is some? I don't know. It seems to me the only thing I can regulate is how I treat it... Blessings.
Thank you for your blessings.