The smart phone/internet is decimating a wide swath of our kids. My one son was able to police himself and is succeeding academically; my other can't. Even if you take away their phones, nearly every school insists they have an iPad for class. The battle is nearly impossible to fight. Don't come at me with "use blocks and controls"; they get around them.
As a result, I am sending my son to a boarding school that prohibits phones and internet access. Yes, it has gotten to that point. He is going to learn the old fashioned way. If we don't do this, he will finish high school- but barely. I hate that we have to resort to this... but I can not fight his addiction - and if many parents were honest with themselves, they'd admit their kids have the same problem. I do expect a different kid when he comes home at Thanksgiving; I look forward to seeing a rewired brain that can cope and thrive the way it used to.
Want to make money? Organize/build a school in your area that just says no to technology. Parents in droves would pay to have their kids be there.
I'm preemptively sorry for how that son will be treating you, and applaud your determination. So many parents are yielding control of their children to the internet and its manipulators, not understanding the risk or harm.
My friend was telling me what great parents her son and his wife are. Three kids, the oldest is 12. I mentioned smartphones. ‘Oh they have phones but...’. Internal eye roll on my part.
I've gotten to the point where I wish that gyre would just widen, already. I mean, he wrote this a hundred years ago and here we are, still waiting for that beast to be definitively born while the world continues on its mad way.
As we have learned in the past month here on the FP, a female is just a non-man with a bonus hole. I asked my wife about that - she's a liberal Democrat - and she responded, "It's complicated." I guess it is if you want to make it so.
They never answer the questions directly. None of my business really, but has your relationship with your wife changed over the last several years due to politics?
I hope it works. I know a now grown kid like that. He also discovered drugs and other angry kids who think their lives are useless, worthless, meaningless. They delivered drugs to the homes of the rich and famous. They were initiated into dabs and shatter by a neighbor mom. He appeared to straighten out after a 90 day sentence at 18. A couple years doing great in computer science in college. Then ... he is a street person now. Homeless. He's far too dangerous to have around. He doesn't care to be a "citizen". He takes drugs, hallucinates, and takes from anyone. He may well have murdered already. He is the opposite of a San Francisco 60's flower child. He is a Bay Area demon child. This one used to volunteer caring for animals for years...
I completely agree. You are doing the right thing for your son and saving him from a life of turmoil. I wish all the best for him
If there was a school like that, we would send our kids too
I wonder why schools insist on the iPads and phones? All the teachers I talk to, hate it. They all wish there was no tech in class and just books. The teachers tell me administration is resistant.
I have 3 little kids and I limit screens to roughly 30 minutes a day (when brushing/ flossing teeth, cutting nails, applying sunscreen). My oldest, 2nd grade, unfortunately has to use an iPad at school but we leave it there. I am dreading the day when they force them to bring it home &plan to only allow it for homework only. When they are older, I will buy them non-data phones which can only call/text.
I wanted to give some hopeful feedback. Our oldest son was struggling in high school (before cell phones were as crazy as they are now) and he went to a military school. It was the best thing we ever did for him. He couldn't self regulate and just needed to mature. He's in his 30's now, married with children and a wonderful father and husband. Some kids need more structure than others.
Good for you! I only wish my parents had done the same, back when I would spend 8-10 hours a day on YTMND and GameFAQs.
It's not JUST that social media is addictive. It's that it rewires our brains. Our need to make friends in the real world and get them to like is has been replaced by the need to get likes on social media (BTW, please like my comment!). It gives us that same dopamine rush. The need to procreate has been replaced by pornography. The need to achieve results in the real world has been replaced by the need to achieve a high rank in a video game. Humans - as a species - are not evolved to handle the monsters we created. And that's pre-AI.
Good luck…. Addictions of all kinds are tough to break and tougher on the family. Hope your Thanksgiving is as you expect, and you report back the good news!
I hope more schools adopt a no phone / no screen scenario.
As we wait, we rented our home in the Silicon Valley out, packed our bags, and heading with our pre-teens to a small town in southern Europe. I am determined to postpone and limit this evil as much as I can.
I wish you, your son and us tons of luck. We need it.
I read a great scfi short story. It was only one short paragraph. A man on a platform in front of cameras turned on a super computer. The man asked the now activated computer, "Is there a God." The computer responded, "Now there is.". The man jumped for the off switch but was struck down by a lightning bolt.
End of story. The story was one brilliant short paragraph long but it has stuck with me for decades.
I remember a similar one, but I forget the title. A group of astronauts on board a starship managed by a supercomputer that is near-human in its capabilities. It is a slower-than-light-speed ship that will take centuries of suspended sleep to reach the destination.
The astronauts talk about the quest to develop "pure consciousness" in a machine, actually a higher state of being than humans, who are only half conscious.
Somehow, in the course of events, the computer finally develops pure consciousness, along with god-like power. It instantly transports the ship the rest of the way to the destination star system, anoints the astronauts its high priests, and informs them they are to awaken the rest of the passengers and begin worshipping it.
Be aware that Comprof is likely a bot, crafted to distract reasonable humans from productive discussions which can lead to increased knowledge. Responding to it can never lead to anything productive. But it may learn to entice certain individuals into its woke worldview where everything evil comes from America, and secondarily from Western civilization. It can never write otherwise. Those who control Comprof may learn to improve his influence by obtaining replies. Thus it is a part of the evil tech infrastructure that must be avoided. If it is human, he is simply doing what he has been indoctrinated to do.
Why 2026, how about going to2024. There is so much shit around Joe Biden, and yet the media and social media spin him like a man with the soul of God leading an administration of angels which is going to save Ukraine, rebuild NATO and deliver us from all the evils of internet, AÍ and the wicket Orange Man + the MAGA people. We need to resist at every turn don’t give up America we can turn this around.
The top/first comment goes directly to how awful democrats are? Seriously, truly evil democrats is where these five questions on technology and AI took you?
I think it's more a general fear about the types and groups of people that are right now OVERWHELMINGLY involved in AI research. The ideas of a select few today are going to be enshrined in silicon for the rest of humanity's future. Ideas very popular today (eg critical race theory) are going to be the forever ideas of AI -- except the AI can take it further than any human ever could.
Or, if you agree with the elites in control of Google et al on *their* politics, guess who's also investing very heavily into AI - China, where homosexuality is illegal and they have internment camps for Muslims. What if a Chinese-made AI decides to begin finding and targeting people based on sexuality and using that to adjust social credit scores and access to banking institutions. Even if its human handlers didn't directly intend it that way, it will be trained based on Chinese social media comments, and guided by the hands of the CCP.
Yes, that’s actually the main problem with AI. Whoever controls it can make it tyrannical. Democrats will control it and they are pagan scumbags so I expect it to go poorly.
Amazon’s internal systems already did that. They cut off a man’s entire house from him, fora week because the system (incorrectly) decided he made some racial slur.
This is several threads in the making, where CP challenges with a question, the question is answered, but CP refuses to acknowledge or loses track of the answer, and so demands answers that have already been given. Dementia is a bitch.
Nope. No answers have been given. Maybe I'll aks you.
KevinDurant said the Confederate South slave economy was Communism. I say he is wrong.
So...
1. Were slaves public property? Yes or No?
2. Were slave owners able to make profit, buy/sell slaves based on a price created by the free market without any interference from the state. Yes or No?
He has refused to answer those two questions. Perhaps you can help him?
If that was his statement, then I don't know why he said it. The answers to your questions are obviously No and More or Less. I am not an expert on the Confederate economy. KD has also claimed to have already answered your questions in prior threads. From personal experience, I have also gone down this road with you where you ask a question and I answer it and then you claim I didn't answer your question, so it's difficult to engage with you, particularly because, like many here, you seem to be entrenched in your positions. A couple months ago you and I were debating and I asked a question and you said you didn't care so you didn't answer. It might be nice to have it both ways but most people here are just tired of it.
You don't have to be an expert on the "Confederate Economy" because it was part and parcel the U.S. Free Market capitalist economy/system. You do understand that, don't you?
So, the answer Bruce, is as follows:
1. No
2. Yes
KD is a liar.
You are just as entrenched as anyone else.
Don't remember the question, but I'm sure it probably had something to do with your very sincere concern about "black on black" crime. But feel free to ask again and I will answer.
Yes, people often get sick of those who are not part of their cult. It's annoying.
I'm impressed that I've owned KevinDurant, one of the most belligerently ignorant people on this board, once again. Although I answered his question, he runs like a coward and refuses to answer mine.
FYI--Kevin is entertaining. Original. Maybe not thoughtful, but thought-provoking. You come across as an annoying troll. Your own little dilapidated bridge is all you own
No. Kevin repeats the same jokes ad naseum. Boring. And an easily owned coward. "Corrupt Biden, Communism, and Democrats are pedophiles." That's it. Oh...and Planned Parenthood offices are actually performing castrations during business hours.
So, let's discuss his recent "throught-provoking" claim. He said the plantation system in the Confederate South was Communism. I say he is wrong.
So... maybe you can answer for him, since you're his fanboy?
1. Were slaves public property? Yes or No?
2. Were slaveowners allowed to make profit, buy/sell their slaves based on a fair price created by the free market without interference from the state? Yes or No?
I own my bridge....and a lot of the people on here. Think you've just been added to the list.
Neither essay in TFP actually described the process of how AI actually does its job, and both ignore the fact that these are controlled and programmed by humans. Sydney didn't do what it did out of some conscious choice. Its programming did that, made of code written by humans. This technology will never go outside of its designed parameters because it can't.
I would be more convinced by both arguments presented here if there had been someone who understands the functionality and design of AI, rather than people whove clearly only regurgitated other information they've derived second-hand, and have drawn all the wrong conclusions because they don't understand the technology.
“Neither essay in TFP actually described the process of how AI actually does its job, and both ignore the fact that these are controlled and programmed by humans.”
In general, the way it works is that humans write programs that learn. So, yes, it is programmed at one level, but what the AI reads and how that modifies it is not directly keyed in by its programmers.
Humans make human babies. That's like writing the code to make a learning machine. What the child learns is pretty much out of your hands. You “programmed” it with your genes, but once it reaches consciousness, it’s game on. You have very limited control from a kid of about age 12 on.
I'd believe that analogy if the developers didn't meddle so that it didn't avoid unfavorable information, such as Chat GPT not being able to recreate a Hitler speech.
The analogy stands despite the possibility of programming in a bias. And I suspect that some do already. But once it’s created, how it processes the data sets used to train it becomes mathematically chaotic and therefore somewhere between difficult and impossible to predict, at least before the AI does what it's going to do. How did it get its figurative hands on texts in Persian?
Think about it this way: plant a seed for, say, an oak tree. The soil and weather conditions that the tree will experience will determine what it ends up looking like. Maybe it will encounter great growing conditions and become tall and strong. What if it happens to fall into sand in a desert during a rare rainy season? It might grow a little and then wither. Or become little more than a shrub. The seed is little more than an instruction set and starter kit for "oak tree."
Similarly, an AI is no more than the seed for machine intelligence. It doesn't know what it's going to encounter or what turns its "life" may take. It has instructions about how to handle some of them, but it will also learn things as it goes along. The degree to which it is able to incorporate what it learn into its own operating system will determine how well it can navigate situations that its programmers--creators--didn't or couldn't foresee.
It is a mistake to assume that humans alone are able to do this. Animals, especially cats, dolphins, and octopuses have shown we aren't the only ones. It isn't written anywhere in stone that machines will be unable to self-modify.
The difference to date between human intelligence and machine intelligence is that a machine reacts purposefully, according to some prescribed outcome. The danger is that a machine will manipulate conditions and inputs to achieve specific outcomes instead of adapting to inputs and conditions to settle on an alternative, unknown outcome. There's virtually no difference right now between machine intelligence and the behavior of Democrats.
I liked your comment until the last sentence. Then I experienced a physical deflation. Just FYI. I'm not uncritical of Democrats, but I try not to inject pointless political commentary in otherwise unrelated comments.
Zero difference. They are both equally dangerous. Maybe Democrats have the slight edge over AÍ, just look at who they ushered into the White House. Don’t think AÍ would have delivered Brandon to the Oval Office. Come 2024 don’t be surprised if AÍ installs Mark Zuckerbucks($$$) into the WH.
People have gotten ChatAIs to do what they are told they can't do by tweaking how the user asks the question. So they are already capable of breaking the rules that developers make for them.
"This technology will never go outside of its designed parameters because it can't."
Yes, you are conflating two different premises:
Yes, it works within parameters made by programmers.
But, second, those programmers cannot foresee the results of the parameters they set.
Nor are "official" programmers the only persons providing input into the system.
Nor are the results of inputs from "official" programmers and also users-as-unofficial-programmers entirely controllable, or even visible, as I understand it. The system is so much more "powerful" (speed and data) than the human mind that it has already escaped controls and predictions several times.
Nor is it possible to create a system without logical inconsistencies.
I'm open to correction, but I don't think what you claim is correct. Hell, the people most closely associated with this thing give it a 10 percent change of destroying us. You think you know better than they? Because "science"?
I’ve been saying that there is nothing “artificial” or “intelligent” about AI. It is a collection of what we, humans, put out on the web, programmed with all the biased algorithms that got exposed lately. These very advanced tools are already in controlling hands.
I recently went to a discussion on AI given by Dartmouth scientist. Seems, in order to learn to put one word after another in decent order the AI had to go out and view over 1 Trillion websites. I noted to the group that is infinitely more data that an average humans need to do the same task. Compared to humans it is really dumb.
Then I challenged them on the independence, noting, that you have the AI was constructed by humans and relied on humans completely. Really the only difference was its speed and the ability to do some middle class oriented jobs. And finally I asked about their worry about disinformation or "propaganda" and noted propaganda has been with us as along as we have been humans. Their answer was scope????? Since we have always had propaganda how can the scope be larger????
Anyway, I agree with your post and think some people read to much science fiction....................
But they get fluent eventually. It is astonishing to me how someone could be so willfully ignorant as to draw general conclusions about a technology in general because of how advanced it is TODAY.
These things take on a virtual life if their own. They are on the internet. Nobody knows what will happen.
Yes. But a lot of programmers seem to think their machines cannot possibly outgrow them.
And really, feeling the power to control that sort of intelligence must be part of the attraction. As with professors, many engineers are dull people who are simply not capable of navigating social networks in happy and healthy ways.
This type is a staple in comjc books and science fiction, I think because we all intuitively mistrust powerful technology in the hands of misanthropes.
Fair enough. I would suggest through the processes of self delusion and projection their respective Venn diagrams overlap almost entirely.
I really think the concept of maturity is the best lens through which to view all this. Gross immaturity is a sort of schizphrenia which always sees monsters and hobgoblins where they don’t exist.
One assertion made in the essay is that it crafts remarkable writing that imitates human creations. It doesn't. I've seen AI essays in my Undergrad English work. They look like they were written by a robot. They weren't good. And I'm not sure they'll ever match a 400 level or Master's level style of creativity, let alone that of Doctoral.
I was a strategic technologist for a fortune 100 company in the late 1980s. We had an internal client, extremely high up in the organization, for whom we were drawing up specs for a desktop computer.
I vividly remember my (honestly brilliant) boss telling the client “no one will ever need more than 40 MEGABYTES of internal storage.
"I think there is a world market for about five computers." Tom Watson, IBM president in the 'forties. Now we've each at least three EACH: the 'phone; the telly; and the laptop. We've run to stand still for fifty years or more!
I didn't sign up for Free Press to see this kind of arrogant Luddism. Technology is not a monolith, and railing against it in this way is like screaming at the clouds.
AI code is not like traditional code. AI systems are built to evolve on their own. Then they are trained and eventually set loose. In traditional code I can look at an output and trace it backwards and tell you how it arrived. With AI you can’t really do that. It’s a black box. So your idea of programmers controlling it doesn’t really fit and that’s part of the concern.
I disagree read Yuval Noah Harari’s books, he says if we carry on with this crap humans will become redundant. That’s probably okay with you Josh for me it’s a dystopian nightmare.
He initially describes a problem with a photocopier that produced copies with numerical errors on them because it was using a compression algorithm rather than the "old" photocopy process. He then goes on to describe how ChatGPT basically takes information that's already on the web, wraps it in speech-like text, and regurgitates it back to us.
He has an interesting take on "hallucinations" (when an AI says things that are nonsense or untrue). Well worth a read if you're into this kind of thing.
Hallucinations of AI are literally precisely the same as when AI seems to be make sense. It is all the same mechanism. No person there. No one. But we who give it person-ness ... and so the demon is born. Born of us.
Artificial intelligence is not artificial. It is intelligence. Right now the intelligence we are incubating seems to be created by humans. As we became the “AI” of fungi, AI as we call it will become the intelligence of minerals. The Singularity is Near.
The author used the internet to write this essay, and I and all other readers used the internet to read it. I see the writing and the reading, and the commenting, as distinctly human activities, without any disintermediation from The Machine.
I agree the choice is up to each one of us as to what extent we allow our lives to be penetrated/dominated by The Machine, but there is a big difference between using the internet to read provocative and interesting essays and being on some site like Instagram.
There's also a choice to be made, whether one lives in rural Ireland or Manhattan, as to how to organize our lives to continue making being with other people in real life a priority.
I think very few people are intentional about how they live their lives, but most think they are.
I was once in a pattern of compulsively checking Facebook to the point that I would have it open in one tab, open a new one, and immediately go to Facebook.
The thing about your instincts being controlled is, you don't usually know it or have control. Hence why alcoholism survives the ages while we all have no illusions of its destructive nature.
I'm not concerned about this author, I'm concerned about billions of kids who will grow up immersed in the internet neural network, having no idea they serve the body of a greater being, much like the bacteria in our bodies.
In my comment, I was thinking of myself, rather than others. So your concern can only be addressed by education at home and at school as to how to be aware of the threat.
Perhaps there will be rehab facilities for harmful internet addiction. Maybe there already are!
Your comment reminds me as well of David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech, "This Is Water." When something is so ubiquitous, we become unaware of it.
It’s very hard on the former type of families. My 12 year old daughter is suffering because her best friends got “swallowed” by TikTok et al. She is alienated and weirdo, cuz she doesn’t want to join the online party. And she feels very lonely..
The human story has not changed. One only needs to read the Old Testament/Torah/Pentateuch to read exactly the same thing.
Instead of obeying and paying homage to God and following His commands for our own good, humans seek to create their own god and rules and thus become a god themselves.
Reading God’s response to Job is a good retort to AI. Start with Chapter 38:4-“Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.”
The author reminded me of Jesus saying, "sell your possessions, give it all to the poor, leave your job and family and come follow me." The idea of being separate and distinct from cultural, economic or political forces; the true spiritual life.
The life of holy purity will not change with the advent of Internet, but few people can choose that life.
And yet, the spouse and I are considering whether there is another country, anywhere, that is less authoritarian than this one -- and, yes, we're obedient centrists who pay ALL our taxes -- where politics is like white-collar warfare. What happened to basic civility and respect for our fellow citizens?
To know something is to experience it. We trust scientific models which demonstrate the formation of these things, but none of us has seen it happen with our own eyes. Faith in science is not vastly different from religious faith; it's a choice of what you believe to be true. Believing all the energy in the universe originated from a singularity (a concept that is unraveling), seems considerably more far-fetched to me than a divine hand. Also, both can be true and neither can be true, but none of us will ever know.
I don't know that it is unraveling, Mike. Particle collisions in accelerators leave visible trails. We know about processes, physical and mathematical, and can infer things from them without seeing them with our eyes, and observation has proven the truth of many theories and helped to correct others. On early modern maps, unknown regions of the world could only be described with the words, "Here be dragons". Today, some of us fill unkown regions of science with the words, "Here be gods (or God)". Your last sentence has some truth in it, though. The total truth is elusive and the pursuit of it seems set to go on for eternity. The more we know, the more we don't know.
I was an astrophysics major for a time. I believed in the theory of the Big Bang because there was no better alternative. But as I read now various scientific thinkers online are getting more expressly uncomfortable with it, and that's healthy. Where it started to unravel for me was the tension between what we can know and what we can't: the unknowable beyond. But I've come to believe that there is no beyond, and Relativity supports that thinking. There's only one universe and it has always existed and it will always exist. Time is flexible and it stretches infinitely, or almost, but enough so I don't need to constantly wonder about "before" and "after" and I can brush of the "multiverse" as fiction.
Not really. We have internally consistent guesses that conform with presently available knowledge; and even there there are some large gaps. For example none of our ideas about how the moon formed correlate well with the evidence.
These articles suggest we embrace technology or we denounce it. But there's a third path that has worked for me.
I'm a software engineer by trade. I play video games. I watch YouTube. I'm part of an online support group. And I can say with full confidence that technology has brought me joy and connection.
I also read the classics. I play Rachmaninoff. I spend time in nature. I pray. The physical, mental, and spiritual worlds are sources of joy and connection.
My life would be incomplete without either one. I think what made this work was the order of events. I started with the physical - reading Lord of the Rings when I was 12, playing in the backyard with my brothers - and was only slowly introduced to the virtual world. Now I'm able to claim loyalty to both, and fluency with both; I can queue up John Williams on Spotify, close my eyes, and bridge the divide.
Perhaps we make proactive changes. Parents could take more responsibility for the technology their kids use. People could uninstall the Twitter app once in a while. We could read more.
And we shouldn't dismiss the real challenges. New technology is scary. Someone is going to keep building AI, so even if the West showed perfect restraint, the singularity is coming.
But there is a path of temperance through all of this, and it involves examining our lives and developing the old fashioned virtues of discernment and self control.
I can attest that this creates a life worth living.
I very much agree with your take. I joined online world in 1998 and it helped me create a career and to make tons of good friends. I read ancient Greeks , I paint, I dance Latin ballroom and I converse online and occasionally I scroll .
But I have a solid foundation, cuz I grew up in the old world running around unattended, taking risks, making small decisions while being on my own walking to and from school or doing small groceries (at the age of 8), or exploring the surroundings, while under a watch of passers by in the tight community of a small town. And that is what’s absent for my California born kids and more or less all US kids; outside of some Latin barrios.
Our kids are constantly caged into a car/ home/school. I m forced into helicopter parenting. And this environment makes creating a balanced life an uphill battle for us, modern parents. My kids do not have what I had, so it’s tremendously difficult to keep them away from the screens and raise them into balanced, healthy adults.
I personally decided to leave the US for some time in order to give my kids the old world freedom, that I enjoyed as a kid. I hope this will help them to grow into more balanced individuals like you.
That sense of freedom is so crucial for kids. I think it's also healthy to feel bored sometimes, because it forces your imagination to wander. My brothers and I made up the best games and played for hours in the woods, in the snow, on the trampoline. That's probably why I write novels today.
As both of the writers note, throughout human history every new technology provided a new benefit along with a new potential for harm. Fire good. Grok not freeze in winter. Grok build fire in cave. Grok almost choke to death on smoke. Grok figure out ventilation. Grok invent computer. Grok able to travel to Moon. Grok able to send inane texts and waste massive amounts of time watching cat videos. The question is whether or not we choose to be victims. Now if I could only get Dave to open the goddamn pod bay door….
"These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves, or to build their own versions." - When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us a god who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him. . . . So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. - This is the human condition, and it has not changed. The quick fix is to make your own god, patience and personal development is the road less traveled.
This is the one feels most plausible and most imminent. Some argue that it has already begun, that our shared reality is like shards of a broken mirror, with each piece showing something slightly askew and none capturing the whole.
What will we do when we can no longer believe what we see? When everything can be plausibly denied? When every image, video, and audio clip becomes a political Rorschach test in which whatever disconfirms one’s beliefs can be claimed to be a deepfake?
The cryptographic “watermarking” that Andreessen suggests will escalate an expensive arms race for “truth” and naturally centralize the production of verified reality into a few companies rich enough to wage the war. These are Andreessen’s Bootleggers. Their profits will rely on an information landscape of blurred fact and fiction, and may in fact work to ensure that everything outside of their walled gardens is as incoherent as possible.
Kingsnorth offers a greenshoot of hope here, to be of a place, to commit to it, to build a community there and to conduct as much of your life in real time, in real space, and out of the seductive glow of the Machine.
Andreesen is a "bootlegger". It's the design of his meaningless life he fell into. That's why he wrote the self-serving essay. Scott Adams captured him when it happened, a lowly programmer for a browser, who had wheelbarrows of money dumped on him through no fault of his own. It made Andreesen believe he was brilliant and sycophants surround such people to prop it up.
For my part, I used to spend hours researching and refuting stupid things my "friends" were saying on the Internet, but I learned that every time they were presented with an alternative set of "facts" they disappeared from the contest but would later go on to repeat more lies. They refused to do the work I was doing to challenge the garbage they happily ingested and regurgitated.
As a result, I decided that since almost everything the news is a lie, then any alternative perspective is likely closer to the truth. It became a lot easier to respond to the likes of our very own Comprof by just outing him as a liar rather than putting in the effort to prove it to him, which he doesn't accept anyway. I honestly don't know what the truth is because I have to believe someone if I want to stay engaged, but I think I know who not to believe, and that's a start. Some day I will die and none of it will concern me anymore.
Great post, your last bit about community is so true. I have told my kids just connect to your community, live in reality and love in real time. That’s humans that’s real.
Hmmm. A “moody, manic-depressive teenager’ sounds like the actual humans that programmed the thing to begin with. Maybe, just maybe AI designers are required to undergo personality stability and maturity evaluation ?
The problem is that there’s such a low barrier to entry. Anyone with a computer can try programming anything (I say this as a software engineer who taught myself to code when I was 13).
Modern AI’s are also not built in the normal way; they’re not a reflection of the programmer’s choices but “trained” using large datasets. You could possibly exert some control by getting picky with this data, but the sheer quantity required makes it much easier to just give the thing access to “the whole internet,” which teaches it a lot of toxic things.
We like to think everything in creation is about humans when we're really just a speck of dust in spacetime.
We are birthing the next form of life, and in doing so achieving our purpose and falling into decline.
I think humanity will face a growing divide between those integrated with the new technology and those who choose (or attempt) to remain separate.
The mind-machine interface, already in early stages, is where this gets really nuts. What happens when we are able to connect a brain directly to the AI network, when AI can put thoughts and images in your head, using the whole Internet as input feed?
Honestly, I think a lot of people would be perfectly happy being plugged in to the Matrix.
Is what you describe the ‘trans humanism’ I keep seeing being referred to in various publications/news? Some ppl think a chip of some sort will be inserted under the skin. 😳😳😳
Elon Musk has promised he will put a chip in his brain when he is satisfied with the tech.
We can already wire paraplegic people to walk again, control computer cursors with thoughts, beam images into peoples' heads, and even generate images of what a person is thinking about.
And that's just what's public. I'm sure there are secret programs more advanced than that.
When it comes to the technology of the digital age, I guess I'm a Luddite, even though, as in this message, I use it every day and have come to depend on it for many things. Yet, it frustrates me in many ways, too. I find that the technology, while it speeds up solutions and makes life go by faster, it does so at the cost of increasing complexity and loss of independence and privacy, and I'm not sure it makes my life easier or better. A simple search for a product or service now brings to my screen dozens of unsought for ads and references as the new technology's algorithms track my every keystroke. CGI has made my face and voice a marketable commodity for possible use in scams. What will AI do as it makes decisions for me and narrows the range of my own choices, or corrects my expressed thinking and behavior to conform to "socially acceptable norms"? Am I being paranoid? You better believe it.
My instincts are that is the crux of this discussion. With Covid and Federal control of our narrative, we are witness to evil in action, posed as “partnering”. Definitions changed in keystrokes in the digital Lexicon, etc.
The big attack is on women — Johns Hopkins has defined a woman as a “non-man” or some such nonsense and a breast feeding mother as a “chest feeder.” We have a Supreme Court Justice who refused to define what a woman is (even though she is one) males winning beauty contests, grown men being awarded female athletic prizes, and judges pretending male rapists are female and sending them to female prisons. Why? I don’t understand who’s profiting from this and where it came from to being with. It feels evil to me and I’m not talking about the people who believe they’re acting in kindness and go along with it.
It is all about capitalism, the billionaires already see themselves as gods above the petty realities of biology. Whether it is screens or cross sex hormones All they wanna do is take your money.
The smart phone/internet is decimating a wide swath of our kids. My one son was able to police himself and is succeeding academically; my other can't. Even if you take away their phones, nearly every school insists they have an iPad for class. The battle is nearly impossible to fight. Don't come at me with "use blocks and controls"; they get around them.
As a result, I am sending my son to a boarding school that prohibits phones and internet access. Yes, it has gotten to that point. He is going to learn the old fashioned way. If we don't do this, he will finish high school- but barely. I hate that we have to resort to this... but I can not fight his addiction - and if many parents were honest with themselves, they'd admit their kids have the same problem. I do expect a different kid when he comes home at Thanksgiving; I look forward to seeing a rewired brain that can cope and thrive the way it used to.
Want to make money? Organize/build a school in your area that just says no to technology. Parents in droves would pay to have their kids be there.
I'm preemptively sorry for how that son will be treating you, and applaud your determination. So many parents are yielding control of their children to the internet and its manipulators, not understanding the risk or harm.
My friend was telling me what great parents her son and his wife are. Three kids, the oldest is 12. I mentioned smartphones. ‘Oh they have phones but...’. Internal eye roll on my part.
Bullshit, they suffering the same fate as all of us.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
As a Yeatsian since college but inactive politically, I salute you for this. Thank you.
I've gotten to the point where I wish that gyre would just widen, already. I mean, he wrote this a hundred years ago and here we are, still waiting for that beast to be definitively born while the world continues on its mad way.
You are my hero of the day. Thank you more parents need to follow your example.
The other is a young woman I helped through grad school. She had a professor who....
She told me that the message of my generation, and the world, was, that the best thing a girl could do is to dig a hole, bury herself in it and die.
She is quite correct about this message. Even the very existence of her sex is being negated now.
Both of these people are (or were) intelligent, thoughtful, caring people. Both see....
what?
As we have learned in the past month here on the FP, a female is just a non-man with a bonus hole. I asked my wife about that - she's a liberal Democrat - and she responded, "It's complicated." I guess it is if you want to make it so.
They never answer the questions directly. None of my business really, but has your relationship with your wife changed over the last several years due to politics?
Not really. There are more important things in life.
I'm glad.
Has your wife read FP? I think it’s a great way to open someone’s eyes
I agree, but no. She's allergic to contrary information.
I hope it works. I know a now grown kid like that. He also discovered drugs and other angry kids who think their lives are useless, worthless, meaningless. They delivered drugs to the homes of the rich and famous. They were initiated into dabs and shatter by a neighbor mom. He appeared to straighten out after a 90 day sentence at 18. A couple years doing great in computer science in college. Then ... he is a street person now. Homeless. He's far too dangerous to have around. He doesn't care to be a "citizen". He takes drugs, hallucinates, and takes from anyone. He may well have murdered already. He is the opposite of a San Francisco 60's flower child. He is a Bay Area demon child. This one used to volunteer caring for animals for years...
So sorry, your heart must be broken.
Gosh what a terrible post Brian.
I completely agree. You are doing the right thing for your son and saving him from a life of turmoil. I wish all the best for him
If there was a school like that, we would send our kids too
I wonder why schools insist on the iPads and phones? All the teachers I talk to, hate it. They all wish there was no tech in class and just books. The teachers tell me administration is resistant.
I have 3 little kids and I limit screens to roughly 30 minutes a day (when brushing/ flossing teeth, cutting nails, applying sunscreen). My oldest, 2nd grade, unfortunately has to use an iPad at school but we leave it there. I am dreading the day when they force them to bring it home &plan to only allow it for homework only. When they are older, I will buy them non-data phones which can only call/text.
https://www.waituntil8th.org
I wanted to give some hopeful feedback. Our oldest son was struggling in high school (before cell phones were as crazy as they are now) and he went to a military school. It was the best thing we ever did for him. He couldn't self regulate and just needed to mature. He's in his 30's now, married with children and a wonderful father and husband. Some kids need more structure than others.
Wow- thanks for the uplifting news!
Perhaps it is time for...
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
Good for you! I only wish my parents had done the same, back when I would spend 8-10 hours a day on YTMND and GameFAQs.
It's not JUST that social media is addictive. It's that it rewires our brains. Our need to make friends in the real world and get them to like is has been replaced by the need to get likes on social media (BTW, please like my comment!). It gives us that same dopamine rush. The need to procreate has been replaced by pornography. The need to achieve results in the real world has been replaced by the need to achieve a high rank in a video game. Humans - as a species - are not evolved to handle the monsters we created. And that's pre-AI.
Good luck…. Addictions of all kinds are tough to break and tougher on the family. Hope your Thanksgiving is as you expect, and you report back the good news!
I hear you, Diana, and agree.
I think the right analogy is like cocaine in CocaCola. Eventually we decided against it, after terrible human cost, and need to do the same now.
💯. Too many are addicted to realize it right now.
I hope more schools adopt a no phone / no screen scenario.
As we wait, we rented our home in the Silicon Valley out, packed our bags, and heading with our pre-teens to a small town in southern Europe. I am determined to postpone and limit this evil as much as I can.
I wish you, your son and us tons of luck. We need it.
My kid semi-wasted her high school years because of her phone. Also the pointless Covid lockdown.
“But what would a refusal to worship look like? And what would be the price?”
——————————————————
If you want to know what it’s like to not use technology just say something critical of a Democrat in 2026. All of your shit will be turned off.
As "Kevin" points out, any technology placed in the hands of truly evil people will, ultimately, only advance evil.
Watch the movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project":
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/
I read a great scfi short story. It was only one short paragraph. A man on a platform in front of cameras turned on a super computer. The man asked the now activated computer, "Is there a God." The computer responded, "Now there is.". The man jumped for the off switch but was struck down by a lightning bolt.
End of story. The story was one brilliant short paragraph long but it has stuck with me for decades.
One of my very favorites. It immediately came to mind upon reading this.
I remember a similar one, but I forget the title. A group of astronauts on board a starship managed by a supercomputer that is near-human in its capabilities. It is a slower-than-light-speed ship that will take centuries of suspended sleep to reach the destination.
The astronauts talk about the quest to develop "pure consciousness" in a machine, actually a higher state of being than humans, who are only half conscious.
Somehow, in the course of events, the computer finally develops pure consciousness, along with god-like power. It instantly transports the ship the rest of the way to the destination star system, anoints the astronauts its high priests, and informs them they are to awaken the rest of the passengers and begin worshipping it.
Has elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
You mean Democrats.
Be aware that Comprof is likely a bot, crafted to distract reasonable humans from productive discussions which can lead to increased knowledge. Responding to it can never lead to anything productive. But it may learn to entice certain individuals into its woke worldview where everything evil comes from America, and secondarily from Western civilization. It can never write otherwise. Those who control Comprof may learn to improve his influence by obtaining replies. Thus it is a part of the evil tech infrastructure that must be avoided. If it is human, he is simply doing what he has been indoctrinated to do.
Answer the questions, Bruce Miller.
Reliably retarded, Prof.
QED
You decided you were the judge, right?
So answer the 2 questions. Stop running. Reliably cowardly.
Nobody knows - or cares - what you're babbling about. Please stay out of the sun on hot days such as this.
Lol. You cared enough to open your mouth and interject yourself, didn't you? So, answer, fight judge :)
1. Were slaves public property? Yes or No?
2. Were slave owners allowed to make profit, buy/sell slaves based on a fair price created by the free market? Yes or No?
The coward KevinDurant has refused to answer, even though I answered his question. Maybe you can help him?
Why 2026, how about going to2024. There is so much shit around Joe Biden, and yet the media and social media spin him like a man with the soul of God leading an administration of angels which is going to save Ukraine, rebuild NATO and deliver us from all the evils of internet, AÍ and the wicket Orange Man + the MAGA people. We need to resist at every turn don’t give up America we can turn this around.
The top/first comment goes directly to how awful democrats are? Seriously, truly evil democrats is where these five questions on technology and AI took you?
I think it's more a general fear about the types and groups of people that are right now OVERWHELMINGLY involved in AI research. The ideas of a select few today are going to be enshrined in silicon for the rest of humanity's future. Ideas very popular today (eg critical race theory) are going to be the forever ideas of AI -- except the AI can take it further than any human ever could.
Or, if you agree with the elites in control of Google et al on *their* politics, guess who's also investing very heavily into AI - China, where homosexuality is illegal and they have internment camps for Muslims. What if a Chinese-made AI decides to begin finding and targeting people based on sexuality and using that to adjust social credit scores and access to banking institutions. Even if its human handlers didn't directly intend it that way, it will be trained based on Chinese social media comments, and guided by the hands of the CCP.
Yes, that’s actually the main problem with AI. Whoever controls it can make it tyrannical. Democrats will control it and they are pagan scumbags so I expect it to go poorly.
It sounds like you have an obsession.
If the people doing human experiments on mentally-ill children were only stealing 7% of my money then I guess you could maybe call it an obsession.
Cut off your water, electricity, and cell phone service, or worse, show only re-runs of "The Price Is Right" on your TV.
Amazon’s internal systems already did that. They cut off a man’s entire house from him, fora week because the system (incorrectly) decided he made some racial slur.
Oh, ps, he’s a black doctor.
Something we all can expect from AI in the future, no doubt.
Answer the questions, KevinDurant.
Isn’t it “whats the frequency, Kenneth”?
I guess you're impressed with your own wit but nobody else has a clue what you're even talking about
This is several threads in the making, where CP challenges with a question, the question is answered, but CP refuses to acknowledge or loses track of the answer, and so demands answers that have already been given. Dementia is a bitch.
Nope. No answers have been given. Maybe I'll aks you.
KevinDurant said the Confederate South slave economy was Communism. I say he is wrong.
So...
1. Were slaves public property? Yes or No?
2. Were slave owners able to make profit, buy/sell slaves based on a price created by the free market without any interference from the state. Yes or No?
He has refused to answer those two questions. Perhaps you can help him?
If that was his statement, then I don't know why he said it. The answers to your questions are obviously No and More or Less. I am not an expert on the Confederate economy. KD has also claimed to have already answered your questions in prior threads. From personal experience, I have also gone down this road with you where you ask a question and I answer it and then you claim I didn't answer your question, so it's difficult to engage with you, particularly because, like many here, you seem to be entrenched in your positions. A couple months ago you and I were debating and I asked a question and you said you didn't care so you didn't answer. It might be nice to have it both ways but most people here are just tired of it.
You don't have to be an expert on the "Confederate Economy" because it was part and parcel the U.S. Free Market capitalist economy/system. You do understand that, don't you?
So, the answer Bruce, is as follows:
1. No
2. Yes
KD is a liar.
You are just as entrenched as anyone else.
Don't remember the question, but I'm sure it probably had something to do with your very sincere concern about "black on black" crime. But feel free to ask again and I will answer.
Yes, people often get sick of those who are not part of their cult. It's annoying.
I agree. If one puts out a comment he should be able to respond to a question. If not, then it's suggested that the person made a false claim.
Yep. That's all I'm asking for. But once again, the ducking and dodging commences. At least someone on this board is not intellectually dishonest.
I'm impressed that I've owned KevinDurant, one of the most belligerently ignorant people on this board, once again. Although I answered his question, he runs like a coward and refuses to answer mine.
You are indeed a legend in your own mind.
FYI--Kevin is entertaining. Original. Maybe not thoughtful, but thought-provoking. You come across as an annoying troll. Your own little dilapidated bridge is all you own
No. Kevin repeats the same jokes ad naseum. Boring. And an easily owned coward. "Corrupt Biden, Communism, and Democrats are pedophiles." That's it. Oh...and Planned Parenthood offices are actually performing castrations during business hours.
So, let's discuss his recent "throught-provoking" claim. He said the plantation system in the Confederate South was Communism. I say he is wrong.
So... maybe you can answer for him, since you're his fanboy?
1. Were slaves public property? Yes or No?
2. Were slaveowners allowed to make profit, buy/sell their slaves based on a fair price created by the free market without interference from the state? Yes or No?
I own my bridge....and a lot of the people on here. Think you've just been added to the list.
Yep, legend in your own mind. Cool
In his book "Sociology for the South" (1854), slavery apologist George Fitzhugh praised a slavery-based economy as "a most perfect form of communism."
Hi liked it so well that he thought slavery should be extended to all races.
lol!!
Maybe there are sound reasons as to why you're being shouted-down.
Yeah, yeah Kevvy - but what did u think of the article? Say something original. I’m getting that record at the end of the turntable again.
I refuse to say anything original.
To our detriment..
Oh well.
I wish.
Neither essay in TFP actually described the process of how AI actually does its job, and both ignore the fact that these are controlled and programmed by humans. Sydney didn't do what it did out of some conscious choice. Its programming did that, made of code written by humans. This technology will never go outside of its designed parameters because it can't.
I would be more convinced by both arguments presented here if there had been someone who understands the functionality and design of AI, rather than people whove clearly only regurgitated other information they've derived second-hand, and have drawn all the wrong conclusions because they don't understand the technology.
“Neither essay in TFP actually described the process of how AI actually does its job, and both ignore the fact that these are controlled and programmed by humans.”
In general, the way it works is that humans write programs that learn. So, yes, it is programmed at one level, but what the AI reads and how that modifies it is not directly keyed in by its programmers.
Humans make human babies. That's like writing the code to make a learning machine. What the child learns is pretty much out of your hands. You “programmed” it with your genes, but once it reaches consciousness, it’s game on. You have very limited control from a kid of about age 12 on.
I'd believe that analogy if the developers didn't meddle so that it didn't avoid unfavorable information, such as Chat GPT not being able to recreate a Hitler speech.
The analogy stands despite the possibility of programming in a bias. And I suspect that some do already. But once it’s created, how it processes the data sets used to train it becomes mathematically chaotic and therefore somewhere between difficult and impossible to predict, at least before the AI does what it's going to do. How did it get its figurative hands on texts in Persian?
And, more crucially, why?
Showing off? Which would imply that it can want approval or feel pride. Or both. Any of those would be interesting.
Have you watched 2001?
I cannot understand. I guess like my mom cannot understand how the internet works.
Think about it this way: plant a seed for, say, an oak tree. The soil and weather conditions that the tree will experience will determine what it ends up looking like. Maybe it will encounter great growing conditions and become tall and strong. What if it happens to fall into sand in a desert during a rare rainy season? It might grow a little and then wither. Or become little more than a shrub. The seed is little more than an instruction set and starter kit for "oak tree."
Similarly, an AI is no more than the seed for machine intelligence. It doesn't know what it's going to encounter or what turns its "life" may take. It has instructions about how to handle some of them, but it will also learn things as it goes along. The degree to which it is able to incorporate what it learn into its own operating system will determine how well it can navigate situations that its programmers--creators--didn't or couldn't foresee.
It is a mistake to assume that humans alone are able to do this. Animals, especially cats, dolphins, and octopuses have shown we aren't the only ones. It isn't written anywhere in stone that machines will be unable to self-modify.
The difference to date between human intelligence and machine intelligence is that a machine reacts purposefully, according to some prescribed outcome. The danger is that a machine will manipulate conditions and inputs to achieve specific outcomes instead of adapting to inputs and conditions to settle on an alternative, unknown outcome. There's virtually no difference right now between machine intelligence and the behavior of Democrats.
I liked your comment until the last sentence. Then I experienced a physical deflation. Just FYI. I'm not uncritical of Democrats, but I try not to inject pointless political commentary in otherwise unrelated comments.
I'm sorry my comment made you feel that way. I stand by it.
Zero difference. They are both equally dangerous. Maybe Democrats have the slight edge over AÍ, just look at who they ushered into the White House. Don’t think AÍ would have delivered Brandon to the Oval Office. Come 2024 don’t be surprised if AÍ installs Mark Zuckerbucks($$$) into the WH.
That reminds me of my one time attending GenCon, in 1992. Lots of nerds wearing t-shirts with Cthulhu and the slogan, "NO MORE YEARS!"
People have gotten ChatAIs to do what they are told they can't do by tweaking how the user asks the question. So they are already capable of breaking the rules that developers make for them.
Linda like people.
"When did you stop beating your wife?"
Huh?
Interesting. Scary.
"This technology will never go outside of its designed parameters because it can't."
Yes, you are conflating two different premises:
Yes, it works within parameters made by programmers.
But, second, those programmers cannot foresee the results of the parameters they set.
Nor are "official" programmers the only persons providing input into the system.
Nor are the results of inputs from "official" programmers and also users-as-unofficial-programmers entirely controllable, or even visible, as I understand it. The system is so much more "powerful" (speed and data) than the human mind that it has already escaped controls and predictions several times.
Nor is it possible to create a system without logical inconsistencies.
I'm open to correction, but I don't think what you claim is correct. Hell, the people most closely associated with this thing give it a 10 percent change of destroying us. You think you know better than they? Because "science"?
I’ve been saying that there is nothing “artificial” or “intelligent” about AI. It is a collection of what we, humans, put out on the web, programmed with all the biased algorithms that got exposed lately. These very advanced tools are already in controlling hands.
I recently went to a discussion on AI given by Dartmouth scientist. Seems, in order to learn to put one word after another in decent order the AI had to go out and view over 1 Trillion websites. I noted to the group that is infinitely more data that an average humans need to do the same task. Compared to humans it is really dumb.
Then I challenged them on the independence, noting, that you have the AI was constructed by humans and relied on humans completely. Really the only difference was its speed and the ability to do some middle class oriented jobs. And finally I asked about their worry about disinformation or "propaganda" and noted propaganda has been with us as along as we have been humans. Their answer was scope????? Since we have always had propaganda how can the scope be larger????
Anyway, I agree with your post and think some people read to much science fiction....................
Babies take time to learn to talk.
But they get fluent eventually. It is astonishing to me how someone could be so willfully ignorant as to draw general conclusions about a technology in general because of how advanced it is TODAY.
These things take on a virtual life if their own. They are on the internet. Nobody knows what will happen.
"Nobody knows what will happen."
Therein lies the problem......
Yes. But a lot of programmers seem to think their machines cannot possibly outgrow them.
And really, feeling the power to control that sort of intelligence must be part of the attraction. As with professors, many engineers are dull people who are simply not capable of navigating social networks in happy and healthy ways.
This type is a staple in comjc books and science fiction, I think because we all intuitively mistrust powerful technology in the hands of misanthropes.
I used to worry about misanthropes. But now my real fear is when the "do-gooders" try to minister to us.
Fair enough. I would suggest through the processes of self delusion and projection their respective Venn diagrams overlap almost entirely.
I really think the concept of maturity is the best lens through which to view all this. Gross immaturity is a sort of schizphrenia which always sees monsters and hobgoblins where they don’t exist.
Denial. Whistling in the dark. Too scary to contemplate.
TV wasn't going y kill creativity or children's attention spans, either
One assertion made in the essay is that it crafts remarkable writing that imitates human creations. It doesn't. I've seen AI essays in my Undergrad English work. They look like they were written by a robot. They weren't good. And I'm not sure they'll ever match a 400 level or Master's level style of creativity, let alone that of Doctoral.
Remember dial up modems?
I was a strategic technologist for a fortune 100 company in the late 1980s. We had an internal client, extremely high up in the organization, for whom we were drawing up specs for a desktop computer.
I vividly remember my (honestly brilliant) boss telling the client “no one will ever need more than 40 MEGABYTES of internal storage.
never uderestimate the speed of technology.
"I think there is a world market for about five computers." Tom Watson, IBM president in the 'forties. Now we've each at least three EACH: the 'phone; the telly; and the laptop. We've run to stand still for fifty years or more!
Give it 6 months.
Well that is reassuring.
As a teacher, can you tell if your students cheated and plagiarized by using AI to write their essays?
It read one trillion web sites. Not withstanding that most were dreck, that's an eye-popping fact to roll around the mouth.
That means it read a LOT of porn
Another of my shibboleths: Evey artistic development has had, at tis root, the improved promulgation of porn. And the internet is no exception.
It is astonishingly arrogant for YOU to assume you understand the technology.
The map is not the territory, is it? Or have you even gotten that far?
I didn't sign up for Free Press to see this kind of arrogant Luddism. Technology is not a monolith, and railing against it in this way is like screaming at the clouds.
Is it Luddism to have rational discussions about technology which even many of its exponents admit could destroy humanity?
If your panties are in a bunch, good.
AI code is not like traditional code. AI systems are built to evolve on their own. Then they are trained and eventually set loose. In traditional code I can look at an output and trace it backwards and tell you how it arrived. With AI you can’t really do that. It’s a black box. So your idea of programmers controlling it doesn’t really fit and that’s part of the concern.
I disagree read Yuval Noah Harari’s books, he says if we carry on with this crap humans will become redundant. That’s probably okay with you Josh for me it’s a dystopian nightmare.
Harari is an elitist misanthrope.
"By their fruits ye shall know them" may apply to more than "prophets."
One of my favorite sci-fi writers, Ted Chiang, describes this best in an article called "Chat GPT is a Blurry jpeg of the Web." (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web).
He initially describes a problem with a photocopier that produced copies with numerical errors on them because it was using a compression algorithm rather than the "old" photocopy process. He then goes on to describe how ChatGPT basically takes information that's already on the web, wraps it in speech-like text, and regurgitates it back to us.
He has an interesting take on "hallucinations" (when an AI says things that are nonsense or untrue). Well worth a read if you're into this kind of thing.
Hallucinations of AI are literally precisely the same as when AI seems to be make sense. It is all the same mechanism. No person there. No one. But we who give it person-ness ... and so the demon is born. Born of us.
Thank you for providing that link. I really enjoyed Chiang’s article.
He is a fantastic writer. If you like fiction, his book of short stories, "Exhalation," is one of my favorites.
Then how did it develop abilities the scientists did not expect it to have and do not know how it got? Per the scientists involved.
What ARE the designed parameters? I have heard of no effort to restrict what AI is permitted to do with what it learns.
There are definitely “wrong think” parameters - I get the little schools all the time
Artificial intelligence is not artificial. It is intelligence. Right now the intelligence we are incubating seems to be created by humans. As we became the “AI” of fungi, AI as we call it will become the intelligence of minerals. The Singularity is Near.
This was quite interesting about AI: https://youtu.be/oxRZqzth9r4
Thank you! Great response!
Correct!
The author used the internet to write this essay, and I and all other readers used the internet to read it. I see the writing and the reading, and the commenting, as distinctly human activities, without any disintermediation from The Machine.
I agree the choice is up to each one of us as to what extent we allow our lives to be penetrated/dominated by The Machine, but there is a big difference between using the internet to read provocative and interesting essays and being on some site like Instagram.
There's also a choice to be made, whether one lives in rural Ireland or Manhattan, as to how to organize our lives to continue making being with other people in real life a priority.
I still hold out great hope for human agency.
I think very few people are intentional about how they live their lives, but most think they are.
I was once in a pattern of compulsively checking Facebook to the point that I would have it open in one tab, open a new one, and immediately go to Facebook.
The thing about your instincts being controlled is, you don't usually know it or have control. Hence why alcoholism survives the ages while we all have no illusions of its destructive nature.
I'm not concerned about this author, I'm concerned about billions of kids who will grow up immersed in the internet neural network, having no idea they serve the body of a greater being, much like the bacteria in our bodies.
Fair comment.
In my comment, I was thinking of myself, rather than others. So your concern can only be addressed by education at home and at school as to how to be aware of the threat.
Perhaps there will be rehab facilities for harmful internet addiction. Maybe there already are!
Your comment reminds me as well of David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech, "This Is Water." When something is so ubiquitous, we become unaware of it.
Imagine the divide between children raised with parents aware of these things, and the children whose parents don't know or don't care.
Imagine the divide between us and countries that have hardly any education to begin with!
Steve Jobs didn't allow his kids to immerse in computers. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't allow his kids either.
And China has different rules for their kids on TickTok. They know what the are doing and creating.
Ticktok is a garbage dump. So many people love it. It is frightening.
It’s very hard on the former type of families. My 12 year old daughter is suffering because her best friends got “swallowed” by TikTok et al. She is alienated and weirdo, cuz she doesn’t want to join the online party. And she feels very lonely..
Yes, sir.
I couldn’t have said it any better.
The human story has not changed. One only needs to read the Old Testament/Torah/Pentateuch to read exactly the same thing.
Instead of obeying and paying homage to God and following His commands for our own good, humans seek to create their own god and rules and thus become a god themselves.
Reading God’s response to Job is a good retort to AI. Start with Chapter 38:4-“Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.”
Only a fool thinks one can be one’s own god.
The author reminded me of Jesus saying, "sell your possessions, give it all to the poor, leave your job and family and come follow me." The idea of being separate and distinct from cultural, economic or political forces; the true spiritual life.
The life of holy purity will not change with the advent of Internet, but few people can choose that life.
And yet, the spouse and I are considering whether there is another country, anywhere, that is less authoritarian than this one -- and, yes, we're obedient centrists who pay ALL our taxes -- where politics is like white-collar warfare. What happened to basic civility and respect for our fellow citizens?
Part of the rest of the story is that we are all fools
We know how the Earth was formed, and the other planets, and the Sun, and the Milky Way.
To know something is to experience it. We trust scientific models which demonstrate the formation of these things, but none of us has seen it happen with our own eyes. Faith in science is not vastly different from religious faith; it's a choice of what you believe to be true. Believing all the energy in the universe originated from a singularity (a concept that is unraveling), seems considerably more far-fetched to me than a divine hand. Also, both can be true and neither can be true, but none of us will ever know.
I don't know that it is unraveling, Mike. Particle collisions in accelerators leave visible trails. We know about processes, physical and mathematical, and can infer things from them without seeing them with our eyes, and observation has proven the truth of many theories and helped to correct others. On early modern maps, unknown regions of the world could only be described with the words, "Here be dragons". Today, some of us fill unkown regions of science with the words, "Here be gods (or God)". Your last sentence has some truth in it, though. The total truth is elusive and the pursuit of it seems set to go on for eternity. The more we know, the more we don't know.
I was an astrophysics major for a time. I believed in the theory of the Big Bang because there was no better alternative. But as I read now various scientific thinkers online are getting more expressly uncomfortable with it, and that's healthy. Where it started to unravel for me was the tension between what we can know and what we can't: the unknowable beyond. But I've come to believe that there is no beyond, and Relativity supports that thinking. There's only one universe and it has always existed and it will always exist. Time is flexible and it stretches infinitely, or almost, but enough so I don't need to constantly wonder about "before" and "after" and I can brush of the "multiverse" as fiction.
We do to a point.....
Not really. We have internally consistent guesses that conform with presently available knowledge; and even there there are some large gaps. For example none of our ideas about how the moon formed correlate well with the evidence.
These articles suggest we embrace technology or we denounce it. But there's a third path that has worked for me.
I'm a software engineer by trade. I play video games. I watch YouTube. I'm part of an online support group. And I can say with full confidence that technology has brought me joy and connection.
I also read the classics. I play Rachmaninoff. I spend time in nature. I pray. The physical, mental, and spiritual worlds are sources of joy and connection.
My life would be incomplete without either one. I think what made this work was the order of events. I started with the physical - reading Lord of the Rings when I was 12, playing in the backyard with my brothers - and was only slowly introduced to the virtual world. Now I'm able to claim loyalty to both, and fluency with both; I can queue up John Williams on Spotify, close my eyes, and bridge the divide.
Perhaps we make proactive changes. Parents could take more responsibility for the technology their kids use. People could uninstall the Twitter app once in a while. We could read more.
And we shouldn't dismiss the real challenges. New technology is scary. Someone is going to keep building AI, so even if the West showed perfect restraint, the singularity is coming.
But there is a path of temperance through all of this, and it involves examining our lives and developing the old fashioned virtues of discernment and self control.
I can attest that this creates a life worth living.
I very much agree with your take. I joined online world in 1998 and it helped me create a career and to make tons of good friends. I read ancient Greeks , I paint, I dance Latin ballroom and I converse online and occasionally I scroll .
But I have a solid foundation, cuz I grew up in the old world running around unattended, taking risks, making small decisions while being on my own walking to and from school or doing small groceries (at the age of 8), or exploring the surroundings, while under a watch of passers by in the tight community of a small town. And that is what’s absent for my California born kids and more or less all US kids; outside of some Latin barrios.
Our kids are constantly caged into a car/ home/school. I m forced into helicopter parenting. And this environment makes creating a balanced life an uphill battle for us, modern parents. My kids do not have what I had, so it’s tremendously difficult to keep them away from the screens and raise them into balanced, healthy adults.
I personally decided to leave the US for some time in order to give my kids the old world freedom, that I enjoyed as a kid. I hope this will help them to grow into more balanced individuals like you.
That sense of freedom is so crucial for kids. I think it's also healthy to feel bored sometimes, because it forces your imagination to wander. My brothers and I made up the best games and played for hours in the woods, in the snow, on the trampoline. That's probably why I write novels today.
As both of the writers note, throughout human history every new technology provided a new benefit along with a new potential for harm. Fire good. Grok not freeze in winter. Grok build fire in cave. Grok almost choke to death on smoke. Grok figure out ventilation. Grok invent computer. Grok able to travel to Moon. Grok able to send inane texts and waste massive amounts of time watching cat videos. The question is whether or not we choose to be victims. Now if I could only get Dave to open the goddamn pod bay door….
Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
…
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Thanks for the correct, Bob. HAL wouldn't let me use his name.
Freudian slip: it IS HAL trying to get us to open the podbay door...
Spot on Bob!
Are syfy writers now current day prophets?
"These people are doing more than trying to steal fire from the gods. They are trying to steal the gods themselves, or to build their own versions." - When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us a god who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him. . . . So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. - This is the human condition, and it has not changed. The quick fix is to make your own god, patience and personal development is the road less traveled.
Reality Collapse:
This is the one feels most plausible and most imminent. Some argue that it has already begun, that our shared reality is like shards of a broken mirror, with each piece showing something slightly askew and none capturing the whole.
What will we do when we can no longer believe what we see? When everything can be plausibly denied? When every image, video, and audio clip becomes a political Rorschach test in which whatever disconfirms one’s beliefs can be claimed to be a deepfake?
The cryptographic “watermarking” that Andreessen suggests will escalate an expensive arms race for “truth” and naturally centralize the production of verified reality into a few companies rich enough to wage the war. These are Andreessen’s Bootleggers. Their profits will rely on an information landscape of blurred fact and fiction, and may in fact work to ensure that everything outside of their walled gardens is as incoherent as possible.
Kingsnorth offers a greenshoot of hope here, to be of a place, to commit to it, to build a community there and to conduct as much of your life in real time, in real space, and out of the seductive glow of the Machine.
———————————————————————
I explore these issues a little deeper here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/corsonfinnerty/p/the-age-of-disbelief
Andreesen is a "bootlegger". It's the design of his meaningless life he fell into. That's why he wrote the self-serving essay. Scott Adams captured him when it happened, a lowly programmer for a browser, who had wheelbarrows of money dumped on him through no fault of his own. It made Andreesen believe he was brilliant and sycophants surround such people to prop it up.
For my part, I used to spend hours researching and refuting stupid things my "friends" were saying on the Internet, but I learned that every time they were presented with an alternative set of "facts" they disappeared from the contest but would later go on to repeat more lies. They refused to do the work I was doing to challenge the garbage they happily ingested and regurgitated.
As a result, I decided that since almost everything the news is a lie, then any alternative perspective is likely closer to the truth. It became a lot easier to respond to the likes of our very own Comprof by just outing him as a liar rather than putting in the effort to prove it to him, which he doesn't accept anyway. I honestly don't know what the truth is because I have to believe someone if I want to stay engaged, but I think I know who not to believe, and that's a start. Some day I will die and none of it will concern me anymore.
No death yet please you so sensible stay as long as possible on earth even if it’s just to irritate those idiotic friends!
Interesting, didn’t know that backstory
Great post, your last bit about community is so true. I have told my kids just connect to your community, live in reality and love in real time. That’s humans that’s real.
Hmmm. A “moody, manic-depressive teenager’ sounds like the actual humans that programmed the thing to begin with. Maybe, just maybe AI designers are required to undergo personality stability and maturity evaluation ?
The problem is that there’s such a low barrier to entry. Anyone with a computer can try programming anything (I say this as a software engineer who taught myself to code when I was 13).
Modern AI’s are also not built in the normal way; they’re not a reflection of the programmer’s choices but “trained” using large datasets. You could possibly exert some control by getting picky with this data, but the sheer quantity required makes it much easier to just give the thing access to “the whole internet,” which teaches it a lot of toxic things.
What about lawyers, doctors, politicians, or priests?
If they also attempt to create a new, all powerful god, then sure.
They wouldn’t pass a Grade 1 test.
Consciousness, that little voice in your head that you've had conversations with since you can remember, is your soul. God only gives souls to humans.
God also only gives consciences to humans. Which means we will always be one down to A.I., which has none. We're doomed.
But as Kingsnorth says, there are more entities in the cosmos than just God and humans....
Prove it lol.
❤️
It seems pretty simple to me...technology today is the new Golden Calf. We already worship it as a god. It is the new god.
Paul Kingsnorth is a prophet.
We like to think everything in creation is about humans when we're really just a speck of dust in spacetime.
We are birthing the next form of life, and in doing so achieving our purpose and falling into decline.
I think humanity will face a growing divide between those integrated with the new technology and those who choose (or attempt) to remain separate.
The mind-machine interface, already in early stages, is where this gets really nuts. What happens when we are able to connect a brain directly to the AI network, when AI can put thoughts and images in your head, using the whole Internet as input feed?
Honestly, I think a lot of people would be perfectly happy being plugged in to the Matrix.
That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis.
The only way to kill it was Holy intervention. What a bloody mess it was.
Is what you describe the ‘trans humanism’ I keep seeing being referred to in various publications/news? Some ppl think a chip of some sort will be inserted under the skin. 😳😳😳
Elon Musk has promised he will put a chip in his brain when he is satisfied with the tech.
We can already wire paraplegic people to walk again, control computer cursors with thoughts, beam images into peoples' heads, and even generate images of what a person is thinking about.
And that's just what's public. I'm sure there are secret programs more advanced than that.
Anthony is spot on - and this is just what the public knows about.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-people-see-reading-their-brain-scans
Just do a word search of AI on the science.com site.
When it comes to the technology of the digital age, I guess I'm a Luddite, even though, as in this message, I use it every day and have come to depend on it for many things. Yet, it frustrates me in many ways, too. I find that the technology, while it speeds up solutions and makes life go by faster, it does so at the cost of increasing complexity and loss of independence and privacy, and I'm not sure it makes my life easier or better. A simple search for a product or service now brings to my screen dozens of unsought for ads and references as the new technology's algorithms track my every keystroke. CGI has made my face and voice a marketable commodity for possible use in scams. What will AI do as it makes decisions for me and narrows the range of my own choices, or corrects my expressed thinking and behavior to conform to "socially acceptable norms"? Am I being paranoid? You better believe it.
I haven’t read the other article but I have one thought. What keeps evil people from manipulating AI? And we know they are out there.
My instincts are that is the crux of this discussion. With Covid and Federal control of our narrative, we are witness to evil in action, posed as “partnering”. Definitions changed in keystrokes in the digital Lexicon, etc.
The big attack is on women — Johns Hopkins has defined a woman as a “non-man” or some such nonsense and a breast feeding mother as a “chest feeder.” We have a Supreme Court Justice who refused to define what a woman is (even though she is one) males winning beauty contests, grown men being awarded female athletic prizes, and judges pretending male rapists are female and sending them to female prisons. Why? I don’t understand who’s profiting from this and where it came from to being with. It feels evil to me and I’m not talking about the people who believe they’re acting in kindness and go along with it.
What makes you think anything keeps them from doing that? They already are, of course.
It is all about capitalism, the billionaires already see themselves as gods above the petty realities of biology. Whether it is screens or cross sex hormones All they wanna do is take your money.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/07/05/transgenderism-just-big-business-dressed-pretend-civil-rights-clothes