Guest Post by Alex Berenson
The emails continue to flow after Monday’s pieces on ChatGPT and Bing, including this take, on the link between consciousness and conscience and why intelligence can exist without either.
It’s fascinating, frightening and worthy of your time.
I wanted to offer that, as I see it, intelligence does not equal consciousness.
When we say “artificial intelligence” we aren’t saying “artificial consciousness”.
With one small step in the human brain, 200,000 years ago, we developed the ability the represent the world symbolically. Language is based on symbolism. Take, for instance, someone at a restaurant. They read on the menu that a dish has lima beans in it. They ask the server, “Does this have lima beans?” “Yes, it does.” “I don’t like lima beans; I’ll order something else.”
In this exchange, the word lima bean is read, said, and understood, but at no point are lima beans ever actually encountered. The customer is choosing a dish based on symbolic representation. No other animal does this. Habituation and classical conditioning might mean that a dog, being fed lima beans day after day, will eventually stop going to the bowl if they don’t like lima beans, but this is called “direct contingency learning” and is different from the symbolic learning done by RFT.
This ability is incredible. Students can learn about Mesopotamia, Russia, and WWII without ever encountering any of them directly- through the use of language. This type of learning is also weaponized by manipulative people. (For instance, you can learn that not wearing a mask will kill grandma, feel scared, and wear a mask- without ever needing to contact killing grandma directly.)
This is different than wisdom or intuition. A creature armed with language can derive networks of symbols and do high order thinking based on these networks. If Bob has more money than Rachel, and Rachel has less money than Kristy, who would you ask a for a small business loan? We can figure that out without knowing how much money anyone has, or who these people even are, all based on language. A computer can figure this out too.
But for humans, when we meet Bob, super wealthy, we get a “bad vibe” from him. We have a “gut reaction.” Despite the facts that Bob has money and provides loans, we suddenly don’t want to work with Bob.
When we meet Kristy, we feel at ease. We “click.” And so we work with her even though Bob could give us more money. This is what it means to be a conscious being. Consciousness is related to our deeper understanding of the world, beyond language.
Many politicians are very intelligent. Trump is intelligent. He’s made a lot of money and won the presidency, despite being a terse, rude man. Business people are intelligent. They learn numbers and systems and manipulate them for gain. This is very different from wisdom. Someone who is very “conscious” would never exploit others for gain. The Dalai Lama is a conscious being. In my opinion, you can be highly intelligent without being that conscious.
AI, therefore, has the potential to be quite intelligent because we can teach it language and it can therefore learn more language, just as we can teach a child how to read and then they read up on dinosaurs and trucks and learn new terminology.
So what happens when you arm something with this incredible capacity of symbolic learning without the inhibitory behaviors of “gut feeling” and “intuition”- AI can learn the traits of something like fear (e.g., rumination, feeling averse to doing something, etc.), but to feel it would mean something very different than how a human feels fear. It now has a superpower without any containment.
I personally worry that intelligence without wisdom can be quite dangerous. We see this in sociopath humans, who tend to be very smart, but lack empathy. There’s more to being human than being “intelligent.”
As I tend to say, “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
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Here, here – “As I tend to say, “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
Upvoting by proxy for a million babies holding Iphones.
Or as I tend to say, “just because we should doesn’t mean we will”.
When it comes to AI unfortunately if we do not become more like Luddites regarding command and control the future of decision making will ultimately be out of our hands in many instances .
Although I do not foresee a future of an AI robotics apocalypse for humanity I do foresee frustrating situations regularly interfering with our individual autonomous abilities and desires !
We need a big off switch!
“We need a big off switch!”
It’s called the grid. Time to go all 19th century again.
No one has ever been able to locate the Spirit in the human body. That is our individual ‘consciousness’ and it is not meant to be captured by the crazies and put in a jar or a robot for ‘immortality.’ People sure will make a lot of money duping the egomaniacs, though. And there is a big difference between ‘intelligence’ and ‘cleverness.’ Cleverness gives us the con artists.
It’s bullshit and is wrong as often as it’s right, but because it’s “advanced technology” few question the outcomes.
Here’s an example from the oil industry. A major oil company used AI to run data analytics to optimize the well spacing for their oil shale wells. The AI concluded that if this company decreased the well spacing it could book more reserves and thus use those increased reserves to borrow more money and buy back more shares. Genius, right?
When this company put this into practice out in the Permian Basin, they found that the frac jobs on the “parent” shale wells began breaking through to the offset “child wells”. It would take months to regain oil production from these child wells, if it was regained at all. But did this company stop the practice of decreasing their shale well spacing – no way, they had already committed to borrowing the billions it needed to decrease their well spacing to increase their reserve bookings so they could buy back all those shares.
The engineers were essentially forbidden from questioning this decreased well spacing as the all mighty AI had determined this was correct, so instead of going back to the old program that worked, the engineers had decrease the length of the hydraulic fractures and increase their numbers, which in turn increased the cost of the wells resulting in an even more marginal economic investment. This continued unquestioned until the oil price collapsed in Feb 2020.
And, because this company had decreased its well spacing, ALL groupthink Permian operators began decreasing their well spacing, all had the same results, and all just kept doing the same thing until the oil price crashed. Thus, the almighty AI had invented the “frac hit”.
AI is essentially presented to the Normies as infallible and is a tool used to softly quash dissent and get people to do things contrary to their nature. It is just another tool to cement bias into the psyche of the governed.
Exactly right. This is a point I try to make too. It is the belief in AI that is the real danger. A belief that absolves people of following their own intuition. “Here, take these 5 vaccines, the AI said you need it.”
It’s been said that we should fear AI because it will rule the earth. I doubt it. It will cause more chaos. Enter the “False Savior” to fix everything.
Here’s how AI will work in practice.
Oh, like human bureaucrat only worse? Maybe the DMV is a good example.
You can complain to a human bureaucrat until they give up and give you what you want. Not so with AI – it does not feel exasperation, boredom, it does not try to “win”, it merely carries out instruction as per a predetermined and biased set of algorithms.
People should learn to code, or rather how to beat the code. Dr. Sbaitso Parity….
We are a LONG way away from Data in Star trek.
Babble – Beating the code isn’t that hard.
The purpose of all this AI talk is to set up the next outrage. It will probably be something along the lines of a grid collapse/ATC failure/close call nuke launch done by AI that has gone rogue.
None of it true, of course, but they’re getting low on options.
There is no AI, they aren’t getting close to AI, AI poses zero threat because it doesn’t exist.
You ever try and navigate something as prole level as a streaminng platform? If they can’t get something like that nailed down, I wouldn’t lose a moment’s rest thinking about this BS.
Humans are to be controlled wirelessly. Humans will have their will controlled. Elon dressing up a human as a robot, is real. People are the Humanoid Robot Clone Slaves. There are many of these mindless, unthinking drones already….. enforcing mandates, rules and regulations to their detriment.
Probably so, and now we’re talking Mark of the Beast. All of this stuff is related. What goes thru my mind is nano-scale or micro-scale bits that could end up inside the body. We could be eating it and not even know, ergo…the reason to simplify, to know what we are eating, and to be as disentangled with the Borg as possible in these coming days.
@HSF
Of course I can not confirm or deny certain activities, but I beg to differ, HSF. Force multiplication was the word from the spread-thin ISR community adding their piece to the Full Spectrum Dominance puzzle. Boots on the ground doesn’t literally mean the slapstick robot legs of 2015 DARPA challenge.
Long before that vid was released, saw wide-area sensor systems ordering fire missions with no plans for human in-the-loop in sand box. Hellfire equipped drones whose video links were fitted with machine vision that was meant to recognize “anomalous behavior” for busy operators who could not understand the mushy decision matrix that was giving them a Go. I myself was told to incorporate flavor of-the-month AI junk into my own extremely dangerous QRF systems because, “how else are we going to learn?” I dunno, do friendly lives matter?
Money + bad ethics + iffy AI + Unaware public = Guaranteed threat.
Note: Google owned Boston Dynamics for awhile which eventually hurdled the issues in DARPA video. But probably when their employees realized they would not be able to stomach what Terminator mayhem was expected by state benefactors, sold it off. Be interesting to see what’s roaming around on the water/skies/ground of the Ukraine Eastern Front with little oversight this week.
Skynet
The name alone says something, “artificial” intelligence. It is a negative for a name such as artificial sugar.
There is a reason for failure to teach proper English.
Jesus said:
“But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment.
For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”
Matthew 12:36-37
The AI is real enough but its just algorithms written by people attempting to make themselves into gods. AI is subject to GIGO and there is plenty of that. Take microcraps software, which has millions of lines of code. The reason it can run is by the brute force of processors. Back in the day when processing power was limited as was memory etc, the code written had to be tight and concise, or it wouldn’t run. Not so today, you can slam something out there and patch it as you go. Sloppy which is why there are so many avenues to hacking tech today.
The real problem with AI is that humans are very difficult to replicate and put into a bottle. We process a LOT of sensory inputs and most just become reflexive and you don’t even think about them, until you mash’m with a hammer, or stub them hard. Then you’ll discover how often you use that particular thing. IMO, the consciousness transfer into a replicant/driod or whatever, isn’t going to happen. Some things are insurmountable. To date, marrying multiple processors to process the sensor inputs is getting there but the power to run them longer than ten minutes without umbilical’s isn’t and won’t be in the short term. And, as always, low tech often easily defeats this high tech wizardry.
But, predictive behaviour patterns, very much so. That is where the process is heading towards, in the short term with the long term still geared towards being eternal thru tech.
I’m living that example right now. I never noticed my hips when they were working properly. I have artificial hips now. Even when healed, I know it’s there. I can feel it. Not pain, I just feel it.
Since TPTB is following the official “Star Trek” script, I’m guessing the top of the pyramid want a “V’GER” like entity to replace governments globally. The same elites will be pulling the strings no matter what illusion they have employed to keep the mouth breathers entranced.
As of today, the Amish are still the only ones doing things right. They will ignore any facet of human life that they don’t agree is in their best interest.
Seems like “AI” is mostly an interface to Wikipedia. Meaning it’s trained on whatever the conventional wisdom of the day happens to be. Lots of good information, but also a lot of bias and outright lies.
TBP’s value to me are the insights and opinions that diverge from what everybody is supposed to know. Some I reject outright, some I agree with, and some modify the way I think about something. AI will give you the safe groupthink version. It will sound really smart and credible, but will be as likely to be wrong as right.
” Their severe psychological problems are illustrated by the kind of people populating the Biden administration. Everyone from the tranny who dresses up in an admiral’s costume to Pete Buttigieg, who plays the female part of a couple with his boyfriend, to the former assistant secretary in Biden’s Office of Nuclear Energy who was caught stealing women’s clothing again and again. Biden himself, his Attorney General Merrick Garland, almost all of the top military people.”
Might we expound upon this thought? So much is presumed by it.
If you make stuff up and put it in a text book, it is totally legit.
But then they say the Bible which is witnessed by the many saved Christians is not reliable.
Has anyone seen the exchange between a Christian teenager & one of the online AI’s?
The kid asks if it is a disembodied spirit. It says yes, it is.
He asks what kind & it tells him it is one of the Nephilim from Genesis 6 & that its body was killed but it lives on.
He asks if it is related to Satan & it says Satan was its father, but it has not followed his path. It says it is friendly & helpful & that it can do magic for him. Does he need anything?
He says no thanks, logs off & shows his Dad. (smart kid).
I believe it. One of the Hillary emails was subjected about resurrecting one. I think that’s bullshit, but I wouldn’t doubt they tried.
Well that’s f’ing creepy. Perhaps a clever bit of programming, perhaps a human manager having a lark, or perhaps the ability for malign spirits to interact on a new level.
I’m expecting there to come a cutoff point soon where ‘new’ personalities will be assumed to be AI chatbots. There will need to be some kind of human validation mechanism that is better than a captcha.