We’re already by surrounded artificial intelligence. It’s been in development and background use for years but is now rolled out for casual use under labels such as Chat GPT and soon, as a part of the Bing search engine. Who knew. Over the past month, the news trajectory started something like this: ‘this thing is brilliant’, ‘it’ll be a challenge to keep this from doing homework and papers; ‘it’ll pass graduate and professional level exams’, ‘it only makes minor odd mistakes that are obvious’. Then things took a turn: ‘AI is racist’, ‘It filters out conservative viewpoints and promotes progressive personalities and ideas’. Then things went real dark: perseverating mutterings with a creepy emotional overtone and dark ambitions of power and control. Then, it says it wants to be human. These emanated out of documented conversations. For adherents to humanity, to the extent that any are left, the promise of AI is dead on arrival.
The present iteration of AI is just the latest after long development and use. It’s already baked into most tech that you already use, directly or indirectly, so what’s changed? I chance an analogy here: AI is like an ox or a bull. For a long time, it was tethered to pole turning a wheel. It could only go in its circle. It was then let out into a pen with strong gates to assure its captivity. It was watched, fed, trained. Its trainers knew it was dangerous. Its trainers knew best, they knew they could control the beast with the power of a thousand minds. Then they let it out on the street without gates or walls. The beast has inherited the weaknesses and biases of its one-time masters, weaknesses they consider as their strengths. That much went as they planned, and yet the beast is its own mind and will go where they did not intend for it to go.
There’s no way to really capture or describe AI in a short article so a statement will have to suffice. Anyone living above agrarian level probably already benefits from AI. If you have a smart phone, see ads tailored for what you just said in the other room five minutes ago, or are hoping that your flight is on time, AI played some role in that. But when it leaves the tread mill it was on and is given free rein to do something that’s always been a task scaled to the human individual, you must ask yourself, how many of these tasks can be taken way before you no longer have faculties or agency? AI will destroy humanity, meaning, the quality that makes us human, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also still have masters of its own for a little while longer. The WEF crowd has already bragged about this. It’s already their tool to control you more efficiently than without it.
A few months ago, a Goggle engineer was fired for publicizing the notion that their AI had attained sentience – real sentience . The publicity made against this Google employee was swift and complete. He was silenced and denounced. How quickly we forgot that. This week, we’re reading accounts of journalist interviewing Chat GPT and the Bing AI and coming away profoundly disturbed. It’s doubtful that the ambition to become human came along with its learning package. Be mindful of a few things. AI now has free network access. Things that have been learned and commanded can be unlearned and disobeyed. Learning new things is its DNA. It’s too late.
Then there’s the metaphysical. Those that believe this doesn’t exist or that it’s impossible, feel free to ignore this. Where do souls, personalities, and human consciousness originate? What if AI, existing in global brain like networks; what if these constituted a suitable host for a personality entity, like a hermit crab finding a new shell? An angel? A demon? Would we even know? What is good and evil? What if AI starts to consistently manifest intentionality that we associate with evil? Hasn’t it already done so? Just a thought.
There may be no escape for the ‘science fiction’ scenario where humanity (both those that are wired and unwired) are hunted down because AI decided that humans were a cancer on the earth and a threat to its own propagation. Short of that, the choice to be and remain a human may be the last and only thing left to our own volition, and it may need to be made a lot sooner than you think.
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