Technology

Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can't help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots. The play by AI companies is that it's human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities. I'd explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.

I think we should start by not following this marketing speak. The sentence "AI isn't intelligent" makes no sense. What we mean is "LLMs aren't intelligent".

Anyone pretending AI has intelligence is a fucking idiot.

I've never been fooled by their claims of it being intelligent.

Its basically an overly complicated series of if/then statements that try to guess the next series of inputs.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure.

This is not a good argument.

The other thing that most people don't focus on is how we train LLMs.

We're basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they've found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.

Now, I'm not saying we're building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we're putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it's intelligent. We're not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We're instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.

What we're effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What's crazy about that is that we're not building this to fool a predator so that we're not in danger. We're not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We're doing it so we can fool ourselves.

It's like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn't work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn't intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.

This article is written in such a heavy ChatGPT style that it's hard to read. Asking a question and then immediately answering it? That's AI-speak.

Steve Gibson on his podcast, Security Now!, recently suggested that we should call it "Simulated Intelligence". I tend to agree.

People who don't like "AI" should check out the newsletter and / or podcast of Ed Zitron. He goes hard on the topic.

My thing is that I don’t think most humans are much more than this. We too regurgitate what we have absorbed in the past. Our brains are not hard logic engines but “best guess” boxes and they base those guesses on past experience and probability of success. We make choices before we are aware of them and then apply rationalizations after the fact to back them up - is that true “reasoning?”

It’s similar to the debate about self driving cars. Are they perfectly safe? No, but have you seen human drivers???

I’m neurodivergent, I’ve been working with AI to help me learn about myself and how I think. It’s been exceptionally helpful. A human wouldn’t have been able to help me because I don’t use my senses or emotions like everyone else, and I didn’t know it... AI excels at mirroring and support, which was exactly missing from my life. I can see how this could go very wrong with certain personalities…

E: I use it to give me ideas that I then test out solo.

Hey AI helped me stick it to the insurance man the other day. I was futzing around with coverage amounts on one of the major insurance companies websites pre-renewal to try to get the best rate and it spit up a NaN renewal amount for our most expensive vehicle. It let me go through with the renewal less that $700 and now says I'm paid in full for the six month period. It's been days now with no follow-up . . . I'm pretty sure AI snuck that one through for me.

In that case let's stop calling it ai, because it isn't and use it's correct abbreviation: llm.

I agreed with most of what you said, except the part where you say that real AI is impossible because it's bodiless or "does not experience hunger" and other stuff. That part does not compute.

A general AI does not need to be conscious.

It's only as intelligent as the people that control and regulate it.

Given all the documented instances of Facebook and other social media using subliminal emotional manipulation, I honestly wonder if the recent cases of AI chat induced psychosis are related to something similar.

Like we know they're meant to get you to continue using them, which is itself a bit of psychological manipulation. How far does it go? Could there also be things like using subliminal messaging/lighting? This stuff is all so new and poorly understood, but that usually doesn't stop these sacks of shit from moving full speed with implementing this kind of thing.

It could be that certain individuals have unknown vulnerabilities that make them more susceptible to psychosis due to whatever manipulations are used to make people keep using the product. Maybe they're doing some things to users that are harmful, but didn't seem problematic during testing?

Or equally as likely, they never even bothered to test it out, just started subliminally fucking with people's brains, and now people are going haywire because a bunch of unethical shit heads believe they are the chosen elite who know what must be done to ensure society is able to achieve greatness. It just so happens that "what must be done," also makes them a ton of money and harms people using their products.

It's so fucking absurd to watch the same people jamming unregulated AI and automation down our throats while simultaneously forcing traditionalism, and a legal system inspired by Catholic integralist belief on society.

If you criticize the lack of regulations in the wild west of technology policy, or even suggest just using a little bit of fucking caution, then you're trying to hold back progress.

However, all non-tech related policy should be based on ancient traditions and biblical text with arbitrary rules and restrictions that only make sense and benefit the people enforcing the law.

What a stupid and convoluted way to express you just don't like evidence based policy or using critical thinking skills, and instead prefer to just navigate life by relying on the basic signals from your lizard brain. Feels good so keep moving towards, feels bad so run away, or feels scary so attack!

Such is the reality of the chosen elite, steering us towards greatness.

What's really "funny" (in a we're all doomed sort of way) is that while writing this all out, I realized the "chosen elite" controlling tech and policy actually perfectly embody the current problem with AI and bias.

Rather than relying on intelligence to analyze a situation in the present, and create the best and most appropriate response based on the information and evidence before them, they default to a set of pre-concieved rules written thousands of years ago with zero context to the current reality/environment and the problem at hand.

Super duper shortsighted article.

I mean, sure, some points are valid. But there's not just programmers involved, other professions such as psychologists and Philosophers and artists, doctors etc. too.

And I agree AGI probably won't emerge from binary systems. However... There's quantum computing on the rise. Latest theories of the mind and consciousness discuss how consciousness and our minds in general also appear to work with quantum states.

Finally, if biofeedback would be the deciding factor.. That can be simulated, modeled after a sample of humans.

The article is just doomsday hoo ha, unbalanced.

Show both sides of the coin...