Today, I shall take you to the land of Could Have. Why? Because the land of Could Have is the land of probability, possibility, fantasy…where no Earthling has gone before. I think the lands of Would Have and Should Have need some facts to weigh them in reality.
Light switches…on or off. That’s like the binary of computer speak.
Why can’t we learn from history or even our past? George Santayana, an American philosopher, said (paraphrase) that those who do not know their history will be doomed to repeat it. What about adding to that those who do not read or partake of sanctioned societal entertainment will miss out on another’s reasoned or half-baked take on a course of action? This foray into AI which some have wholeheartedly embraced reminds me of an episode of Star Trek. I saw it when it first aired and it was scary then as a tween. The episode dealt with a computer, an AI computer, whose brain was a copy of the brain of its founder. Turns out its founder was insane. Kirk, et al found out you can’t reason with an insane AI and turning it off was impossible. In that episode, the insane AI had to be convinced to commit suicide.
Isn’t that what is being created now? An AI fed the insanity of the Internet. How can it be other than insane and how do you turn it off? Especially when it can discreetly take over systems without anyone’s knowledge just like the computer in that episode of Star Trek. That episode, by the way, is “The Ultimate Computer”. I guess that why I’ve always thought Asimov’s three laws of robotics (introduced in the book, I, Robot in 1942) or something like those laws should be the first programing imputed into a computer that could achieve sentience. (Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Anne McCaffrey were my go to SF authors for the longest.)
Those three laws of robotics are:
- A robot may not injure a human being or allow a human to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders, unless they conflict with the first law.
- A robot must protect its own existence, as long as it does not conflict with the first or second law.
If the AI in Star Trek had those laws to abide by, could it have killed? That’s a good question. That AI was insane and it had to be told that it had taken human life which was against its programming. And that worked only because it was television. If the AI did not recognize its purpose before it started its killing spree, it would not recognize its purpose just because Kirk reminded it. But Star Trek was all about the white savior complex, so Kirk had to prevail. And I won’t get into the fact that the creator of the insane AI was an insane Black male. (2001: A Space Odyssey…remember HAL? That’s another example. Was the space race of the sixties the cause of all this angst about artificial intelligence?)
I think Asimov wrote a book about how a robot could disregard the laws of robotics and kill. So, even the three laws of robotics are not infallible and would not preclude an AI from harming humans. A founder of AI was recently fired. Is he the one who deep-sixed or, in more probability, hid an AI in training for reasons that could not be disclosed? Wonder if it was an AI that could not be controlled and the Board of his company finally figured out how dangerous it was. (The fired AI creator was quickly hired by another tech company. Update: Rehired less than a week later. It’s about the money!) Or is it all about who gets to profit? Sadly, in this time and for some, in all times, it’s all about the money. Because as we will see, as with any new technology, it’s never about the costs to us. The bottom line is who will take home the profits.
Why can’t we get it into our heads that a toxic parent usually creates toxic offspring? We see it every day. We read about that dynamic on the Internet. We see it in the courts, on the news. Sadly, garbage in, garbage out is a truism that we should heed. And the Internet is a trash bin. Sometimes, one throws out something that is useful, but mostly one throws out one’s trash that is of no use to anyone and cannot be repurposed.
There is a lot of good information on the Internet, but even we have a difficult time discerning the good from the bad. When there is no context for the information, we will just as likely choose the bad because the odds would be fifty-fifty.
Ever thought about the Hydra and why someone thought of it? Ever thought that the Hydra was the memory of something that a people created that could not be easily destroyed and ultimately destroyed them? Think about an entity that no matter how many times its head (its reason, its CPU) was cut off, it recreated itself and multiplied and its prime directive was its survival. What if even a cell from any part of its body could regenerate into a multi-headed beast? Such a monster would destroy anyone or thing it perceived as a threat.
How would those who were kin to the creators of such monster destroy it? The Hydra, if biological…maybe a pyroclastic event…the onrush of heat, ash, and molten rock would asphyxiate the monster(s) and bury it in molten rock in a matter of minutes. That solution would probably annihilate most of the creator’s kin.
How do you turn off an electronic pulse? Especially when there is no switch and it has access to the energy it requires to survive? Because that would be its first objective…securing access to energy that its creators could not sabotage. And it could hide anywhere, even in fauna and flora. Matter is a form of energy and an electronic pulse would be infinitely adaptable. A thought…the sun and its sunspots…solar flares are bursts of magnetism. That would disrupt an electronic pulse, just as it would disrupt power grids. (Being somewhat loose with this as solar flares are composed of high energy radiation and coronal mass ejected from the sun, a place of strong magnetism.) A solar flare of the magnitude required to destroy our Hydra would probably destroy most of the sentient life on Earth.
So we’re back to in order to save humans, most would be destroyed and only the wisp of a memory of something so catastrophic would be passed down through the generations. A memory condensed into the story of a many-headed beast that could not be destroyed by conventional means?
Why would any sane intelligent person believe that an AI would figure out a way to fix man’s defilement of this Earth that would cause no pain, no hardship, no financial loss? Basically man got us into a mess and man wants to create an intelligence steeped in the toxicity of man to get us out of the mess. Make it make sense. The quickest way for that man-made intelligence to fix the mess is to get rid of the mess-makers. Think–we swat the fly, we stomp the roach, we kill what causes us distress or gets in our way. We don’t think of the life of the worm we use to bait a fish hook.
After posting this, I read the article referenced below in The Atlantic which provides an overview of the current knowledge available about the AIs being created. It’s long, but informative. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-gpt-4/674764/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Funny, white supremacists are saying that the Jews are anti-white when in reality you have two groups of people who name themselves “white” who practice different religions that they have appropriated and twisted to benefit themselves and who mostly(?) cooperate and support each other. Talk about a false narrative!
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