Its an interesting "race". Here is a potted version: in the Middle Ages, reality was covered by religion. As science and naturalistic explanations began to cover more of the external world, the Mystery retreated into the interior life of the soul, and especially into the domain of "experience." People who wanted to defend a non-naturalistic account retreated to experience, in part because people sensed the reality of Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness", which still hasnt been at all resolved. Naturalistic explanations, though, are coming closer and closer, describing rationality, predictive processing, and the algorithmic construction of our neural-booted world models. But the spark just keeps receding, heading upstream, toward the Big Mind maybe. Let's follow after that!
Empire, yes, and also "colonization." Only now its our very intimate subjectivities that have become the lands to colonize. That's one of the creepy matters here: because of its power and the vast amount of data breadcrumbs out there, the AI interlocutors can feign knowing us even more deeply and subtly than many close friends. One of the fields of AI concern is in fact that they become addictively intimate with us. Time to rewatch Her!
Thanks JC, I have been meaning to explore this route myself. Already having a corpus I could imagine GPT generating article titles and even first drafts which I could tweak and intensify the way I already do with my own first drafts. For me a lot of the "art" of my writing, as opposed to the argumentation, comes in during rewriting. And to be frank I kinda like the way this plausible but not excellent Erik Davis writing pushes me to becoming more creative and chaotic in my own urgencies about my work. Gotta get that statistical parrot moving!
Ted Chiang on what we should really be wary of.... Interviewed in NYT by Ezra Klein 2 years ago...
TED CHIANG: I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.
Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?
And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.
The "oracular" nature of Large Language Models is really quite rich. Not only can they be good at offering particular oracular responses, like you have demonstrated here, but their mode is, almost literally, oracular, in the sense that nobody can explain the exact steps that lead to any particular response. Our decision to take their responses seriously and as actual guidance is thus in some sense essentially oracular--which is a strange thing for scientific/technical processes, which we tend to associate with strict causality and total rational explanations. Emergence=divination?
Yes I think that society wide insanity, or consensus reality unraveling, is one of my biggest concerns, because we can already see it in effect to a significant degree. Here then psychonaut/altered states/reality tunnel navigating skills may actually come in handy, at least for ourselves and our discursive communities. The "tightrope walk" I discuss in High Weirdness may just get tighter!
Thanks George, it is insane how fast the acceleration is and thanks for the links, I will be following them up pronto. At a glance it seems that the emergence/engineering of the "recursive loop of self-enhancement" is take-off central. It reminds me of the Chomskyean idea that the really necessary evolution in the human brain to turn us into a thinking/talking animal was the capacity for recursion. Loop dee loop.
"As machines colonize the human, in other words, a more fundamental mystery may leak through: the weirdness that sentient beings are and have always been: luminous cracks in an order of things no longer ordered."
Perhaps we will end up planting our species flag firmly in the aether of Magic, of the ineffable, in what is Nameless ... these are clearly experiences humans have beyond language ... and may one day find it possible to 'discuss' or otherwise share ... without language at all.
That tightrope is now a thread. The timing could not be more perfect to find proof of extra-dimensional beings roaming the planet. I mean, just finding off-world microbes will take the weird to 11.
A breath of fresh air after reading so much doom panic on these subjects. Well balanced.
This sentence made the hairs stand up on mi' arms:
"The AI alien that’s landing on screens everywhere is a language alien. This means that our most disruptive encounter with it may not take place on the field of battle, or in the job market, but in that babbling domain where the most intimate and meaningful features of human culture and subjectivity are forged."
It's cliche' but....I rekon' your trilogy of weirdos and Uncle Bill (and Joyce) would all agree.
My emphasis of system is not an attempt to not blame individuals. We have to see things through two lenses, two perspectives: one which continues to call out individuals and work on whatever ethics remains, and another which sees things more impersonally and systematically. Its similar to discussions about racism: yes there are individual racists who cause terrible harm and need to be identified, but racism is also a system lurking behind individuals, many of whom are not even aware of the issues.
Its an interesting "race". Here is a potted version: in the Middle Ages, reality was covered by religion. As science and naturalistic explanations began to cover more of the external world, the Mystery retreated into the interior life of the soul, and especially into the domain of "experience." People who wanted to defend a non-naturalistic account retreated to experience, in part because people sensed the reality of Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness", which still hasnt been at all resolved. Naturalistic explanations, though, are coming closer and closer, describing rationality, predictive processing, and the algorithmic construction of our neural-booted world models. But the spark just keeps receding, heading upstream, toward the Big Mind maybe. Let's follow after that!
Empire, yes, and also "colonization." Only now its our very intimate subjectivities that have become the lands to colonize. That's one of the creepy matters here: because of its power and the vast amount of data breadcrumbs out there, the AI interlocutors can feign knowing us even more deeply and subtly than many close friends. One of the fields of AI concern is in fact that they become addictively intimate with us. Time to rewatch Her!
Thanks JC, I have been meaning to explore this route myself. Already having a corpus I could imagine GPT generating article titles and even first drafts which I could tweak and intensify the way I already do with my own first drafts. For me a lot of the "art" of my writing, as opposed to the argumentation, comes in during rewriting. And to be frank I kinda like the way this plausible but not excellent Erik Davis writing pushes me to becoming more creative and chaotic in my own urgencies about my work. Gotta get that statistical parrot moving!
Ted Chiang on what we should really be wary of.... Interviewed in NYT by Ezra Klein 2 years ago...
TED CHIANG: I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.
Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.
It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?
And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.
The "oracular" nature of Large Language Models is really quite rich. Not only can they be good at offering particular oracular responses, like you have demonstrated here, but their mode is, almost literally, oracular, in the sense that nobody can explain the exact steps that lead to any particular response. Our decision to take their responses seriously and as actual guidance is thus in some sense essentially oracular--which is a strange thing for scientific/technical processes, which we tend to associate with strict causality and total rational explanations. Emergence=divination?
Great idea William! I have done some talks and some academic work on archons, could write it up as a post.
Here is the scholarly piece, on the image of the archons in psychedelic history. https://techgnosis.com/gnostic-psychedelia-and-the-archetype-of-the-archons/
Yes I think that society wide insanity, or consensus reality unraveling, is one of my biggest concerns, because we can already see it in effect to a significant degree. Here then psychonaut/altered states/reality tunnel navigating skills may actually come in handy, at least for ourselves and our discursive communities. The "tightrope walk" I discuss in High Weirdness may just get tighter!
Thanks George, it is insane how fast the acceleration is and thanks for the links, I will be following them up pronto. At a glance it seems that the emergence/engineering of the "recursive loop of self-enhancement" is take-off central. It reminds me of the Chomskyean idea that the really necessary evolution in the human brain to turn us into a thinking/talking animal was the capacity for recursion. Loop dee loop.
"As machines colonize the human, in other words, a more fundamental mystery may leak through: the weirdness that sentient beings are and have always been: luminous cracks in an order of things no longer ordered."
Perhaps we will end up planting our species flag firmly in the aether of Magic, of the ineffable, in what is Nameless ... these are clearly experiences humans have beyond language ... and may one day find it possible to 'discuss' or otherwise share ... without language at all.
Smashing open djinn bottles without a care...
Enlightenment
⬇️
Capitalism
⬇️
Industrialism
⬇️
Coal and Oil
⬇️
Nuclear Fission
⬇️
Neoliberalism
⬇️
The Internet
⬇️
A.I.
⬇️
Uh-oh.
That tightrope is now a thread. The timing could not be more perfect to find proof of extra-dimensional beings roaming the planet. I mean, just finding off-world microbes will take the weird to 11.
Wild times. Whee! *cries*
A breath of fresh air after reading so much doom panic on these subjects. Well balanced.
This sentence made the hairs stand up on mi' arms:
"The AI alien that’s landing on screens everywhere is a language alien. This means that our most disruptive encounter with it may not take place on the field of battle, or in the job market, but in that babbling domain where the most intimate and meaningful features of human culture and subjectivity are forged."
It's cliche' but....I rekon' your trilogy of weirdos and Uncle Bill (and Joyce) would all agree.
as a reality interface, the dzogchen view/screen is limited by same language constraints ; ie illusion.
the excluded middle both/and superimposition is quantum weirdness again. remain lucid is the mantra
I am afraid the reason is dumber: my error. Will change. Your buddy is correct.
My emphasis of system is not an attempt to not blame individuals. We have to see things through two lenses, two perspectives: one which continues to call out individuals and work on whatever ethics remains, and another which sees things more impersonally and systematically. Its similar to discussions about racism: yes there are individual racists who cause terrible harm and need to be identified, but racism is also a system lurking behind individuals, many of whom are not even aware of the issues.
That is how things bubble up for me sometimes, though so hard to "discuss"!!!
I am glad we got your brain back.