I Must Not Fear: Not Even A.I.
The Technology Wars, Part 2
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If you spend enough time staring into the abyss, it might get hungry and eat you.
If you fear the progression of technology (reasonably defined), you're taking the wrong approach—perhaps to everything. You should pause and reflect on the path that led you to fear the unknown. Was it schooling? Was fear of the unknown taught in your house of worship? Somebody failed you, and it is you who must take control to rectify the situation.
The popular science fiction novel in history is Frank Herbert's Dune. The Dune universe, or Duniverse, involves an intergalactic society that is struggling violently within itself after overcoming enslavement by artificial intelligence. Skipping the complexities of a future space-traveling humanity crippled by overspecialization and dependence on a single dominant resource (spice) vomited from the mouths of giant sandworms that live on a single desert planet, Dune (the first book in a series) focuses on a young man who masters fear. This turns out to be the first step in a several thousand year process that sets humanity free among the stars.
The conquering of fear is codified in the "Litany Against Fear":
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
Personally, I think this Litany Against Fear is great to remember. It helps me focus on an adventurer's mindset. Specifically, I think of it as most appropriately applicable to struggling against the winds of change where technological progress creates turbulence in the balances of power among all affected life.
Will Artificial Intelligence Enslave Us?
Personally, I think that humanity may be at a point of peak enslavement already. It is possible that this is simultaneously true and that we will soon face great struggles during an Ovidian metamorphasis. What I am still concerned about is the possibility that artificial intelligence might augment those who seek power and rule over others. Jeff Childers seems to have a similar mindset as my own:
I’m not exaggerating by saying artificial intelligence will change everything. It’s nearly impossible to imagine any scenario in life that could remain unaffected. In most cases things will probably be profoundly altered by the new technology.
Point number one: if you’re not using AI yet, you should be. You need to understand it, and it can be quite useful at times. Google’s Bard is free and is a decent place to start.
https://bard.google.com/
. Begin by just thinking about the AI as an enhanced search engine that can answer English-language questions instead of making you guess the right search terms.
🔥 Point number two: AI will not suddenly wake up, take over the world, and evolve into a higher order of life making us humans obsolete. Scientists don’t even understand HUMAN consciousness, so it’s preposterous to think they could artificially recreate self-consciousness in a lab. We’re not even close.
Which is not to say AI isn’t dangerous. But the dangers aren’t with what the machines might do. The dangers lie in what people might do with these intelligent machines.
I recommend reading his whole article:
One of numerous pieces of interest:
🔥 Speaking of stocks, AI will soon be picking everyone’s stocks, creating a niche market for humans with the unique abilities to predict and outsmart the machines.
Before I hung up trading (at least for now), I did make some of my profit trading both with and against bots. But I think that the markets will change as much as the AI, and large companies that cannot keep up with technological gains of small, nimble companies, will quickly become a thing of the past. If Bitcoin wins the reserve currency race (which I currently suspect), then its mature value will increase in proportion to world wealth growth (also known as the "technological factor of the economy"). This will mean that the only worthwhile corporate investments will be smaller cutting edge projects that will most often be privately held. I may explain this point in further detail in a future article.
What Jeff and I both worry about is the combination of authoritarian control over artificial intelligence (technology's symmetry problem), and the training of its use into children who cannot comprehend the way they're being simultaneously deceived and brainwashed by it.
But when everyone accepts the AI, and learns to depend and rely on it, many people won’t even WANT to consider alternative ideas. The AI will be seen as neutral, unassailable, with no bias or bone to pick. It’s the ultimate mind controller.
Problem, reaction, solution.
So, must we go full unabomber, massacre the technologists (um…good luck with that?!), and then train our children to be luddites?
What happens when they're 60, trained only to run the farm, find a laptop, and then get introduced to internet porn selected for them personally by the AI Overlords you missed?
Rule of thumb:
If the genie can be weaponized, but can't be crammed back into the bottle, it's better to get to know the genie than to fight it.
Knowing the genie doesn't solve the whole of technology's (a)symmetry problem, but it goes a long way toward that solution.
Pro tip: find elegant ways to describe new technologies.
The large language models such as ChatGPT that will soon become ubiquitous in work and education are something like low resolution reflections of ourselves. They are low resolution because machines are necessarily lesser in computational capacity than the universe itself. They can mimic us to a degree, and quite rapidly. We can make productive use of that mimicry. But we must keep in mind the primary problems that humanity faces, like the fracturing of communities into personality types and industries that become separated communities set in competition with one another, instead of cooperation.
The Intellectual Property Paradigm
So, who will profit from the AI?
Oh boy! Here lies another of the underdiscussed problems amid the fear campaigns that saturate our media.
The simple answer to the question is whoever owns the intellectual property (IP) rights. Or "rights" since the existence of these rights is really the suppression of the rights to make use of the knowledge without payment. The "owner of the IP" is just a sneaky way of saying, "Whoever is the government," because implicit in IP rights is the threat of violence to enforce them.
Who is that going to be?
Everybody if we successfully decentralize government. That's right—we're back to the same square one. We must solve the pretzel-pickle we've been in throughout this whole dark age.
Here is the recipe I would follow, personally:
Homeschool/unschool - This may certainly include coops. Make sure to build out social, physical, and spiritual aspects of education along the way.
Learn to love all subjects (and do not fear any of it). This includes making sure all the kids understand that the martial arts (situationally defined, including the weapons of technology) are part of the ability to decentralize power.
Adopt an adventurer's mindset.
Introduce technology to children exactly when they're ready to understand the traps inherent in them ("ideological or source bias may be programmed into this software").
Rebuild community so that you and your children know the difference between an AI and a human.
Best of luck. I believe in us.
While I love the "Fear is the Mind Killer" quote and have used it recently in comments perhaps the more or at least equally important lesson from Dune is Gom Jabbar. Very briefly for non-Duneites. the Gom Jabbar is test of ones humanity. It is part of a very complex plot line, but greatly simplified it tests ones being human by inserting your hand into a box that creates gradually increasing levels of pain until extremely painful. If test subject pulls their hand out of the box when the pain gets to be too much, they give up their humanity. The analogy used if an animal gets caught in a trap it will chew its leg off to get away and live what ever limited and painfully life that may buy them. A human would endure the pain and kill the trapper to save others.
I can't help but think of the Covid Crisis as humanities Gom Jabbar. The Covid Criminals, Evil Incarnate, created a psychological, sociological, and physical pain box that sadly virtually every person failed. By giving up their humanity they supported the Covid Criminals' massive crimes against humanity including mass murder by stifling incredibly safe and cheap early treatments including antibiotics, steroids and repurposed drugs. They also failed to stop the Evil Ones from mandatory vaccinations, lockdowns, selected business bankruptcies, censorship and causing permanent life-long psychological and educational damage in our children. As if hedonistically sacrificing children isn't the epitome of inhumanity, they laughed when a comedian joked about the totally illogical and divisive "Epidemic of the Unvaccinated" lie by saying that the unvaccinated should be let to die with the punchline "Die Wheesey". Even the Nazis Gas Chamber operators didn't do nightly comedy.
Having proven the great mass will fail their humanity Gom Jabbar, The Evil Ones are moving on to The WHO and UN Emergency Power agreements, enforced using AI.
While seemingly dire, there were those who endured the Gom Jabbar pain. If they haven't taken out the trappers, they may at least have made more of animals aware of the trap. From my readings of life in prison camps or Gulags, as long as some humanity survived, there was hope. Some survived this Gom Jabbar. Let's see what the next one is.
If we don't understand consciousness, how do we know when we've created it?