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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARy91XqIWpk
Oh, YES, definitely. You told me to comment, so here goes... You made so many topics shoot through my head just now.. This will be a long post.
FIRST, what is with the FEAR?
People are always talking about the negative, their fear of AI.. But that's silly.. And I'll tell you why.. AI is so far from even near conscious, it's ridiculous. I believe Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are just dead wrong about the timeframe. We will probably, maybe get there in the end and quantum computing may help, but we are just starting that field. 50 years is very optimistic, we need great big leaps of concepts, and in quantum mechanics AND AI we have been chasing our tails the last 30 years. But even more importantly than technology is psychology. We need to face our own illusions about being sentient and by that time we will have adapted and we will have adapted AI so that it cannot harm us anyhow. By that time, everything will be different, but if I tell you how I think it will be, you'll probably laugh and you won't take me seriously.. But I'm gonna try and you can laugh.
We need this time to feel around, to stop being afraid.. So much is going to change before that.. if the moment even comes.. If there ever will be something that will feel like the definitive moment.. Because right now? We don't even have a working definition for human consciousness. Or a test for consciousness in other potentially sentients. We have a shared illusion that we are conscious as opposed too ...all other things? And as long as we don't probe that, we can keep telling ourselves that it's quite all right to have a bio-industry like we have now. That will be a real hurdle, good luck with that one.. Are plants conscious? Where do we stop? It's a grey, not a black and white, like everything. We have to collectively stop lying at some point and accept what we are.. We are creatures who need to derive energy from other creatures. Something has to die for us to live. No wonder we tell ourselves stories. And those stories will impede the progress of AI for a while to come.. We need to believe there is a light-switch for consciousness or our golden rule of treating others won't fit anymore, when we need to broaden our definition of 'others'.
But right now, being afraid of AI is missing out. Human minds, human memory works with stories, symbols, understanding, meaning, belief, emotion. Neural nets, the best we have today... DON'T. They don't understand anything. They don't even have a concept of understanding or of concepts or even of 'having'. AI is just a very handy, multidimensional, adaptable filter. Like a computer was just a tool that could be used for many functions. Like a swiss army knife. Nothing new, just executed a bit smarter.. Neural nets mimic just a very small portion of our cognition. Some (maybe even most) of our grey matter may function that way, but we are nowhere near cognition in computers, nowhere near meta-cognition, nowhere near the artificail conscience to prevent evil killing autonomic robots in the Asimov sense. Nowhere near a 'mind' that could even understand the first of the three laws. The real magic, right now, is in our heads, when we look at AI and recognize the pattern in this very crude form and are SO impressed, so afraid. We are doing most of the work. If you want to be impressed, be impressed by your own mind.. That's pareidolia at work. (Oh, please look that one up) It's something AI can do as well, up to a point, and that right there, will give us another clue, I just know it..
SECOND, the potential of AI..
Is AI potentially harmful? Sure.. AI, like any technology can and probably will be misused by some humans, hopefully not too bad, but in the end, it will benefit us all...
YES! I am 100% with you on this, Siraj. And I've been forming a mental picture of the resulting society in the last months.
AI has the potential to solve inequality, taking over large portions of the governing and logistics and finding the most efficient ways to do things, find trends to start doing things that can be finished when they are needed. First from an advisory role, because noone wants a self-driving car, right? Not yet, anyway.. AI can take over justice jobs, automatically exposing logical fallacies and other rhetoric that for the masses still efficiently masques selfish agenda's today. It will FINALLY free us of democracy. The despair of the Greek philosophers.. And I know people will hate me for this, but even intelligent Americans must now admit: democracy sucks. It's just the least of all evils we know.. But we will look back upon the election of Hitler, Nixon, Reagan, Schwarzenegger and Trump as the pinnacle of the dark ages. It's where democracy failed and it was dark at times. Maybe we should count ourselves lucky that right now, it's only Trump? We deserve worse. And maybe AI can even take over most of law-enforcement and health care (in a totally different way, think automatic, subtle sanctions, psychological stimuli etc, not violence). AI will revolutionize schools, making teachers just benevolent coaches. It will eliminate the need for money, yes even bitCoin. We won't measure prestige like that any more. We won't have to. We will leave a small imprint on the global neural net, contribute to the generative net out there to show our worth, if we want to immortalize ourselves in a way.. It's not like StarTrek at all because that is to military and centralized and women have short skirts, because Gene Roddenberry was just a bit frustrated in that department... but in other senses it is going to be EXACTLY like StarTrek.. VR offers such potential as a psychotherapy tool. Like some of those awesome holodeck episodes, where the captain takes advice from historical figures.. Well.. I recently took composing advice from an AI taught on the works of historical masterminds. It's not literally, but quite amazingly like it. I don't see why in 50 years time it couldn't be exactly like it. We even have things like fairy lights now, femto-laser holograms that you can TOUCH..
Lastly, but not least.. we will be freed from the shackles of random beliefs, assumptions and other illusions. And yes, I know I can't say 'religion', because people will throw a hissy fit, but those people generally don't read this much text..But still, I won't say 'religion'.. And I can't say 'new age nonsense', because then nobody will like me anymore, so... I won't.. And I can't say 'gender roles' because than you'll think I have some kind of agenda.. So I won't.. All those beliefs'll still be there, enriching our lives, with the slicing of the sausage of time into holidays and bite-sized times between rituals, creating little boxes in our head we can put people, objects and moments in, but taken no more serious than Santaclaus, the easter-bunny or the coming-of-age goddes: the tooth fairy.. It will just be for fun. Because we will have solved two of the biggest selling points of all beliefs in one go. One: creation of intelligence. The old origin story. Done that, been there.. If we can do it, are we gods? NOOOO. And how did we do it? Evolution (and gradient ascent and opposition and much more..) It will be as plain as our noses (and here I refer you to Jacobson's organ :) and two: self-fulfillment. Everybody will be the best version of themselves, because it will take a very advanced neural net and some intricate behavioral models to finally 'prove' to the majority that happily frustrated people will be cheaper and more efficient at anything than unhappily frustrated ones. Listen to the game-designer here. This knowledge is now being used to get you addicted to games, but that will be illegal in 5 years, because it's so effective.. Everybody will be a part of the solution and we will no longer need to lie to ourselves and be hypocritical about matters, which makes us depressed, small-minded consumers.
instead...
We will all be creators. Not in a religious way. I just see a lot of human-AI collaboration in our future. And you can start RIGHT NOW. FOR FREE, on your OWN. It's all open source..
AI is such a beautiful, creative tool. AI changes all the rules. You become a art-director more than an artist and you use the parts of your brain that make you uniquely human and uniquely you. The parts that can find meaning and tell stories. The part that wants to learn about itself. Those qualities will be more important than anything. I can use it TODAY to do illustrations I could only dream about before, to make sounds that will compress REALLY small for games, to get opponents in games that feel a little more real. I'm not even far with it yet, there is so much more to explore, but nothing dangerous on the horizon. Except misinformation and fear. That's always a bit dangerous.
The only thing AI will do in the long run, is help us in our common fight against entropy (the only struggle that matters in the really long run and the thing that unites ALL LIFE, I know it sounds new age, but it's just the second law of thermodynamics, really ) and better harness the power sources of our local system: the sun, wind, tides, geothermal power and nuclear fission. And then the united sentients will finally be out of the dark ages. No more fame, no more marketing, because anyone can make anything. No more self-loathing because somebody needs to increase sales. We will be free of all of that mind-numbing crap. Why? BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE TO WORK ANYMORE, don't have to lock our children up in school, because we will FINALLY take the time to take care of them ourselves, to take care of ourselves. We''ll just do what we are good at: play, create and lovingly steer each other towards mental health and positivity.
Ok, you can laugh now... I sound like a rambling mad man, just wait 50 years... I think Siraj sees at least some of this or he wouldn't be bouncing of the screen with all that energy each time. You keep telling them, Siraj. You are the change.
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