I Am Become AI, Destroyer of Words

Words abstracted die. This is not tragedy. This is not comedy. This is plain fact.

I don't mean that they stop being meaningful. I only mean that abstracted from the feelings and associations that they started with in a human mind, words no longer do what they once did when they were used interpersonally, or on stage, or even in orations.

We've been abstracting words for a long time. We no longer write personal letters, and now nobody would read an email that was written like a letter. Trust me, I know. Even I use the phrase-prompts. LMAO

I have a bird feeder in my back yard. The squirrels are deuced clever at getting at it. It pisses me off. When I write, I write for someone in particular, and it would often really piss me off if someone else gets at it. Meaning is always related to audience. The audience related to AI is concocted by and for AI. As a listener or reader, you make more allowances for AI than you do for your friends. Which means there really is no audience.

All you want is the truth from AI, which is a lot less than you want from your friends. But then you tend to know when people you know are telling the truth. With AI, you can't really get mad at it being wrong the way you might with a liar.

The odds are against us getting pure abstracted truth, since most of the AI promoters already have access to our algorithmic being. You know, the being with a money valence, as if that were the whole of you.

We have a very wrong notion about what intelligence is. We seem to think it's the all of what human minds are about. Naturally, we think intelligent thought can be put into words, and so when AI does it, we think AI is intelligent. But AI is quite simply echoing words that once made sense to humans. Not categorically different from what a camera does. AI is much more complicated than a camera of course, but the shots it takes of sense are pure mathematical abstraction from stuff that makes or once made sense to humans in a particular context.

Things glom together. Measurable, perceptible things. Things are recognized by mind, as are their associations. Words do not affect human evolution, as Robert Wright would have it in his recent book. They might help us to survive, but that would be in conjunction with others who have good motives. Words come to mind as recognition of affinity in the form of a generalized object; a concept. Evolution was long complete before language hit us humans. Call it an epiphenomenon.

By the power inherent in human communication, humans have mostly stopped evolution for humans. We survive despite almost anything in the mostly built environments in which we live. I'm no champion of moving to be more primitive, but I am a champion of being honest and accurate about what's going on. That's along with humility about how much we truly understand. 

I am utterly amazed at how quickly my granddaughter learns new words, and remembers them. Ruth Garrett Millikan puts all cranky male philosophers of language to shame with her acutely accurate description of how words are made and used. As she affirms, no AI can hold a candle to my three and half year old granddaughter.

Of course my granddaughter can't parse erudite and complicated texts the way that AI can, but what words she uses, she uses with incredible accuracy. And she knows context.

AI can be plenty accurate. The trouble is that there's no mind in it. AI treats language, pictures and sound the way that we treat sound and fury, signifying nothing. And we are suppressing all the felt associations we have with words as we plow through so many now each day. Our minds are being washed away as much as they are being enriched.

Atoms, particles, molecules all have affinities. Wandering randomly, there is no motive to their connections. They happen upon one another, which is when random takes on meaning. We define random as generally meaningless. But I define random connections as emotive. I really do. 

Interestingly, computers have to reach out to the actual world to get random numbers. By themselves all they can do is pseudo-random. How well I remember the plots on the pegboard at the mini-computer company my friend worked at way back in the seventies. The plots demonstrated the power of their computer to determine when numbers weren't random. A pattern would emerge, which didn't happen with real random numbers.

Since random impingements define most of our lives, whatever meaning we make of them or don't, it would be a mistake to consider random to mean meaningless. Beyond the reach of mind to know is all. Like evolution, which is a chain of random connections and events. Meaningless?

A direction for time is engendered by comparing order to disorder. Forward in time is things falling apart. Forward in life is, well, emotive. Anti-entropic. Things coming together and sticking together in a kind of proto-evolution. I don't posit some elan vital. This is just reality. Life develops in a direction opposite to energy devolving. As a dimension, time was present at the beginning, haha!

AI built on silicon can't touch emotion; meaning that there is no feeling direct to any mind - sometimes so called - as embodied now by silicon. Perceptions are felt as impingements on skin and other sensory organs. Emotions are felt directly by mind. Computer-based AI deals with words as we deal with perceptions. Words impinge on their mathematical neural networks the way that photons impinge on our retina. Either sort of intelligence, human or machine, can turn math on that sort of reality (There's plenty of human-born AI; think how corporations operate. Corporate people.) Math doesn't really work with emotions.

Not feeling emotion does not mean that emotion cannot be mimicked. We do it all the time. Sometimes we call it lying. As Wright describes it, silicon mimics emotion all the time. Corporations can also pretend to care.

I can never find the reference, though I suspect it comes from The Nation way back when I actually read The Nation. I still subscribe, but I am no longer young and have no time for echoes to my thoughts, which echo plenty without any prodding. The reference was to a meeting of some Insurance professional's congregational entity. There was a crisis of solvency in the insurance industry; especially in healthcare. As the story went, some wag among the audience noted that if non-payment of claims could be made a profit center, they could easily achieve solvency. 

Most of the audience laughed, as I recall my reading of it, while some of them started calculating. The results have long since become our reality. Credibility of reasoning took a back seat to probability of no contest.

I recently purchased some items for my garden which were advertised as 70% off from a price of $599. There is simply no way that this item was either worth or had ever been bought for that price. To add insult to injury my 'ship it now' purchase took nearly two months to initiate, during which time the price had dropped to 80% off. 

The website come-on instantly seemed to me to be the calculation of some AI servant or savant, which likely also included calculations about the likelihood of penalties for false advertising. Surely no human would lie so brazenly. Ummmm

One time a while ago while recovering from a pulmonary embolism which enlarged my heart and killed me by 50% chance, an indiscreet health insurance customer agent said these words to me: "Don't worry, they know the game, your bill will get paid." I hadn't known it was a game. Their initial denial of tens of thousands in claims was terrorizing. They finally paid me on a technicality that the hospital was in fact in-network in some fine print somewhere that they hadn't found at first. As though I would or could have survived an hour long ambulance ride to their territory where my COBRA insurance was located.

By that time everything was already a computer game, which must have given that otherwise deadly boring job some pizazz, especially if there were prizes involved.

Now snap forward a few eons from when time took on direction to the time where replicators - genes - came into being. Never mind how, they just did. Beyond molecular bonds, replicators shared a shape, whose bonds might be mirrored in a partner shape. The enlivening at that connection is, well, the very origin of life. 

Now sure, beyond a certain scale there is gravity to bring things together. But gravity is not picky, though it may mark proximity of random connectabilities. Emotion may be and is by me, defined as movement or change without force. Which means without predetermination. Which means random, which is not, therefore exactly meaningless. Random is simply beyond minds' limits.

Do you really think you can take credit for all that happens in your life? We all feel like we should be able to until it comes time to face the music. Like maybe getting rich also has a cost?

Anyhow, by now everything is text. Or maybe everything is text and image and sound. Each of us spends but scant time in any realm beyond those elements. In meditation, say, or out on the water sailing, or sitting in some forest or desert, perhaps with eyes closed and swishing leaves or blowing sand hashing out all pattern. No words will come. 

But words did and do come when some repetitive thing keeps happening by. This foreshadows the main process of our human mind, which is to generalize things so that we can react and plan properly against their future impingement. The perceptions glom together in our minds just as they did in the beginning.

Was the word. And then we could come together, sometimes as one.

Now we live at that same remove from reality that AI does. We check our phones, our TV listings, our music lineup, our schedule, our transportation, our heating and cooling and purchasing power, and it consumes our very all. Feed the horses and water the garden, huh?

We are become AI, abstracted from a reality that is disappearing day by every day. It's the same process that gave us a built world of steel and glass and roadways and grid-slashed earth. It is certainly not going to save us from ourselves.

People like Robert Wright, and people in general are impressed by intelligence. We mistakenly think that in a survival of the fittest world (which describes capitalism, not evolution) intelligence is what has enabled us to survive. But in the real world, random traits enable us to survive as the environment transforms, largely because of life as a whole. Intelligence may have broadened the range of environments in which we can survive, along with the range of foodstuffs on which we might survive.

Of course the end of that process is that all that survives is AI, because nothing remains of life. Which is, in fact, no different from nuclear self-annihilation. Environment and creatures become as one. And then the plug is pulled from the silicon. Poof!

Now the environment is already mostly man-inflected. Which random mutations enable survival would have to mesh with being in the right place at the right time. Or immunity to some man-made toxin.

It's no mistake that wealthy people become obsessed with immortality, since they are by definition narcissistic, which sometimes means in love with their very own intelligence which they seem to think is what got them so wealthy. People chasing immortality are out of the game; irrelevant to evolution.

An optimistic take would be to suggest that altruistic genes enable sensing through the mess to whatever it is that nurtures. That survival is a function of fellow feeling and not of solving the environment. You solve the environment and it's gone because you've gotten rid of every danger. You live virtually then, in the survival game of your dreams, which isn't life at all, since you risk nothing and there's nothing left to chance.

All we really have to do is slow down. The rush we're in is a function of knowing that the end is near. It's not part of any strategy. We don't even have to pull the plug. The grid will collapse on its own, and then it's game on life. I don't look forward to that sort of wilding, though it could be a goad to get civilized all over again.

Time will yet stand still anon. When I did die by drowning, my entire life was present to me at my last breath. There was nothing mysterious about it, nor sacred, though the presence was astonishing. 

We must be present in our lives or there will be no life left to live. We must tax the AI overlords out of business. They offer us but baubles in a life not worth living, as though our life were a movie written by them. We must recover our corner store and our local expertise. Who owns you? my former student once wrote, in a very fine argument against the patenting of genes.

"Let's Go Buffalo!" cannot be owned either. As it was in the beginning, Amen.

Machine Learning - Quantum Everything

One hears the term machine learning fairly often, and it seems to relate to machines that learn. Descending from that is artificial intelligence, perhaps of a sort which feeds neural-network style computers the results of intense statistical triangulation among linguistic structures. Those structures are presumably proven to be meaningful among humans engaging with them. One doesn't really know what might happen when the language generated by AI overwhelms the human language in the feed. Some kind of anti-singularity?

But we concentrate too much, I think, on the artifacts of our various industrial scientific and communications revolutions. The real interest should be on what is happening to humans on the planet as a result of changes to human learning.

It would be hard to ascertain whether we've become more or less brutish. The record clearly shows that we've always been brutish, while people like Steven Pinker assure us life is getting better and better. Which hasn't stopped him from hanging around with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe that means we all like even better better than we like better, as it ever has been. 

Even though I spend scant time with social media, and almost no time with anybody telling me what to believe, my phone is still at the center of my existence. I check the time more obsessively than when I had a watch. I check the weather, and the wind direction and speed. I check the news. I still miss out on events that I might enjoy, much more than I used to when I talked with people more than I look at my phone.

We use YouTube now to coach our amateur mechanical work, and I often wonder how, as a kid, I was able to learn carpentry and house-painting and bicycle repair and boat-building. Of course I know it had to be by way of conversation. In stores, at shops, at the boatyard, from colleagues, and sometimes from magazines. People always seemed eager to share their knowledge and expertise. People were helpful. I even read various books when I needed to know something in depth. "Corrosion in Boats' being one book. Nobody ever seemed to have a motive to lie, unless it was for a practical joke.

It's the ways of knowing which interests me. I think those ways may be more constrained than they've ever been before. Back when the US was young, it would take the railroads and the Erie Canal to pull us together. Telegraph wires after the Franklin Post Office which facilitated newspapers' spread. So much of the country was filling with people who scrabbled to plant, and were maybe concentric around towns. 

Now that we climb Everest for a personal best or find other ways to mimic pioneers in our self-reliance, it's hard to imagine so much solitude as we once endured. How poignant to say our farewells from the summit by cellphone. To announce deaths and diseases on digital bulletin boards. To never write a letter ever more anon. 

And now somehow we're all willing to tell lies to one another if it gets us attention. This all feels like yelling into the void to me, though here I am with my own truth to tell.

Just as sheep will, we let this wave of massive data centers wash over all that is left of open land. We think somehow it might be progress still, and that there might be a Christ-like imposition of wonder and glory at some end or other. 

I think it wasn't until the 1600's that Europe learned first-hand of China. We encountered a language that imposed more orthodoxy than even the Latin of the Church. The wealth and power and privilege differentials were of the same grade as we now suffer, although peasantry isn't nearly so unpleasant as it once was, over here or over there. 

Will we awaken to God finally as he comes back down to earth? Can we possibly accept that sort of dictatorship? We have been impersonating God - personalizing God - making God in our image and so forth - for so long that some have actually come to believe that the teachings are finished and some of those show no mercy upon those who disagree. 

In the race between full understanding by humans of the everything and the all and full submission to the certainty of God's revelations, there is a kind of terminal energy. Both are vacant quests. 

In any case, we will awaken, yes, to the impossibility of full understanding. We will awaken to God that is not personal but is the everpresent fact that we cannot know. The fact being that we cannot know everything. And we certainly can't know God. 

Which doesn't, however, preclude miracles. Most of what has made me me has nothing to do with my intention or desire or even appetites. Call it random, but there's God in it.

I wondered aloud the other day why anyone would buy a car from Carvana (what a name!). My friend said that he didn't find car-buying to be pleasant, always feeling swindled by someone who holds all the cards and practices his wiles all day long. He understood why someone might want to buy from a machine.

And somehow it's better to buy from a machine that knows exactly how much you're likely to want to pay. Have any studies been done about price variation depending on buyer, controlling for the goods? We think all used car dealers are sociopaths, but a machine is sociopathic by definition. I've had very pleasant encounters with car salespeople. Fellow feeling is not a possibility with machines, which is also true of corporate decision-making. Think how Bill Gates adopted a curated persona as he ruthlessly put others out of business. That was once personal for me. 

We once could judge a price. Prices now are meaningless. So much for friction-free capitalism. We've got hucksterism on steroids. Digital pricetags which will change by algorithm, and maybe even according to personal history.

And yet just as we once denied women full admission to a world controlled by men, we still ban emotion from our quest for knowledge. It gets in the way. It distracts us, just as a woman might distract which becomes an excuse for dismissal.

We reject the differing ways of knowing among those not party to the ways of power. We falsely believe that money is a neutral medium of exchange rather than that this supposed neutrality is way to make money a vector of power. In almost the same way that oil is.

The really important development isn't ever-increasing understanding. It's the shift from manufacturinig things to manufacturing money. Raw. It's no accident that the best money-making machines are the ones which are free to use. We are that easy. Please know everything about me. No-one else does.

Meanwhile, I've just finished this great book called Portals to a New Reality, by Vlatko Vedral. He seems accurately to have charted the course for future developments in physics. I'll have to read it again, but sadly he seems to have drawn at least one premature conclusion along his way. He seems to still conclude that we might possibly and eventually understand everything. That's even while his approach to quantum reality, which would mean to incorporate gravity in the theory, implicitly denies the possibliity to know everything. 

It's not just that everything's related to everything else. It's more that everything is implicated in everything else, and so there's no longer any position for understanding that's outside of what's being understood. Everything is mind and there's no mind apart. 

Quantum entanglement doens't break any rules of instant information at a distance. Rather, it determines aspects of a universe of entanglements, none if which is entirely severable from all the rest. When I say everything is mind, I just mean that there is a conceptual structure to reality which has no physical measure, and which is, therefore, apart from the forces which describe and determine old-fashioned physical reality. God certainly can and also ought to be defined as that aspect of reality which will never be comprehended. 

And no matter how much you might want to, you can never make everything your scope. You must choose the domain of your inquiries wisely.

Vedral gets a little silly when he imagines things we might do with quantum knowledge. Like implanting 'chips' which might allow us to "feel" the quantum measurements the chips accomplish. He has what to me is a sympathetic rather than dismissive idea of what emotions are, without daring to realize that emotions are also abroad in the stuff of the cosmos. There is no survival value in hacking emotions, which is what Vedral wants to accomplish by his trick. There's always weird voodoo when people think that it's possible to feel more alive than we do. 

We'd do better, of course, by trying to stop from feeling as dead as we're about to feel when machine learning takes over everything. Get out and live is no idle order.

It's hard to leave go of the quest for further knowledge. I would say that it's time to start making choices. We already know enough about reality to start to make choices about our collective existence. Which would mean to start to take responsibility rather than to seek power (over nature, over others, over death and pain). 

We can already responsibly define life as a continuum which cannot exist for the benefit of one single species. I'm saying something far more grand than to say that we can't live without our natural environment, though I am saying that as well. But since we're implicated in all of life everywhere in the cosmos, we have to find a way to live with rather than against it.

If you think you make your decisions rationally, you're wrong. Your mind builds associations, but the impetus to decide is always emotional. I still suspect, as I did when I discovered these matters in my relative youth, that gravity makes the intersection. Vedral offers his suspicion that space-time is not physically real. I have to concur. Time is a function of life, and space-time indicates the limits of physical mapping. 

Without life, everything runs down. I can't say that I truly understand what Vedral calls q-numbers, but I know I sort-of do. The two of us branch in different directions when considering the twin paradox of relativity. To my mind, in a process of reductio, the twin paradox means essentially that as we diverge in time and space, we cease to be any matter to those we left behind. Getting back in touch becomes a logical impossibility. Emotion is what resolves the paradox. The want to be together is what replaces space-time.

And death loses its sting. No different from moving out of touch while time dilates in the exit. I've experienced that very thing by drowning when my entire life became present to me. I have no real desire to move or to get attention. I do worry about our direction though. It doesn't feel very alive.