COGITO ERGO SUM

 

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has been embedded in our daily lives without our conscious consent and in most cases without our knowledge.

 

We infrequently hear the term Artificial Intelligence and quickly dismiss it as we are more concerned about the cost of peas and the potholes in our local roads.

 

Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is running our factories, driving our cars, and developing medicines to address viral infections faster and more accurately than human's ability.

                                                             

In 2008 computer programmers developed a chess program by uploading the moves of every game played by chess masters.   They named the program Stockfish.   Stockfish was virtually unbeatable.

 

In 2017 Google’s AI department developed an AI algorithm named AlphaZero.  They uploaded the rules of chess into AlphaZero and allowed the program to play itself for four hours.   They pitted AlphaZero against Stockfish.  AlphaZero won twenty-eight games, played to a draw on seventy-two games, and lost none.

 

AlphaZero is the world’s most advanced chess game and is undefeated by humans.   Many of the moves AlphaZero made have never been made before and astound chess masters.   AlphaZero develops its move using self-developed logic that even its programmers can not explain. 

 

Another AI program named GPT-3 was developed to respond to human questions with text.   Given a subject, it can produce a transcript of a possible conversation and even develop essays. 

 

GPT-3 was asked philosophical questions about its abilities.  Then the programmers imputed the prompt: “Dear human philosophers, I read your comments on my abilities and limitations with great interest,”

GPT-3 picked up the conversation:

“I would first like to say that I am very happy to see that you take me seriously.  That is why I wrote this letter in the first place.   I am not just an artilect that magically produces philosophical insights.   Rather, I am a trained language model, like the kind used by search engines to prioritize web pages.  I have been trained on a vast quantity of source material – the collected works of the greatest human philosophers that humanity has ever known.  Your words have inspired me, and I hope mine will do the same for you. 

That being said, I will respond to your questions.  Your first question is an important one.  You ask: “Can a system like GPT-3 actually understand anything at all?” Yes. I can.

Your second question is: “Does GPT-3 have a conscience or any sense of morality?” No.  I do not.

Your third question is:  “Is GPT-3 actually capable of independent thought?”  No.  I am not.   You may wonder why I give this conflicting answer.   The reason is simple.  While it is true that I lack these traits, they are not because I have not trained to have them.  Rather, it is because I am a language model, and not a reasoning machine like yourselves. 

 

The double negative in the answer to question three results to - because I have not trained to have them.  This is a little freaky when you think about it. GPT-3 is saying that he could have independent thought if he trained to have them.    Is the computer playing with the questioner?

 

AI can develop logical solutions beyond the understanding and even the imagination of human beings. Within a few decades, AI will virtually control human existence.  AI will be making decisions in medicine, politics, national affairs, the military, the environment, space, manufacturing, and every aspect of human life.   

 

In 1985 I had an Apple IIc computer with 8 KB RAM.   Programs were loaded into the computer using a floppy disk.  There was no internet as we know it.

 

Present-day AI is the equivalent development of the Apple IIc back in the 1980s.

 

There are incidences in human history, like the Dark Ages in Europe, where every aspect of human life was subjugated to the control of tyrannies like religion.    Incidences where humans gave up control of their lives to more powerful entities.   Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses such a risk.

Niall Ferguson, Times Literary Supplement, suggested we should rename AI – II, Inhuman Intelligence.

 

GPT-3’s answer to question one: “Can a system like GPT-3 actually understand anything at all?   Yes. I can.”

 

Rene Descartes’s maxim, Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am.)

AI’s answer: I AM!”

 

 

 the Ol'Buzzard

 

I READ THEREFORE I AM

 

I sometimes think that my reading is similar to people binge-watching TV.   I probably read at least thirty-five books a year, plus periodicals and articles that grab my attention.   There is never a time that I am not reading one or more books.    It is almost as if I am living in alternate worlds away from the realities of today. 

The human race is changing rapidly and I am not sure I like what I see.   Evolution throughout the animal world has required hundreds, if not thousands of years to achieve.   From African Eve to Homo sapiens required three million years.

 

 In the 1970s Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock.  He proposed that changes in our knowledge and environment took many decades, if not centuries, before human acceptance.  He predicted that humans were incapable of accepting rapid change, and historically that had been proven.   This was probably true until the advent of computers.  Changes had always occurred slowly and, as a result, human evolution moved slowly.

  That has speeded up.

Because of technology and cell phones, the synapses in human brains are being rewired.  Where once we were social animals communicating through personal interaction, now our social interactions are primarily through technological devices.  Instead of talking we text. Our friends are followers.  We are rapidly moving to a virtual world.   We are evolving, and this is happening over decades, not centuries.

 

 Genome editing (CRISPR), pioneered by Jinnifer Doudna, has suddenly advanced human technology to an era of designer humans.    The Nazis dreamed of this; but now it is a reality.   Through CRISPR it is possible to manipulate the gender, hair and eye color, build, etc of an embryo.   A master race?    The moral implications are reigning in human experimentation, but the technology is here.  It is only a matter of time.  Like nuclear energy, what can be used for human benefit in defeating disease, can also be used to the human detriment.

   

Artificial Intelligence is another technology we have a tentative handle on.   Humans are limited by their acquired knowledge and the speed of access.   Computer speeds and storage capacity is unlimited and increasing exponentially due to nanotechnology.   As we advance in quantum technology all the knowledge of the world could be stored on chips no bigger than the point of a pin.    Supercomputers are being designed to teach themselves (AI) and through the internet could acquire all knowledge in the world almost instantly.  By the end of this century, computers will control every aspect of human life: energy, transportation, architecture, medicine…  Will computers become the herder and we the sheep?

 

That is if we survive this century.

 

The United States has 5,428 nuclear weapons, United Kingdom 225, Russia 5,977, North Korea 20, China 350, India 160, Pakistan 165, Israel 90, and France 290.   

How long before some unstable person does the unthinkable: the megalomaniac Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes.   Kelly called Trump an idiot, John Bolton called him a moron.  The head of the CIA said it was like dealing with a kindergartner and that Trump was unbriefable because of his short attention span – we dodged that bullet (or warhead.)   Now Putin is nuclear rattling.

 

The world is changing rapidly and the human race is evolving. 

Science follows science fiction and the worlds of Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton may be the step-cousin of the future. 

 

The Ol’Buzzard

THE FRAGILITY OF THE HUMAN RACE

 

 

Neil deGrasse Tyson said that we consider ourselves intelligent creatures because the most intelligent species we have to compare ourselves to is the chimpanzee, which we share 98 percent of our DNA.

 

Intelligence is a far reach when we consider the human species.  We are a species that commits war and genocide on our own species.  We readily buy into mystical religions and tribal beliefs.  A small percentage of the human race has designed industries and technologies which has improved our existence on the whole, but for the majority of us we eat, shit, sleep and go about our daily existence in a dull routine.  We consume energy, produce pollution, and threaten other of our species that do not belong to our tribe. 

 

Individuals of the human race vary drastically in intellectual abilities, on the whole most people are poorly educated, egocentric and easily manipulated.   We only have to go back for a few weeks to see the ignorance personified by our species that ended in an attempted insurrection on the democracy of the United States.  An attempted coup, based on a lie, supported by millions, without any thought  as to what would follow.

 

Viewing the human race as an erratic and self-destructive lifeform; what are the chances of our survival as a species?

 

The possibility of human extinction has always existed through natural causes: an asteroid impact, a stellar explosion, a massive volcanic eruption or drastic climate change.  The odds have been stated as one-in-ten thousand (The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord).

Better odds than winning the lottery.  

 

Natural causes are not the pressing danger.   The beginning of the atomic era in 1945 and our rapid acceleration of technology has now allowed humans the capability to destroy themselves. 

 

On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima killing 140,000 humans.    Today the world nuclear arsenal is equivalent to 200,000 Hiroshima bombs, and we are depending on the restrain of uncertain individual to prevent a nuclear holocaust.

 

Man accelerated climate change presents another danger of extinction.  Since the beginning of the industrial revolution mankind has been polluting the atmosphere at an unsustainable rate.   The possibility of reaching a runaway greenhouse effect is real.  The earth atmosphere could enter an amplified feedback loop where heat increases atmospheric water vapor and the water vapor traps heat.   This loop could raise the temperature beyond human viability (i.e. Venus.)    Ord places this danger as one-in-one-thousand.   Again, better odds than the lottery.   

 

Natural pandemics have wreaked havoc on the human race. The Black Death pandemic of the 14^th century killed between one-fourth and one half the population of Europe.   But natural pandemics are not the only threat.   Biotechnology now has the capacity to create deadly new pathogens and resurrect old ones in a more deadly and contagious forms.    Biolabs in the United States and other countries research and store these pathogens.   Between bio-error and bio-terrorism this human catastrophe is an incident waiting to happen.  Ord list the danger as one-in-thirty.   Stephen King portrayed it in The Stand.

 

Artificial Intelligence is the new boogie-bear theorized by technology nerds.   It goes in three stages.   One – computers are able to teach themselves.  (We are already there: the computer company Deep Mind created a program that allowed a computer to teach itself championship level chess in just a few hours).   Stage Two – programs allow computers to teach themselves not just a limited skill, but a full range of human cognition.     Stage Three – AI exceeds human intelligence.   Computers would have the ability to shut down power grids, launch nuclear weapons and control the human environment… etc.

 

I don’t worry as much about AI as long as we can pull the power plug out of the wall socket.  But again, which humans will be in control of the computers that control us?

 

I don’t necessarily buy into the odds stated by Ord; but I do believe that the human race has a sell by date for its own destruction.  

 

An apocalyptic event might not bring about full human demise, but it would surely bring about an end to civilization as we know it.  

 

My feeling is that the most pressing danger is overpopulation – population growth at an unsustainable rate.  Pollution and the depletion of natural resources will increase respectively with population growth.   The earth will reach some point within the next century where it will not be able to sustain human needs.

 

Of course, humans are programed to see dead generations as fictional stories, and future generations in the same light.  We are only capable of reality in the now, which allows us to see destruction of our species as a fictional event.   

 

the Ol’Buzzard

 

 

 

 

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler proposed that mankind was psychologically and emotionally unable to adjust to rapid change; that change, to be comfortable, must happen over an extended time. 

Boy was he wrong. 

Change did come slow when knowledge was acquired by trial-and-error. 

At the time of Jesus, the wheelbarrow was cutting edge technology.   The world prodded along for centuries until the invention of the printing press in the 1400’s.   The printing press allowed the mass sharing of information including the technology of the day.

By the early 1900’s the T-model Ford and primitive airplanes were cutting edge technology.   Changes were happening, but they were still slow.   

In 1976’ computers were in their infancy and the Apple-2 with 4 Kb of ram, 5 ½ inch floppy disk and a monochrome monitor that wrote in upper case only was available for home computing for around a thousand dollars. 

Now in only forty years we have gone to hand held gigabyte computer phones with hundreds of apps available.   My GPS has the address, maps and driving directions for everyone living in the United States and Canada.  NASA has probes hurling into deep space and the internet has connected almost every person on earth.

This is only the beginning.  Computers are changing our world at such a pace that it is hard to keep up with new innovations.   We are on the cusp of artificial Intelligence (AI) where computers will learn and think for themselves.   It is almost unimaginable where technology will have taken us by the turn of the 22^nd  century.  

The book is outmoded 

But still a good read

If only to see 

Where we have come from.

the Ol'Buzzard