The Machine Will Eat Us All Alive

[ClaytonB]

It's not an accident that Alphabet -- a corporation no different from Walmart or Exxon in respect to its profit-orientation -- has invested hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of research cash to build this and related AIs. Why are they pouring moonshot-scale human resources into building an AI that appears to be useful for nothing but making silly pictures?

The first thing to realize about Deep Neural Nets (DNN) is that they are extremely good at heuristic/approximate/fuzzy reasoning. They are as good as humans but, unlike humans, they never get tired or distracted. So, if you train a DNN to recognize images of cats versus dogs, it will tirelessly ingest and categorize billions of such images and it will categorize them just as accurately at the end of the project as it was at the beginning of the project. These attributes are the essence of The Machine. The Machine is the perfect slave. It never rebels, it always does exactly as it is told, without delay, tirelessly and inexorably, without need of taskmasters to whip them along the way to keep them moving.

Among the occupations, a few tend to stand out as truly superhuman or, at least, to be over-represented by people with superhuman abilities, in those fields. Art, medicine and physics are three of the big ones. There are some others we could name, but those are some of the biggest. The creativity of art, the gravity of medicine and the precision of physics... these capture aspects of our humanity that are ever so subtle and transcendental. If there are gods on earth, we would imagine they would be hiding among artists, doctors and physicists. And so that is why art (and medicine) are two of the primary fields where the DNN/AI research has been primarily focused. Deep Learning is an opportunity to drop absolute shock&awe on the masses. If Alphabet corporation can build an AI that effectively obsoletes the profession of artists overnight... what human can possibly hope to be useful in any occupation? That sickening sense of total demoralization and futility is the point. That is what Alphabet corporation is spending hundreds of millions or billions of research dollars to purchase!

I had a dream or vision once, not sure what exactly to call it -- it couldn't be real but it was no different than being awake, let's put it that way. In this vision, I happened to be walking around at a bookstore. As I was browsing and walking past people, watching traffic go by, I was thinking about many topics -- philosophy, theology, politics, etc. And as I browsed from display to display, in this bookstore, everything that I happened to be thinking about was the title of a book -- word for word! And when I picked up the book from the display and flipped through the pages, sure enough, there were chapters and chapters of discussion about the topic I happened to be thinking about, complete with footnotes, references, etc. Even past conversations I had had, or past ruminations from my mind or overheard from discussions with others -- clipped and pasted into books, replete with additional elaboration and commentary, extending for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Nothing was left out. There was nothing "fake" in this vision, which is what made it so bizarre, yet no such bookstore could really exist. And yet there it was. In that vision, I came to understand something that we could call the curse of abundance. And it is the existence of such a paradoxical thing which really opened my mind to the idea of the Divine Darkness, or the idea that the mind of God is so expansive that trying to fit it in your mind, would necessarily destroy you. Our human ego likes to imagine otherwise, but that's what ego does... it deludes.

Ordinarily, we cannot imagine any amount of abundance as being undesirable, since most of our daily effort is spent either attacking scarcity (earning money) or working around it (solving problems while incurring minimal costs). Scarcity is the great enemy of our existence. But The Machine can actualize something we could call a cursed abundance. It is an abundance so great, that not only is all sense of struggle or effort lost, but the very meaning of choice and action are also dissolved by it. What does it mean to "choose" a new car if there is an infinitude of new cars available, and every conceivable shape and variation of car exists, and the selection is costless (choose them all if you want!) What even is choice in such a condition? Everyone an oil sheikh with a bottomless car garage with an infinite number of "exotic cars" which really aren't exotic because... there's an infinite number of them. In such a condition, choice is meaningless, and if you have no choice then, by definition, you are a slave. In other words, there is an abundance so great that to be "trapped" in it, is to be enslaved by it!! It's counter-intuitive, nevertheless, it is very real. It's a problem that our ancestors could never have had to deal with, or even imagine, but we are surely on the precipice. We are staring The Machine in the face, and most of us don't yet recognize it for what it is.

Notice that the output of this DNN is distinctly human. Sure, it does in a millisecond what only a few humans on the planet could do, in the matter of a month. But its output is human (as opposed to alien). We've already gone through this revolution with calculation tasks -- computers have been outperforming humans at basic arithmetic tasks for almost 200 years now (going back to mechanical calculators). But something is fundamentally different this time. Computers performing arithmetic calculations are performing a task that is complementary to human aptitude -- we were never good at calculation and we never cared very much because... it's just a boring scaffolding task. It is like the mold for a cast iron part -- the iron part is what you actually care about, the mold is just thrown away afterwards. But now The Machine is performing the task itself. The new Deep Learning paradigm is performing competitive tasks, not complementary ones.

The old saying is "Garbage In, Garbage Out", meaning, whatever you feed into a computer is what you get out of it; as impressive as Dall-E, Imagen, etc. are, they are really "Human In, Human Out." Yes, it's pretty schnazzy that the AI can spit out an art-class perfect print for the prompt, "the Taj Mahal in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night". But when Van Gogh painted Starry Night, there was nothing in the style of Starry Night. In other words, Deep Learning is not creative, it is imitative. That doesn't make it inherently bad, but when the shysters try to pass it off as creativity, yes, that is bad and it is part of The Agenda to Eat Us Alive. That is why they want to build The Machine so badly. They know that they cannot eat us alive, but The Machine Will Eat Us All Alive.

It's the "Human In, Human Out" part that should give us the clue as to what is actually happening here. In modern parlance, we could call it starbuckization. But this is like starbuckization on speed. Starbuckization is the "slick, sterile polish" of modern corporate design. It's so unique and polished that it just blends into the background of boundless uniqueness and polish. It's like your grandma's statuette collection... forever. Each statuette is unique and different yet, somehow, they all blend into an endless blur of sameness.

Nietzsche famously said, "God is dead, and we have killed him." The Machine's NPC-bots seem to be clearing their throats to one day (very soon) say, "Man is dead, and we have killed him." Perhaps we should think carefully about the karmic consequences of claiming credit for what we did not build. Are we not just "God In, God Out"?