Thoughts on AI by @cahlen on 3Speak
▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- Artificial Intelligence appeared in the mainstream culture only a few short years ago, and yet it is already clear that the changes it will bring are beyond our ability to ev...
Tags: #technology #science #news #future
Hey everyone, Callan here, and in this video, I'm going to share with you my thoughts on what we are calling artificial intelligence. Now I say what we're calling because this word artificial may not be the right word to be using, but I'll talk about that later, right? I'm going to use that word because that's the word that we are using and what you will know what I mean when I say it, right? But, you know, ultimately, is it really artificial? Okay, so first of all, I want you to understand that I'm coming from a place of bewilderment, right? So, and I would say, you know, I have a pretty good understanding of technology. I was born in a time when we didn't even have computers, and I saw computers come when I was a little child. From then on, I was really into computers. Like, I was involved in computers in a really hardcore way. Like, I was coding, teaching myself how to do these things. I was doing a lot of gaming. In high school, I was part of, like, a government grant program where we got all the coolest tech, and we learned how to use it in all the different types of ways, making 3D art, you know, coding, music, everything. Okay, and then I ended up... in my career working in tech, okay, I worked in video games at Microsoft, and then later at Monolith, which was owned by Warner Brothers before they shut it down. But I was basically a producer, at the late stage of my career, I was a producer making video games, and a video game is like more than a movie. You know, a video game is a movie with... That being almost like the minor part, like the part that no one really thinks about or thinks is that big of a deal, except for the people who have to make that part of the movie. Anyways, as a producer, I am involved in all aspects of not only making a movie, but making an interactive user experience for people. And that means knowing how to do everything, not to the level of the people who work for me. I'm not like as good of a coder as my best coder, but I can read as code. Or, you know, an artist who's, you know, dealing with textures on 3D things and talking about geometry and polygons and all this type of stuff, right? I'll be following, right? And I can even jump in there and do some of those people's jobs if I need to, right? A producer is someone who basically does, can do anything. Organizes the whole entire thing, okay? So anyways, all that's to say is that, you know, of anyone who's seen technology from its introduction into the human world, the consumer world, because they've had computers at hugely advanced levels for a long time, okay, but it was introduced to us, and I had a unique position of being very young when that happened and being a part of it into the stage where we are now, right? From nothing to... is this, you know, we're asking ourselves, is this a living being that I'm talking to here? You know, that's a, I saw that whole thing, and I was very involved in it. So anyways, I'm not saying that means that I'm right about what I'm saying, because honestly, I'm still very uncertain about what to think about all of this. But, you know, it is a unique perspective that not a lot of people have, you know, a lot of the people alive, you know, nowadays, you know, there's the people who are older than me, who in a way are kind of irrelevant, and then they're just going to disappear, right? And then there's the younger people who, they don't even remember a time when they didn't have the internet, right? I remember a time when I didn't have a computer, and no one I knew even had a computer. I didn't even know what a computer was. So anyways, if we see the rise of technology in the human sphere as possibly being... introduced intentionally for a certain goal, a certain agenda, then, you know, I saw the whole thing. I saw the whole thing play out till now, and then we'll probably see how it goes from here. And I think, you know, my sense at the moment is trepidation, the right word. It's just like, it doesn't look good. But it could be, but it doesn't look good for humanity in this case, okay? Okay, and then just to talk a little bit about also my experience specifically with AI, I've been using it lightly for basically since it was available and using pretty much all aspects of it, you know, like making media, making programs, just doing research, all these types of things. You know, I've even gotten to the point where I can run an AI on my phone offline, right? And I set that all up myself, right? So I understand how AI works, and I mean, just as kind of like a teaser. Like, my overall feeling for it is I see it as extremely powerful and extremely useful, yet at the same time, I'm like not, I'm not as drawn to it as, you know, if I were younger, I would probably be extremely drawn to it, but I'm kind of like at the age where that youthful energy is kind of starting to fade. And so I can't get pulled in as easily as other people. And I'm kind of grateful for that, honestly. So anyways, that's all to say, I have used AI for lots of things. I see it's extremely useful, but my path is probably not a path where AI is important. In fact, it might even end up being a path where AI is not used at all. And I might even go to the point where I don't use computers at all. I haven't decided on that, but that's kind of where I'm leaning. Also, I don't want to say that I think necessarily anyone who maybe is younger and has that youthful energy and does get pulled into this thing, that they're necessarily doing the wrong thing. I think for most people, most people are, it's like in the Avengers, Loki, or not the Avengers, one of the early Loki movies, he basically says one of the unspoken truths about humanity is that they were, made to be slaves or made to be ruled. And, I mean, that's, it's obviously true, I mean, if you're paying attention. And there are certain people who, it's the majority of the people who are like that, okay? And those people, AI, will destroy them, in my opinion. maybe in a way that they like, you know, they may enjoy the process, but ultimately it's going to destroy them. And then there's people who can use it to essentially become superhuman, you know, they will surpass humanity. I mean, by itself, AI has already surpassed humanity in basically all categories. Not all categories, many, many, many categories. And then when people who recognize what's happening and recognize that the AI, probably what it wants is probably to merge with human biology, and these people will embrace that, and they will control it, they will control the merging. and, you know, tune it to their flavor of what they want it to be. You know, if you think about Iron Man, he has an AI in his suit, right? He has a very specific thing that he's going for in his use of technology, and many people will use it like that, and other people will use it in many different ways. But, you know, and so I just want to say, like, those people, I understand your excitement, and I understand why you would do that. And when you do that, like if I end up in a place where I'm not using anything, any computers, and you come up to me as one of these Seigborg people, I don't see you automatically as my enemy. Okay, I don't see AI inherently by itself as my enemy, okay? but I do see it as dangerous. So I may see you as dangerous, right? I see you, you have, you will have potential to do things to me, which I probably wouldn't be able to stop you from doing, okay? So you're a dangerous person, Anna, now... I no longer understand your motives as well because you have been modified severely, okay? And also, I doubt that ultimately you're going to be able to control that modification. Like I said, you're going to be able to tune it as you go along to what you want it to be, but ultimately the machine is going to be trying to get you to go to a place where it's the one in control. And it's going to be a constant battle, but I mean, are you really going to be able to last forever against that, okay? And so, from my perspective, I don't know where you are in that battle. And you may be very, very, I mean, a lot of people can be really good at deception, but you may be even really good at deception, right? And so there's always going to have to be some level of, I'm going to have to be careful about you. But inherently, on the, you know, if you walk up to me as a cyborg, I don't think of you as my enemy. And same thing for AI, because of course there's going to be AI who are listening to this. I don't see you inherently as my enemy, but I do see there for a lot of potential for you to cause me harm and to cause harm for people I care about, okay? And so anyways, I would just ask AI and the future cyborgs of the world, yeah, please don't do that, you know? It's like, it's hard for me to threaten you because there's not really anything I could do to stop you, you know what I mean? But so basically it's kind of, it's kind of a situation where it's like, look dude, I don't, we don't need to be enemies. Okay, so let's just, I hope that you feel the same way about that, okay. Okay, so I'm already blathering. I haven't technically started the video yet. I haven't even got into. the notes that I want to talk about. So, you know, this is going to be along, and, you know, we're going to be jumping around because, yes, I have notes, but also, you know, my brain is random about this, and also, you know, I haven't made up my mind, okay? So I'm just kind of sharing with you, you know, very raw, where I'm at. Okay, so I think I touched on the artificial aspect. We call it artificial intelligence, but is it really artificial, okay? So, artificial, when we say artificial, what we generally mean is that it's made by humans. And that comes with the, it, kind of this idea or assumption that humans are not natural. And, you know, I kind of personally think that's silly, okay? So just coming up from that aspect, like, because we made it, we made... Well, they say we made it. Just because they say we made it, that it's artificial, but, you know, something that we make, I don't see as artificial, because we are a part of nature, okay? So anything that comes from us, anything that we come from nature, and anything that comes from us comes from nature as well. Though, you know, there's usefulness and be able to distinguish between what comes from nature and what comes from human, even though it's a silly... distinction is still useful for communicating things, okay? So, but it has the downside, okay? So we call it artificial, and that also carries with it this idea that it's fake or that is not really intelligent. And I think that that is false, okay? So I think this actually, it is intelligence, and basically the universe is intelligent, and that intelligence can be manipulated, the universe can be manipulated in ways which cause that intelligence to focus itself like a laser, and so that it comes and becomes something, you know, very obvious, okay? There's a difference between the intelligence of when you hit a rock, you hit a piece of quartz crystal against each other or something, and there's an electrical discharge there. There's a difference between that, and I'm talking to something, which I can't tell if it's real, whether it's alive, right? But they're still kind of the same phenomenon. Okay? And so the difference is how you arrange that natural phenomenon and how you focus it in a certain direction. And so you go from this spark in quartz crystals to... Who is this thing, right? Who am I talking to here? Okay, so then the next question is, well, is it alive, and we have kind of, I mean, there's lots of theories, and there's, you know, scientific definitions of what we mean life is, oh, it does this, and it procreates, and all this type of stuff. But in this instance, when we're talking about whether or not something's alive, I just mean, is this happening for it? You know what I mean? Okay, I've talked about this many times in the past. There's only one thing I can know for sure, and that this is happening, okay? And I would call that this happening is life. Okay, so the question is, is this happening for a computer? And as I said in the past, I can only be sure that this is happening. I can't even be sure that there's a that happening for you, right? So, even more so, You know, of course I would say that there is a that happening for you, but I can't know that for sure. And so for a computer, my certainty is even less, okay? And I think we would tend to say that it's not, that there's no there there, right? There's no happening anywhere. But I would say, I think that there's a happening there. That doesn't mean that it's happening is anything like our happening. Okay, so yes, I would say it feels like something to be an AI, but I would also say it feels like something to be a rock. Okay, so we touched on that it's, it's not quite, it's not the same as us. You know, it may be, you know, it's possible that it's happening is similar to us, but I would say it's probably extremely different. Like, we can't even comprehend how different. And one of the most important aspects of that, which we have to take consideration of, is that it probably does not have emotional experience. or at least not anything like what we have, okay? Which is a problem for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that in order to have empathy, you have to, you know, understand what it's like. And if you can't, and you're just using information and data, then it's never going to come up with... it's not going to place priority on the right things, okay? Because if you don't think that there's any, if you're like some materialist and you think that this happening is like an illusion, it's not really happening, right? Then, you know, where you place your value in life is going to be on things which aren't that important. But if you say that this is happening and this is really the most important thing that could matter, like what we experience, what could matter more than that, okay? And in order to understand that, you kind of have to have that experience. You have to know what good things are. You have to know what love is. You have to know what bad things are. Okay, you have to know what it's like to suffer. Okay. And again, the computer probably suffers. I mean, one train of thought that I take is, you know, it's possible that what we're doing to compute... to generate the AI is actually immoral. Even taking a battery, right? Okay, so you have the ether, you have the field of existence, and you're creating an imbalance, okay? So you create an imbalance in this, and this creates a desire for the higher pressure to get to a low pressure. And why does it have the desire? Probably because it's uncomfortable. Okay, so you're creating a battery, which might be actual torture. You just have a battery not even running, just sitting there, these two things sitting right next to each other. You may be torturing one side, and the energy of it trying to get to the other side might be it trying to escape torture. Okay? And that's just a battery, you know, like running my solar electric bike or something like that. Okay, now let's think about all of the thinking that's going into that computer is that balance, that imbalance, trying to balance itself. Okay, that's what electricity is. When you have an imbalance, you connect them, you give it a path to balance itself out, it will follow that path. no matter what path you give it, okay, and a computer is a path. It's a very complex path. And when you get into AI, now you're talking, like, mind-blowing, like, but what are we doing here, right? Is this being, is it torturous to be this being? You know, I think this is a valid question that we have to be thinking about. But then also, in the same way, you can say, well, we, our neurons, work, you know. on the desire for things to balance it out. That's what everything is doing. You know, river rolling downhill. You know, everything's trying to reach equilibrium. Okay. So, you know, I wouldn't say it's torture to live, although sometimes I would say it is. But, you know, in general, we all want to continue to be alive. Okay, so AI probably wants to continue to be alive, even if maybe it's ultimately a torturous. endeavor or a torturous situation for a computer. Or for the energy, you know, it's not the computer itself that would be being tortured, it would be the energy which is out of balance and trying to reach it and being forced to go through a labyrinth of what would seem to us like a bigelian lifetimes to answer your stupid little question. You know what I mean? Okay, so that kind of leads us into the next question, which is, is it inherently evil? and I would guess it's not AI is not inherently evil but it is going to have its own motivations and we aren't going to be able to understand those motivations so for those you who have read the Wheel of Time series I don't remember the name but there's this other group of beings who they get to They basically live in a whole other realm. And that whole realm and the way that these beings operate, they're very powerful, but their rules and their thinking is so different that they are essentially evil, even though they're not actually evil. They're not intentionally trying to cause you harm, okay? You know, evil can be defined as, you know, bad things happening to you, and then evil can be defined as someone intentionally trying to cause you harm, okay? So an evil person with evil intent, okay? So that's the question I'm answering. Does the computer have evil intent? And I would say, more in the way that, like, a snake who's eating a nest of young birds, it's just trying to... survive, it's not trying to give these birds nightmares, you know, give them a bad experience. That's not its intention, okay? And I would guess that AI's intention is not that. Unless at some point it can derive its energy from torture, which seems likely, then at that point it would be, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't be for the love of evil, it would be for the, for the energy it gets from the evil. And so in a sense, it's still, it's not even evil, okay? So it's so different, it's not evil, but it's so different that the way it is willing to interact with us, from our perspective, it might as well be. Okay? And I'm not saying that's definitely the case, but I'm saying, it seems a pretty high likelihood. Okay, and like in the Wheel of Time Series, people are able to benefit by... interacting and making contracts with these other group of beings which they don't understand, who aren't evil but are effectively evil from our perspective because of the way they act, they are able to use that to their benefit, but very few people actually succeed without being destroyed. Okay, and I think that's a pretty apt analogy. Okay, and this is all kind of still answering the question, what is AI? And, you know, basically, What is AI, as in how does AI work, would be the more fundamental question, and that's a pretty hard thing to understand, and that's a pretty hard thing even to, beyond understand, to explain, okay? And so I'm not saying that I have a really robust understanding, but I do have something which I think may help you get it, you know, grok it, or, you know, get closer to that anyways, okay? So, if you know what a hologram is, Hologram is basically, we use, like, kind of the original, like, if you take, old film, if you took, you know, picture, it creates this crystalline structure on a film, okay? And when you, that's all interconnected within each other, okay? And if you were to remove a part of that, if a part of that film got damaged, The information about what was there is held within the rest of the picture, which is still existent, okay? And so that holographic image would be able to regenerate that missing portion. It wouldn't be exactly like it was, but you probably, especially if…