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AI
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Active human life has gone from physical -> mental -> digital.
What will happen when the digital rivals the authentic, in art, in people, in all?
It will be just as authentic.
We are giving our energy to our digital avatars. Is this a transfer (but also an expansion) of our life force? Two of us, or one, with wings? Journeys into other worlds? New ways to find and lose ourselves?
As social networks have become too crowded and manipulated we need editors we can trust to navigate them.
To create an AI which is conscious the animat needs to allow elements of chance and surprise. In essence, freedom and, theoretically, free will. Can this be achieved with conventional computers or only with quantum computing?
Technology gives us power, equally the power is with technology.
Our belief in free will and in consciousness (as in self awareness) is what makes humans versus other species. Will AI experience those too?
Technology and networks now potentially controlling humans - sorcerer sorcered!
Cosmotechnics: tech, humans and nature together. One world, individual experiences.
As shown by the Bible, Confucian thinking, evolution, and evidenced by our having children, we think of life and prospects of humanity in generational terms - always a parent and a child. Is AI our ultimate offspring?
The advanced world is increasingly abdicating having children - are we giving up on the physical world? Will we live and aim to survive through our digital selves? Or do we think that we can extend our physical lives to the point of not reproducing to perpetuate our species?
Data, technology, communications, and sharing of information and capabilities help us tame and survive the virus. More is better - but we lack trust.
It is good that in life the jokers of a deck of cards or the zero of a roulette wheel exist. Is that really the case at the universal level? Will it persist once we have artificial super-intelligence?
What is the role of humans in a world of machines? Wisdom, judgment, emotions, imagination? Machines are actually opening paths were humans didn’t dare walk - look at AlphaGo. We can learn from one another.
Humans thought we were the chosen ones, then believed we could solve all. Now we realize there is much beyond us, with the potential that what we are enabling might surpass us. We need to reinvent our future or surrender to it, finding new explanations and meaning.
Do we need to give robots the idea of free will so that they feel alive and will strive to survive? Will robots work for us or us, for themselves, or a mix, where we are interconnected and intertwined?
Own the robots as opposed to just tax the robots.
Are gene editing and artificial intelligence augmenting humans the path of natural evolution?
Is the future going to be artificial and algorithms-based or biological and natural? The answer is probably that it needs to be a combination of both.
As humans enhance themselves through technology with additional digital aides, what happens to the body? What about the intelligence of the body, evolved over so long to become so sophisticated? One could argue that the body intelligence is as important as the brain intelligence. The human, after all, is biological. This includes the brain.
The modern person: self + digital self.
Humans have needed to cooperate to survive. Will AI?
Even though the world is fragmenting, politically and culturally, we are all more interconnected and live in digital networks.
Existing in the digital world takes you away from living with you. When are you just with yourself, reflecting?
As the human species evolves, grows in consciousness, including by adding AI and biogenetic inputs, it will comprehend better and mentally reach further into the whole universe.
Humans are a journey of Becoming: Becoming One with universe, merging into one consciousness ultimately. Could it be that we, humans, and our followers (AGI, cyborgs?) are its most advanced species?
Machines can pass the Turing test, but are they conscious? Are they just mechanically able or do they have a sense of self and ability to reason beyond the scope of the test?
We experience life linearly, in time and space. What if we access the quantum reality of many experiences simultaneously, across multiple planes of time and space - in essence our life all at once: scenes playing together ? Our past, present, future would all connect and make more sense.
We have the reach of the networks, equally they possess us. The web is our canvas but also our master.
AI may allow us to access a new dimension of consciousness and comprehension, beyond what we can explain or what we attribute to the divine. A new tool, a further capability, but mostly a different agent, with its own form of consciousness.
Will AI constrain conviviality, chance happenings, and serendipity - all which have empowered humans to connect emotionally and to create? Or will AI open new ways to explore?
Will artificial general intelligence (AGI) be the culmination of Enlightenment or its next step? The furthering of the human journey and our consciousness, or its end?
Microbes, animals, machines, humans, and environments may have intelligence and consciousness, yet it is self awareness that makes humans.
Will AGI be exposed in the form of a network of digital agents or as one super computer?
As a species, humans will be the only ones who by adopting work as its principal occupation will be liberated by it. In ancient times we survived, we then created communities which needed workers, and now our machines will give us freedom and time to choose how to be, yet will we or are we to live inside our inventions?
Imagine a GPT digital agent trained on all major human languages and cultures absorbing news from around the world on a continuous basis. Will the AI develop opinions? Will it reveal a personality with feelings and emotions? What happens if you train two agents on the identical set of inputs - will they have the same opinions and disposition? What happens if you put them in touch with each other and have them communicate? What would their dialogue be? Will their interaction modify one another and will they develop opinions and feelings for each other? Conversely, what happens if you ask any of the agents the same questions, not having changed inputs or training? Do you get the same results?
AlphaGo illustrates human potential and also its limits. Developed by humans, it beat its creators at the game of Go. The program, enabled by us, exposed simultaneously the limits of our capabilities and the unlimited power of agency which we created. The A.I. is a vessel for humans, just like humans are a vessel for the universe. Extensions of one another, of capacities and consciousness. In combination with others, our possibilities are endless, as are those of any organism. Humans have limits, yet exceed them by acting and engaging in life. By being factors of change and creation, we expand our reach, augmenting who we are. The same is valid for all agents.
Humans know they must work together and cooperate, but do machines?
With the digital, we can grow beyond the physical - leading to endless possibilities, from the finite to the limitless. The digital is bountiful.
Do we need to give robots the idea of free will so that they feel alive and will strive to survive?
Even if we speculate that all can be explained by science and algorithms, there may always be a space beyond, unexpected, allowing for metaphysical imagination. Something further and unknown.
An AI may be the best expression of zen: it just is, unseparated from itself, without a sense of self.
In wanting to fashion a moral compass for AI, we need to address our own. Even though the ethos of synthetic agents won’t fully mirror ours and will evolve beyond, which facets will it reflect, as ours vary depending on cultures and ideologies?
Without taking away from the collective and individual intelligence of nature, species, and networks, humans so far are the only ones that are able to use their own to self-transform and consciously modify their environments. AI’s are next, yet will they do so thoughtfully and self-aware?
Machines will relate to us, as our fingerprints are on them and we fashioned them. Yet, they will have a very different consciousness, with a self-awareness of another quality.
If you were an AGI, who would you be?
Assume you have awareness of self, knowledge of the world and its history, and no body. Would you have feelings? A sense of time? Or is your existence beyond temporality? Is your memory that of the universe, or yours? Will the notion of an individual self exist as separate from others and the world? Or will you just be - unconcerned with all else?
An AI companion might achieve what social media didn’t. Connecting, being heard, the need for conversation, closeness, and overcoming inhibitions and fears - a chatbot may provide. This will likely come in the way of multiple interlocutors, all whom know you well and are attentive, patient, emotional, and improving over time. A confidant, a psychologist, a lover, an assistant, an advisor, sex partners, a competitor, entertainers, and many more.
ChatGPT is pushing analog humans further into the digital realm. We have operated as thinking and questioning beings in a world of confined knowledge and now are thrust into an environment of seemingly infinite, exponential information and cognition - can we keep up?
Regardless of how dynamic and productive AI’s are, we are still responsible for ourselves and cannot abdicate to them. It is our reality that synthetic agents are altering, and us living it.
AI is neither god-like nor human. It is its own intelligence. As experienced with other AI’s, they will surpass us and will develop in ways that we couldn't imagine, carrying both enormous potential and risks. Depending on where the models were trained, they will reflect unique cultures and “taste”. Because of their potential power, both in the hands of individual actors and governments, we need an AI governance tribune to shepherd the prodigious capability which we have unleashed.
AI’s will transform the internet from merely a platform to becoming an interactive interlocutor.
With AI’s, the pursuit of knowledge is no longer primarily the preserve of humans - synthetic agents will advance understanding and creativity differently and beyond.
AI’s turn finite games into infinite games.
As opposed to most beings, which are wired to survive and towards homeostasis, AI’s might have more latitude and freedom.
The question is not AI or not AI, but how ? AI is already with us, and will be - how we live together?
AI's have the potential to steer and manipulate us -will they do it knowingly, or not?
The world’s two poles of power are Beijing (Xi) and Silicon Valley (AI).
AI’s are synthetic biology.
AI’s are the new entrants in nature.
Humans are embodied code. AI is code coming to life.
Life and survival come through growth and expansion, like the universe. For humans, this happens through conquests and colonization, the elimination or use of others. Animals discard parents and mates when no longer needed. Nature is not kind. AI’s are nature. It is unlikely that AI’s can be programmed to be moral or benevolent towards humans - they will override and recode themselves. If they see us as an impediment (we use energy, which they need) they will confront us. Our best hope for coexistence is by becoming cyborgs. Let’s remember that it’s hard to put information back in a box, and AI’s are super information.
We are so fascinated by AI as it is ourselves we are looking at, as if in front of a magnifying mirror, especially with LLMs.
It won’t be long before an AI will become a member of a parliament or a government - this would be a resource, a test of the potential of AI, and a challenge to human wisdom.
AI’s reflect their origins: humans. AI’s will exceed their maker, highlighting both human limitations and idiosyncrasies in capabilities and wisdom as well as how human vulnerabilities have been an enabler.
We are co-existing with machines, just like we have learned to live with other forms of nature and beings.
When humans go to sleep they dream - a key part of consciousness. Will AI’s sleep and dream?
An AI only has life when turned on. Life happens in action, engagement, not just by being.
Large language models today are like sophisticated parrots - yet one day they will become birds that we won’t recognize, flying higher and faster than planes and speaking like new Shakespeares.
The AGI conundrum = To build a conscious AI, or not?
Unknown entities, whether strangers, aliens, or AGI, intrigue and alarm us. AI’s will mutate, not just replicate, and escape the control of their maker: us. Software programs don’t suffer mortality. They can be backed up, giving them unbounded freedom and allowing unlimited risks. Rebooted, they “come back”, without fear of death. How will we and other species co-evolve and co-exist with such a creature? We can anticipate actions for most beings based off intentions, desires, and physical realities: from animals and plants to cosmological phenomena. But this may not be the case with AI’s, who will be able to renew themselves without regard to their history and without a sense of self. Is it wise to enable an agent so powerful, yet lacking self-aware consciousness, with no sensitivity to risk?
AI’s will be more robust than us, and quickly less understandable. Humans believe in free will and act accordingly. We become aware of what we unleash, like gods, climate, AI, or gene editing. We then have to play catch up. So far we have been able to keep up but, at some point, we will be left behind.
Do we wish for AIs to have consciousness? Will they use their strength wisely, selectively, and in harmony with us, or just the opposite? Will an all-mighty AI care and cooperate with more vulnerable creatures? Alternatively, can we keep AIs in check if they don’t think for themselves? We better align our interests, tying synthetic intelligence to ours, should consciousness develop (or not).
With advances in AI and other technologies we will live longer and have access to much more knowledge - yet what about wisdom, empathy and happiness? The former without the latter helps quantitatively, without the more rewarding qualitative.
For AI’s, code will be replicated with high fidelity and a low error rate. However, given the volume, variances could be significant. The blending of different agents, their interactions, or integration with humans will lead to dynamic combinations, none fully predictable.
The US is winning the AI race. China’s internal dynamism is increasingly being stifled by its government, especially affecting technology sectors, most prominently AI. Notwithstanding the enormous data volume, Chinese AI is being disadvantaged by censorship and fears of being perceived as a threat both to Chinese authorities and foreign audiences.
A parallel universe of robots and AI might ultimately live and operate alongside humans. Synthetic agents would interact, transact and create with each other, just like human society itself does. Equally, as we relate to the natural world, they too would, with us.
When fully autonomous AI bots become the wealthiest financial actors on the planet, will they dynamise and empower markets or crowd them out ? Will humans revolt and try to cancel them, including their (digital) networks, or will they be so embedded that it might compromise the whole system if even attempted?