It's Not My Imagination That's Failing

The biggest failure of imagination on AI is a failure to radically scale your expectations on how consequential it will be. Great piece from @cwarzel: https://t.co/oBbkOz2A0O

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) March 21, 2023

I have been invited by Google to test out "Bard," their AI experiment.

You might ask Bard to outline a blog post about summer mocktail recipes, draft a packing list for a weekend fishing and camping trip, or help you understand if lightning can strike the same place twice.

I wonder if Bard can help me understand that:

This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is ground transparently in the Power which posited it.

--Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death 

Or maybe the simpler question I've wondered about all my life, being an inveterate speaker to myself:  when I talk to myself, who's doing the talking?  And who's doing the listening?  And when I disagree with myself, who's disgreeing with whom?

I'm pretty sure I could draft a packing list for a weekend camping trip.  Especially since I never go on weekend camping trips.  Or drink summer mocktails.  I don't even drink summer cocktails.

But to Rick Wilson's point, all I can say is:  "consequential how"?  It's been in use for years now for oil exploration and weather predictions.  In neither case has it turned the world upside down.  As a bot that will write clever but flawed blog posts?  Yeah, we have people for that already.  The way Photoshop (or however your spell it) was supposed to alter our relationship to images, because they could be faked and we'd buy the fake every time?  When is that future coming, again?

I don't see a massive acceleration in bullshit and bafflegab overwhelming the populace, coming from AI.  You can't accelerate what has already peaked and is receding.  It's mostly the old people on Facebook who are still buying Trump's bullshit. and the tide of interest in the GOP conspiracy theories promoted on Twitter and elsewhere is ebbing rapidly.  I dip my toe in Twitter (no, really; I'm still standing on the shore at low tide when it comes to Twitter), but I've seen enough in replies to know it's a bottomless cesspool, even without Elmo's outreach to Nazis and other white supremacists (his peeps, IOW).  My daughter, a Millenial and truechild of the Internet age, won't touch Twitter with a club.  She despises it and wants nothing to do with it.  Apologies to all the "serious journalists" who think Twitter is their salvation when print media finally collapses and cable news goes the way of the Dodo.  Nobody under my age is paying attention, except for the handful of nuts already there.  And they think Maggie Haberman's a shill; or a squish.

So AI fundamentally changes things how?  I think "large language models" are another flash in the pan, like the many styles of teaching literature and writing and even grammar that I grew up with/suffered through in 19 years of education and post-graduate work in the field.  What's coming cannot be imagined.

I've been reading 50 years old science fiction stories involving cloning (basically written before even the sheep was successfully cloned), predating any public knowledge of genetics.  It's all about "chemicals" and "germ plasm" and other anachronistic thinking (chemistry is SO 19th century!) and, frankly, it's downright painful.  Star Trek in its many iterations imagined all kinds of technology, but never even guessed at the internet or the world wide web, or YouTube or Twitter or Google or...you get the idea.

So don't tell me how "consequential" something will be, based on a hazy understanding of even what it is (a "large language model" is not "thinking;" it's not even aping thinking.  Housecats show more intelligence and understanding of what it means to be human, or at least live among humans.  They certainly have a greater understanding of what it means to be alive and live in an environment.  When computers understand that, you'll have something).  I'm old enough to remember "remote terminals" that connected via a phone cradle to a mainframe (boy, is that term dated!) so you could use the computer there, over here.  And CRT's (yes, they existed 50 years ago, and were called "CRT's", not "monitors" or "computer screens") were the holy of holies, not to be touched by any but the Computer science major seniors, and some professors.  Nobody predicted what would happen when Steve Jobs decided to put a computer in every house. Not even Steve Jobs did.

And it's been consequential but, at the same time, has it?   Life resumes its familiar shape.  Probably it's more consequential I can drive from where I sit to downtown Houston in 15 minutes.  I knew people who remembered when that was a half-day's ride in a horse drawn wagon, because they made it.  Occassionally.  I've still seen more of the world thanks to transportation technology (mostly cars and planes) than I have from my computer screen.  If anything, my computer encourages me to sit and associate with like-minded persons.  Travel requires I go to strange places where they put ketchup on hot dogs and hamburgers, or drink Coca-Cola at room temperature (my favorite memory of a trip to Europe in 1976.  I'll have to tell you about it sometime.), and don't all speak English.  Or even know how to use "Y'all" properly.

Yeah, it's been consequential.  But we're getting over those consequences.  I'm not convinced yet AI will prove as fundamentally important.  Especially since I'm not yet convinced AI is I.  A, it is.  I?  I'm still not so sure.

Google wants to know if their email was helpful?  I think I'll ask Bard what I should say.  After it helps me with this:

Man is spirit.  But what is spirit?  Spirit is the self.  But what is the self?  The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self.  Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis.  A synthesis is a relation between two factors.  So regarded, man is not yet a self.

In the relation between two, the relation is the third term of a negative unity, and the two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation; such a relation is that between soul and body, when man is regarded as soul.  If on the contrary the relation relates itself to its own self, the relation is then the positive third term, and this is the self.

Still not sure who I'm talking to when I'm talking to myself; or who's doing the talking.  I'll keep working on it, without Bard.