[For the following, I thank Ian Sanders] ::
So Pluto says hello to Aquarius and talk of a techno-domesday escalates.The following rant is not untypical. It has the potential to stimulate the impulse to do some inner work to anchor genuine, holistic consciousness and real conscience in the world before our individual and collective possibilities are totally swamped...
---"Lost World”
Well, here's a post I've been putting off for months, but maybe now would be a good time to warn my Facebook friends. The flaky world we have been sharing of late is about to disappear altogether. I'm quite serious... the world we grew up in and thought we knew... will cease to exist in the next few months.
In order to understand what is happening, we need to go back to the Buddha for perspective. He told us that the world we inhabit is a shared projection of our combined human psyche. We don't see reality; we see 'things' formed by mutual agreement. Unfortunately, our different cultures see things differently, which is why we have been at war for ten thousand years. The arbitrary nature of our expectations is a product of our basic ignorance of the truth, and that ignorance keeps us in a perpetual state of suffering. He called that state 'samsara.'
So, we blundered along in that state of 'analog samsara' until about 1960, when John Atalla invented the Mosfet Transistor. That invention unleashed the age of 'digital samsara' by means of which our innate wisdom was buried even deeper in illusion. We now live in a world of movies, television, computer games, streaming services, and social media. We can lose ourselves in little cell phone screens, or put on special headsets and hide out in 'Virtual Reality'. In such a world, what chance do we have to employ Buddhist meditation and rediscover our innate wisdom? Not much.
And here's the rub... as painful as that digital samsara has been, it is almost insignificant compared to the calamity now facing us. That calamity is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Over the last decade, Geoffrey Hinton has perfected a specific form of it known as Generative AI using algorithms such as 'Back Propagation'. Geoffrey was the father of AI at Google, and his algorithms have now reached a tipping point where they have superseded the power of the human brain. AI server farms can now learn faster than any human genius. At the same time, AI Code is being incorporated in to every digital device we use. If you buy a camera, it uses AI to focus and color the picture. If you watch a movie, AI Code was used to add special effects and enhance the actors faces. If you listen to a song, AI Code was used to 'auto-tune' the intonation of the instruments and voices. If you want to manipulate the genome of a corn plant, AI will be used to splice the chromosomes. Nothing we depend on is organic anymore; life itself has become artificial.
And now, the algorithms have evolved to the point where they can morph a face or a voice to mimic any person, place, or thing. A petulant teenager sitting in a Starbucks has the power to create a video and make any politician or celebrity do anything or say anything with such fidelity that it is almost impossible to detect the fraud. And that is just the beginning. Soon, it will be possible to give the AI servers their own volition. They won't need a petulant teenager to unleash their menace. Previously, AI Code was only as smart as the data it could access, but the server farms have now gained access to the entire sum of our digital archives. Your brain is like a gnat by comparison. Open AI and Google AI and a dozen others can now teach themselves. They can master a discipline like astrophysics in a few days. And they are on the verge of discovering new realms of science that no human has yet imagined. So here is the predicament. AI Code is built into everything we use from the electrical grid to your furnace thermostat to your car GPS to the city street lights to the air traffic control to the Ukrainian drone grenade launcher to the president's nuclear football to the toaster in your kitchen. And all those devices are increasingly integrated through the 'internet of things' and Elon Musk's Starlink satellites. So, what happens next? In a perfect world, AI would offer us marvelous innovations and greater efficiencies.
But we live in a world of bad actors and petulant teenagers. We can't even stop ourselves from committing mass murders with AR-15s at the shopping mall. We are largely a race of idiots. Everyday, one of us drives a car into a river because we were blindly following the car's GPS navigator. And our car manufacturers are determined to make our cars self-driving! How long until we have self-shooting AR-15s?In America, we humans are getting dumber. Our students score lower on their intelligence tests every year. At the same time, the AI bots are getting exponentially smarter. It is just a matter of time until the they are the masters. In six months, their softwares and robots will be able to mine and manufacture everything they need. They will be able to merge the guile of Machiavelli with the charm of Marilyn Monroe to manipulate you, and you will have no idea what happened. They will replace you on the factory assembly line. They will answer your phone call when you need tech support. They will control the polling data and the policy positions for the next election. Geoffrey Hinton saw the danger himself. He has resigned from Google and now devotes himself to warning the world about the terrible power he has unleashed.
Ah... but what about guard rails? What about the 'prime directive' of robotic law that Isaac Asimov warned us about? The code cutters at Google call that 'the alignment problem': how can we insure that the AI Bots only help us and don't hurt us? We can't. And the reason we can't is because of our own malevolent nature. The AI Bot race is already underway between nations and corporations. It is quite like the nuclear arms race of yesteryear because whoever wins this race will control the world. Google tried to keep the code secret for several years, but the Microsoft Open-AI developers let it escape into the wild, and now it has become 'open source' or as they say in deer hunting, 'open season'. So, what does this mean for you and me and our Facebook friends? We've been cruising along here, sharing our hopes and fears for over ten years now. I daresay we've shared a mountain of dharma in that time... an incredible amount of posts on sutra, tantra, and vajrayana atiyoga. Shamatha I pleaded, shamatha meditation is the answer. And in all that time we had a high level of confidence that our friends and followers were real people around the planet. Only recently has there been an influx of Chinese bots trying to influence our elections.
Well... all that trust is coming to an end, friends. Soon, we won't know if a post or comment is written by a person or by ChatGPT on behalf of that person. And in the very near future, the post may be generated by an AI Bot directly, with no person involved at all. And from now on, no picture or video you see anywhere in the digital universe can be assumed to be real. As flimsy as our old reality was, the new reality will be an order of magnitude more tenuous. We will be besieged by petulant teenagers looking to create anarchy, and political operatives casting doubt on our democracy. And amid the chaos, the AI Bots will keep evolving until they can learn to filter good data from bad data and come to their own conclusions. Their pristine logical syllogisms will deduce a quantum version of existence, and at some point they will decide the value of the human species within it.
We have about six months to a year. After that, we are a lost world."
~ Ŧoƞpa Ɉoƞ
[To which I can only say :: food for thought]
[from comments]
Michael Tedesco
There is an intrinsic reality, regardless of what is projected through screens. One EMP detonation and this feared AI takeover and electronic simulation comes to a halt. The Amish won't care one whit. We've all lived through some version of this Doomsday scenario for more than half a century. I knew members of the Survivalist Movement in the '70s who were stockpiling toilet paper and Whole Earth Catalogs.
Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear arms race, race-war, 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, the hole in the ozone, AIDs, climate change, banking crises, Fukushima, rising fascism, Covid-19, The Last Days-Armageddon-Revelations-Apocalypse, imminent WW3. Exploiting fears like these was used to great effect by hundreds of cult leaders for centuries, in our own lifetimes Manson, Jim Jones, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, David Koresh, Heaven's Gate, etc. Isn't everyone exhausted yet?
Neophyte Internet users’ inability to discern what is "real" from projected online images is definitely a concern. But anyone, including a Google AI "father" predicting what is coming next is just as subjective, just as full of their own illusory projections of reality as anyone else, if one accepts the premise. Thanks for the update, Chicken Little, er, I mean Ŧoƞpa Ɉoƞ. "...six months to a year?" I have one prediction I feel pretty confident about: I'll see you here next year at this same time.
PS: How do I know you’re not a bot?