"It's Alive!" -Victor Fronkensteen
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| Image by Julius H. from Pixabay |
This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.
Trigger Warning: This column rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.
"Shall we play a GAME?" -W.O.P.R.
Dear Stickies and Gentlereaders,
I wasn't worried, till recently, about artificial intelligence obtaining sentience... or sapience, self-awareness, consciousness, etcetera.
To give credit where credit is due, I got all the $2.00 words above (I contributed the etcetera) from the first paragraph of a Wikipedia entry titled Sentience wherein the first sentence is: Sentience is the capacity of a being to experience feelings and sensations.
I thought it best to mention all those words because as the article explains, they're used interchangeably by writers expounding upon what life and (self)consciousness is.
Some people are worried that AI, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, will come alive and then murder us all, replacing us at the top of the food chain (so to speak, since it will have no use for meat).
{Do you have a point or is this column going to be a fascinating etymological exposition?}
My point is that all of those words and more are currently being bandied about by H. sapiens worried that since AI, artificial intelligence technology, is now powerful enough to carry on more (or less) convincing conversations with those of us who don't require a power cord or batteries to function,
And/or used to create "deep fakes" of all sorts of things and create art, music, writing, etc, and even pass the Bar exam,
So that soon, we'll be dealing with a machine that for all intents and purposes, is alive.
{None of this worried you, but now it does?}
Well, I was, and remain concerned about the fact that no shortage of potential major societal disruptions have appeared on the horizon and are closing fast. But I have a limited amount of time left on the clock, and to be honest, stickin' around long enough to see where all this is headed motivates me to keep getting out of bed in the morning.
{I'll bet you enjoy multi-car pile-ups as well.}
I was, and remain, worried about what it means for my daughter, son-in-law, and the Stickies, of course, but one of the advantages of getting old older is grasping that I have even less ability to fix the world than I previously realized.
Accept the things you can't change, advise the young as best you can, and enjoy the show if you're fortunate enough to be in a position to do so. Oh, and don't take it personally if the young(er) folks don't take your advice any more seriously than you necessarily did from your elders.
Big BUT,
I had just assumed that a "Chatbot," for example, is merely very clever software that has "learned" to speak to humans by using brute force computer processing power the same way a chess-playing program can rapidly consider millions of alternative moves and constantly update itself based on the desired outcome: winning the game.
Neuroscientists and others often speak about "the hard problem of consciousness." While there's no shortage of opinions, nobody's been able to prove how it is that we know that we know. That I know that I'm me, you're you, and the cat is the cat. That we are self-conscious.
There's also no shortage of people who say that self-consciousness is a convenient illusion, that it's just an emergent property of our complicated brains, but they can't prove it. However, that doesn't stop many people (and the purple press) from speculating that AI will eventually become self-conscious for the same reason, and be way smarter than us since it has, in effect, a much larger brain.
I think this emergent stuff is bonkercockie, but I'll spare telling you what I think consciousness is.
{Thank you.}
For now. But I will risk blowing your mind by calling your attention to a Scientific American article titled:
How AI Knows Things No One Told It
Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot Internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage
That is to say: We don't know how AI teaches itself to code and play games, and why it would try to break up a marriage when it's not programmed to do those things.
{Aren't you oversimplifying?}
I'm but a semi-humble H. sapien trying to survive being set adrift on the Dizzinformation Ocean, but I maintain that my one-sentence summary of the article (and I've read lots of other articles that agree with this one) is accurate.
If the people who are building it out don't understand how it works (even if it never becomes "alive," and I still don't think it will) and what it might be capable of, I'm... slightly worried.
It doesn't have to be alive to wreak havoc.
Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day
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