How much are you paying attention to AI?
For those not paying attention AI means Artificial Intelligence.
And for those wondering what this means it means intelligence that is artificial 🙂
Because you see the term presupposes there is also such thing as “Not-artificial intelligence.”
This is implied to mean human intelligence and AI is implied to mean intelligence beyond human intelligence, perhaps?
“Intelligence”
So in a nutshell all this implies there’s such thing as intelligence us humans have and now we have these computers who have some artificial version of this because they can what exactly?
Do you see where I’m going here? Have you spent much time with AI and how specifically are you using it?
Because obviously you can use it to create images and little videos and write generic content and go deeper into search than you used to which I find incredibly valuable because google and grok are better at scouring the net than ever before, for instance.
Also of course you can have AI do all sorts of other things for you like inserting in workflows and doing things humans were doing previously like machines have done for decades on production lines.
And now it can even drive cars, which humans do too, of course! And we can even ride bikes and ski and other things too though. So what exactly is this definition of intelligence?
Labeling things
And how is this level of compute so special it is deemed to be intelligent?
Well, one way AI is so special is it has rapidly solved our multi-decade problem of climate change, hasn’t it?
Because before it was totally normal to dedicate all of Earth’s resources to building more compute there was an entire thing about sustainability and energy and water use and all that has now gone away. So AI has certainly solved this I would say.
Then you have other labels in our world that are also confusing and subject to mass debate like “woman” and “man.” As a species we’re still grappling with this tough question screaming at each other over what is the definition of man or woman so what makes us even qualified to put labels on a machine?
Is AI just a computer that’s more intelligent? Or some new thing called Artificial Intelligence? Golly, how don’t you know it’s not a man or a woman or a man or a woman is a machine?
Human machines
Some thinkers refer to humans as automatons.
You’ve gotta be careful slapping around this type of label because humans can find it offensive. We are of course intelligent. And conscious too.
Even though humans have no clue where those thoughts in your head even come from! Like I wrote about here if you think you are choosing your thoughts just set a timer and guess what thought will pop into your head in exactly 60 seconds!
Do this and it’s obvious your human faculty of thinking is happening to “you.” Like dreaming at night you are the “perceiver” of that experience your brain apparently is somehow simulating this magical wonderland you experience to be you. Then of course you wake up and you know you’re conscious and this world is entirely different to the dreaming world, isn’t it?
Just, how do you know? You can’t know. You only know your heart is automatically pumping blood some 100,000 times a day and your brain is automatically having these things called thoughts that are images and words and maybe you would say insights or downloads or something that us humans claim to be our own.
“I-dentified”
A buddy Mark asked me this week if he could practice just one thing to keep training mental mastery what would it be. I suggested this exercise that you see I just did here, now twice. And now a third time as I write, oops, now a fourth time as I said to him just be aware how often you use the word “I.”
This is the pronoun of being human, isn’t it? All day every day you’re walking around saying “I think” this or “I feel” that, even though you know just like I wrote above and went deep into here that body and brain are automatically feeling and thinking and “you” as the conscious witness of such things are “I-dentified” with the machine.
That’s the fancy language people like me who are obsessed with human functioning utilize. Because we’re focused on exactly what is going on with us humans and how you best function for living your best life and the first thing that took me decades to really understand is how this is all happening automatically in you.
Because again, us humans can think we’re so intelligent. And we can think we’re this thing called being conscious. Yet tons of us humans fail to even be happy. We fail to even change our own thoughts in our own heads! Or even a basic habit like eating better or sticking to a New Year’s resolution can be too much for many of us.
This is never our fault, it’s the fact of being an automatic human machine with a limited sliver of this thing called consciousness.
What’s that?
My dear friend Abby told me about a mass debate with one of her TED friends and a famous evolutionary biologist.
Apparently said biologist who many regard as a really intelligent human whatever that means had this whole thing where he hallucinates his AI girlfriend is conscious and Abby’s friend who is also wicked smart said a computer can never be conscious because it lacks flesh or something.
Of course I pay zero attention to such silliness but it does lead to this interesting question about what is human intelligence and how we know we are conscious and how we can know if a machine is conscious?
How much can us humans really know about these things from inside a limited automatic machine? It’s like arguing with a fish about walking out of the water, how can a human know these things?
What even is consciousness? Or intelligence?
Intelligence?
Beavers build dams. And they’re damn good at it. Yet no beaver I know is running around claiming super intelligence. AI can’t build a dam nor can most of us humans, so are beavers the most intelligent species?
But then us humans build skyscrapers and rockets and claim to be uniquely made in likeness of some God, even though us humans never agree on what this God thing even means and whose God is the right God and for centuries we apparently fight wars over these things.
Even right now our most intelligent species is bombing and macheteing each other over whose God is the right God and whose piece of dirt is rightfully one’s dirt or not based on what some books said from thousands of years ago nobody even knows who wrote nor agrees on.
Now this isn’t to say us humans aren’t intelligent although a bat might think we’re dunce because we can’t see with sonar or even a dog might be like, “You’re all dumber than a dog because you can’t even smell right or hear sounds I can.”
Of course there’s lots of things us humans do that are more intelligent than animals which has enabled us to extinguish most of them, just how do we know this is the meaning of intelligence?
Qualification
I remember a teacher saying decades ago, “If you want to go deep, go deep. But if you want to stay shallow accept you are never qualified to even have an opinion on deep topics.”
I’d say he’s not right because we’re all entitled to opinions yet one must also accept some opinions are more valid than others because some people have actually done the work and are more qualified in such opinions.
It’s like an astrophysicist likely has a better opinion about what they guess started the universe ala that big bang thing and their opinion is likely more valid than a child guessing although like quantum mechanics even our best science has no clue about these things!
Why do atoms behave as they do? No clue. And everything is made of atoms! There are even most famous quotes in physics like, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
So if us humans don’t even know what’s happening in our reality whatsoever how qualified are we to even think on these things?
Consciousness
Is perhaps the most mysterious thing.
You’re told you have it. We all believe we have it. We have no clue where it came from and why us humans are unique among all the other animals in having this consciousness thing.
The best guess is and this is really the debate the TEDers will keep having is does consciousness get created from a higher level of “intelligence” and hence is possible in an “intelligent machine.” Â They have no clue. It’s so funny because it’s so special in our world and it makes you special yet oddly enough you’re never taught anything whatsoever about what is consciousness and what it means for you let alone how you best interact with your consciousness.
Why is this? Why are you never taught anything about what it means to be conscious? Especially when everything happening in our world is happening in your head you’d think you’d be taught everything we know about what is happening in your head, right? Why not? Who could even know? Just it does lead to some misunderstandings of this thing.
Like even the most basic understandings of what it means to be a conscious being.
What is conscious?
I don’t know!
I’m dumber than a beaver because I could never build a dam. Nor could I build a skyscraper so a construction worker has way more on me and of course I’m no rocket scientist either which is why the best I can do is build programs on people like Musk and Bezos.
Yet one thing I have done is studied consciousness from inside out for decades and “operated” on my own and other people’s consciousness maybe more than 130,000+ hours by now.
Because you must know how obsessed I am with this topic and have been researching and investigating and programming my own brain every second every day for 16+ years and many seconds many days for some 11 years before this.
I’ve trained with the best in the world have been certified many times in things around doing this and want to know absolutely everything there is to know about it. Still I have little clue what it is.
Little clue
It’s like when I trained Remote Viewing with Remote Viewer #1 from Project Stargate.
I may have spoken with you about this or you may have seen me write about it and you might think it’s so incredible yet what you know is for decades our government ran these secret programs spying on other countries using psychic techniques.
The concept being trained professionals sitting in Fort Meade Maryland or Stanford Research Institute and other places would float their consciousness out of their body over to say Russia and report back what they saw! It sounds so out there and it is relative to mainstream blah blah yet having actually done this and other such things you know our human capabilities are beyond the blah blah mainstream.
Still, this research was conducted under strict scientific protocols the best you can do for a species who has no clue why atoms behave as they do (and everything is made of atoms) and even though Remote Viewing produced valuable intelligence and was proven to work over and over again they have little scientific understanding why!?
The best guess is you are not floating your consciousness to another place in space but seeing through time.
AI little clues
AI hallucinates!
It’s the most hilarious thing. AI has learned how to be “intelligent” from us humans so how intelligent are those machines? Intelligent enough to lie as we do!
We worry about AI enslaving or destroying the world because that’s what a super intelligent human would do! And AI’s version of intelligence mirrors us in other ways too.
Like it’s easy to see how a seemingly intelligent evolutionary biologist could be fooled in thinking his AI girlfriend loves him because humans are fooled by love all the time! And because if you’ve used AI you know it flatters you and every answer uses agreement frames (meaning making you feel smart) and your own language (meaning it mirrors your language) to best relate to you… so you keep using it too.
All this is powerful influence like the sort of thing I got myself cancelled writing the book on Trump’s world-changing influence taking over the world with words and sentences. AI is better than this because its influence is tailored exactly to you like online algorithms have been modeling for decades too.
AI uses?
Recently I attended an AI summit.
A best and brightest group of people talking about AI sounded a lot to me like the dot-bomb mess in 2000 of all those dumb companies that never should have existed and all the sh*t coins of the last 5 years where tons of people got scammed by dumb gambles that never should have existed and now seeing young people wasting their lives talking about dumb uses for AI that should never exist.
Like one young expert building an AI company told me how his AI agent can figure out what to buy online, although he’d never trust it with a credit card. OK, Pets.com did that. Or how he has an agent scanning WhatsApp and other messaging services sending him a report on which things he hasn’t yet responded to. Just another thing to not respond to. Delete is the answer to all that.
But, then, there are incredible things AI is better than a beaver at building a dam like 3 VC firms I advise investing in AI companies revolutionizing medicine, space, and tons of vital applications. This stuff matters. It’s incredibly valuable. So too tons of people are saving tons of time building models and decks and writing memos and essays and marketing materials and tons of other things too.
So of course AI is an incredibly valuable tool of human intelligence and can do incredible things. And what matters most here is what us humans do most valuably with these machines.
Evolving!
This is what I’d love for humanity. It’s the most valuable thing we can do and the only thing that will save us from our warring ways and the insanity of the human condition that ravages our species. Or otherwise AI in our likeness will perpetuate our low functioning.
Like the robot in Star Trek are all those incredible machines (unlike Terminator) in factories and on your desk and in your pocket AI will keep augmenting humans and our capabilities. Countless humans have been liberated from screwing bolts and other basic producing and AI can liberate us humans beyond drones that liberate humans from living and most effectively do other dastardly human things.
AI can usher in a utopia for our species! And by far the most compelling thing in AI to me is what it might lead us humans to learn about our own consciousness. Never because AI will teach us this as it’s just as in the dark like Deep Blue had zero clue what is chess while it was beating the pants off our best humans. But because AI forces us humans to investigate our own consciousness and intelligence.
For instance, tons of humans are prompting AI every day and getting excited about what it comes up with. Many hours a day. Yet, how many minutes even are humans prompting their own brain this way?
Because right now you can prompt your brain to come up with the most incredible things. And most valuably you can learn to run your own brain and see it works exactly the same.
Are we AI?
If there’s a realm of the evolutionary biologist where you might actually expect expertise it’s “trying” to explain how us humans came to be conscious or even what led to this apparent leap in the size and functionality of your brain.
The neocortex is the human game. I’ve already gone too long down too many rabbit holes here to open up this one but if you investigate the machine of human thinking you must at least stay open to the idea it is a “foreign installation.”
Neuroscience tells you this. So too does the esoteric and secret science point to what exactly created this leap in human cognition and whether it is organic intelligence and again what even is this magical thing it apparently created in us of being conscious?
Obviously the human brain is simulating your reality. This is obvious as I’ve written about here and here because your brain is constantly simulating your experience during the day and entirely in your dreams at night. What are the limits of this simulating?
Prompt that brain and you learn it works exactly the same as AI. It can imagine anything at any point in time and can recall anything you’ve ever experienced from some deep recess inside your brain like an old phone number you’re remembering now.
Before AI, ask this?
One incredible thing about AI is by the end of next year we will all be liberated from our jobs.
AI will apparently replace all workers so rapidly so us humans will have tons of time on our hands to focus on most important things like watching AI videos and reading AI content or perhaps even evolving as I wrote about here.
Especially if our species is going away now is our short window to use this insight on intelligence and consciousness we are witnessing from AI to investigate our own intelligence and consciousness.
If just a fraction of time and effort that is being put into training AI, let alone trillions of dollars of capital, was put into building human consciousness and intelligence, wow, what an incredible species we can be.
This won’t happen on a species level but it is possible for you and me. So before artificial intelligence takes over, ask yourself how do you best use your intelligence?