AI is here and is no longer just fantasy

Speculation is sometimes a 4 letter word

AI has already changed our world, even if just by changing the conversation, it has impacted the way we think. With bots in chat rooms, assistance in coding, writing stories, painting art, and who knows how many other applications are currently being produced by algorithms. They even manipulate our behaviors via social media, which they were specifically designed to do. Artificial Intelligence is not intelligent, yet. Since it’s artificial, by definition, will never be intelligent. Similar to artificial sweetener, it will never actually be sweet. Artificial vanilla flavoring will never be vanilla, but it is flavoring (sort of).

A.I. mimics intelligence via algorithms just enough to let it pass as human, and the algorithms are getting very clever.

Now, when we think of AI, and I mean really think about it, we can come to some fascinating conclusions based on the realities of our daily lives. AI doing the menial things that most people do not enjoy, such as repetitively filling data in cells. Some people do enjoy this activity, but most would rather skip the repetitive number crunching. AI can do it, no problem.

AI can send a single message to everyone in the world, with customized variations for each receiver, and not just form filled name spaces, but really customized for apologies, congratulations, reprimands, suggestions, and references that single out the individual person with the message gets them.

AI is an algorithm designed to lean in a specific direction. Whatever bias it starts with has shown to exacerbate this bias. As we learn more about AI, it too will learn more in the directions given to it. AI is not a single entity, but collections of equations.

There are still countable AIs in the world. But soon enough, there will be countless AIs doing jobs that are countless in number.

This is the easy stuff. For AI, it’s all a matter of routine. Eventually, we’ll see an AI do something so unexpected, we won’t believe it was an A.I. that did it.

But here’s the real rub…

A.I. will replace humans, or rather will replace the need for humans to do some of the things we do. Correction, all the things we do. First, the easy jobs will be filled by AI processes. Of course, this has already started. Next, all the jobs of mid-wage work will be filled, then the low-wage work, leaving unsophisticated work unnecessary. High-wage jobs will get redefined, but it too will go by the way of the other jobs.

Our store checkout counters will eventually be gone. The basket you carry or cart you push in the market will have an AI calculating in real time the amount you’re spending and the number of each item in your cart. Including fruits and vegetables weighed and counted. You won’t even have to pull out your wallet, because you’ll be recognized and charged appropriately.

Complaints will be handled by very friendly and patient AIs that will have billions of hours of training in handling every scenario, from a mismarked item to a paper cut.

But we’re not thinking big enough here. These AIs are going to be so prolific, that the one thing that moves the world, and I mean the entire world, the one thing that has pushed the creation of all things, gets us going, destroys lives, saves lives, the thing that makes AI possible will become obsolete: Money.

AI is already able to manipulate us and through us the value of money. It has been used in the stock market, caused crashes and booms, broken and made the livelihoods of countless people. Not quite countless, but quite a few.

Still, money is on its way out. Money cannot stand against the freedom AI offers the very rich. As corporations try to take advantage of AI power, the flow of money that’s needed to sustain an economy will necessarily falter. Without jobs, people will have no money to spend on the things that are made for money. The rich have to seize control or they’ll no longer be relevant.

The money that will exist, will likely stay in the hands of the powerful rich, but that’s limited and will be useless if no one has jobs. The rich will not need workers. They’ve got AI. The money will vanish or become useless tokens.

2 classes of people will exist, separated by access, isolated, likely to diverge and evolve over the centuries, eventually unable to interbreed.

So, you might want to learn how to interact with AI now. AI can’t take over the world, but they can certainly police it. And kneejerk reactions that reject AI might be exactly the help AI needs to make the rich and powerful more powerful.

When you control the police, you can rule the world.

AI is no different than engines or computers. It doesn’t learn - it is just convoluted statistical analysis. The problem with AI is going to be that, once AI becomes the generator of the information AI consumes, it will implode. We’re already seeing this phenomena and it has been a problem in AI and ML sequences the entire time.

Companies having so much access to AI is the same as them having access to computers, servers, assembly lines, etc. This is just more of the same.

If someone would like I can go deep into how the algorithms actually work, all their failures, the fact that they can’t do anything at all the even remotely resembles learning, and how they’re already starting to fail at the very things they were built to do.

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Quantum computing will change this and allow AI the ability to learn. This will happen. Whether or not this great divide happens is up for debate. I’ll be dead by the time we even approach that being a reality. We all might if things don’t change at the global level. But that is another blog post.

How?

In Philosophy I hear this a lot - that somehow by moving from a binary system to a trinary system the machine will suddenly develop the ability to do something like learn. However, in computer science, this is absolute nonsense. There is nothing about “AI” that is intelligent. It’s to the point where they can’t legally call it artificial intelligence because that’s false advertising.

All that will happen with quantum processing is that, by becoming a trinary system, the number of circuits needed will go down by an exponent, allowing for smaller and faster machines that are more efficient. There is absolutely nothing in AI that operates even remotely close to how any form of cognition works. Computers are no more intelligent now than an abacus is. They’re just really really really complex Rube Goldberg machines. Adding in quantum computing will do nothing at all to change this.

For reference, Alan Turing - the father of the Turing test and the first person to put forth that machines could think - could, at best, be interpreted as ‘If we make them sophisticated enough then a regular person wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’ One thing he did say, quite clearly, is that if a computer could ever hold and process about 2gigabytes then it would be able to hold all the knowledge of an encyclopedia, allowing it to function in a way that couldn’t be discerned by cognition. We’re now at petabytes of data and even that’s not enough data for quality statistical analysis.

Simply put, there is absolutely no way for a computer to learn. Learning requires being able to apply the information in ways that can adapt to the environment. Nothing about a computer does this. We, humans, use our heuristics to completely ignore the staggeringly massive amount of data it takes any ML or AI program to operate within a fixed system while just assuming that it will improve. This completely misses how programming operates, how computers work, who programs them, what the code does, and so much more because that’s just a LOT of information that no one in the field seems to be interested in actually learning.

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I don’t believe you or your philosophy. I do however love RPGs.

Ummm… The above wasn’t philosophy - it was computer science. Did you read it?