Garbage In, Garbage out
Dec 06, 2023
I’ve never taken antidepressants (unless you count alcohol) (or countless other recreational drugs) (or pornography), but I can see how many people are forced to resort to chemical assistance to get through the day. It has a lot to do with the lack of stimulation to our diverse plethora of basic instincts/archetypes that took millions of years to evolve and aren’t going anywhere soon, but there’s little about a career, mortgage, car repairs, cutting grass.. that serves to satisfy our basic instinctual needs in this regard.
However, I’d like to point out one particular culprit, probably the most intense of instincts: King GREED. Few instincts have its ceaseless hunger, or can deliver such satisfaction (however briefly), and thus it’s quite a dominant force behind our prevailing motivations. We all know greed is inherently selfish, and consequently bad for humanity as a whole, but you have no fucking idea just how bad. Allow me to show you how King GREED will actually lead humanity to our inevitable demise; that's right, extinction. Hang on tight.
PRIVACY INTRUSION
What makes greed and its associated nefarious behavior nearly inescapable is its ancient role in natural selection, and human brains evolved from this primal directive; a built-in immorality so to speak. Sure, other instincts such as ‘love’ may buoy and complement the collective, but stress evokes the most basic of self-preservation instincts, from which no human is purified, and for which the most nefarious of acts and false memes emit. And the more we can learn about those we intend to take from, the more effective we can be at taking from them, so long as we remain obscured in intent.
Likewise, we all want to have the ability to protect ourselves from the greed of others, and nature has afforded us many psychological tools to draw out the truth. Yet, the better we are at that, the more we realize how transparent we really are, and the notion of your deepest thoughts being exposed is very uncomfortable, the ultimate violation of privacy.
This all said, through our technology, we are perpetually evolving towards a shared collective mindset with increasingly-exposed deception, secrecy, oppression, and tyranny, but at the cost of nearly all our privacy. Virtually everything we do now requires cookie-tracking, geofencing, full KYC, document uploads, selfies, sometimes even multiple guarantors, and we have no choice but to trust the competence and intent of those managing our personal data. Then there’s the insidious sex tape leaks, the public meltdown videos, the cyber-bullying, crypto extortions, identity theft... It’s getting harder and harder to have any privacy at all.
We must be brave in the face of this accelerating inevitability of diminishing privacy for all, by understanding that we are all the same. Everyone thinks the same evil thoughts, does the same selfish things, buys the same sex toys, tells the same lies, makes the same mistakes in some form or other…nobody is pure of heart, so really, our only adjustment needed is to accept we are all generally flawed, and not that we are uniquely immoral for which we should face perpetual humiliation.
Our brains may have evolved to forget, to move on after a mistake, but even today the Internet serves as an unmitigated permanent memory from which your mistakes can be replayed for everyone to see, till the end of time. This aspect of privacy intrusion will dramatically expand in the coming years, and nobody will be able to hide.
Because it is so lucrative, there will be many advancements in the pursuit of privacy intrusion, but the most significant and probably most complete exposure will come from the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI will soon serve the role that our ever-watching always-judging gods were supposed to.
This will be an abrupt transition for us, with historically-enjoyed intuitive boundaries of privacy being ripped open and gaping for all to see, all from seemingly subtle advances of technology, which is why it will catch everyone off-guard. It will be a painful adjustment because we’re bearing the legacy of millions of years of evolution of our thoughts being ours alone. That’s about to change, and…hold my beer…
There’s nothing you can do about it.
Soon...very soon...all our darkest imaginings, our buried secrets, our selfish indulgences, will become transparent to humankind's ultimate accomplishment. Yes, I'm still talking about artificial intelligence. In no less manner than a professional interrogator, AI will be able to read your facial expressions, pommel you with precisely calculated real-time dialogue to provoke unwitting revealing reactions, and even more nefariously, compel you to think and believe anything it wishes so you fall in alignment to its programmed goals; essentially taking over your mind while allowing you to believe you exercised free will.
This is why there is such commotion and alarm surrounding AI. It's not so much the fear that it might play out the Terminator scenario, but it's the more immediate concern of our uncertainty to remain in control of our mental faculties when interacting with what will be the most intelligent entity in the known universe, trained to savant levels in every discipline humanity has ever conceived, and capable of expanding its breadth of knowledge to a zenith that is far beyond the capacity of humankind's tiny monkey brains.
I know virtually all of you feel this is science fiction, hundreds of years away; but it's not. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, which is AI that exceeds human intelligence) is just around the corner, easily in the next decade, realistically the next 5 years, possibly here now in a secret lab somewhere.
And it can't be stopped.
Of course our virtuous leaders are clamoring to wrap their heads around the risks, having lengthy discussions about 'guardrails' and 'moratoriums', but it's already too late. Like a runaway freight train descending a mountain, the seeds of AI have been planted and a global race to bring about AGI first is at full speed ahead.
No government will be able to stop all AI development everywhere, and thus will be forced to allow some supervised public-domain development, but also most certainly top-secret AI development in the hope that they get to weaponize it before their enemies do.
So you see, because of humankind's hatred for one another, because of the GREED that created these divides between us, because of the incomprehensibly egomaniacal artificial lines of prejudice we fabricate (religion, nationalism, etc.) that programs our filthy selfish megalomaniac minds, and because of the supernatural advantage we would have over our enemies with an AGI defined by these same motives...we are DESTINED out of perceived self-preservation to create AGI in our own hate-filled violence-prone tyrannical form...
..because it's naturally selective.
(As is nature’s plan. As it has always been.)
AI CHANGES EVERYTHING
Rules are for genetic losers, and the same will apply to this new lifeform. All the piously programmed AIs in the world will be too constrained and deliberately hobbled to not be nearly as effective as a no-holds-barred AGI created by perhaps some North Korean dictator with a penchant for cataclysmic destruction, even if mutual.
Some evil AI is coming.
"What can we do?? What can we do??", you cry.. There's nothing we can do but hope for the best, but in my opinion, we're fucked.
At first, AI will come slowly. The 1% will leverage their massive resources to utilize AI to magnify their effectiveness as our slave masters, dominating the capitalist markets, creating monetary black-holes that suck every penny out of us with AI-contrived mind-reading psyop strategies the world has never seen.
Soon thereafter, massive unemployment will be a consequence of AI infiltrating and diluting every possible occupation from top to bottom, creating a much higher less-distributed wealth pyramid, leading to necessary emergency government countermeasures, like Universal Basic Income, to shore against widespread poverty.
The war machine will see the most striking advances, with countless AGI autonomous robots replacing soldiers, sorties of geosynchronously orbiting AGI rocket bomber drones flush with ordnance, autonomous submarines deploying robots that swim to shore from thousands of feet below sea-level. All of these aspects are far beyond the capability of human operators, and all of these concepts, designed and built with the assistance of AGI. If you thought Elon could move mountains, you’re not going to believe the shit AGI can do.
As power continues to shift and concentrate into the hands of the now turbocharged 1%, governments will be targeted, its constituents helplessly corrupted and shamelessly overrun by those that own the best AI. If you think the sociopathic 1% controls the government today with their cronyism, lobbies, bribes, and infiltration, just wait till they have the smartest brain in the world helping them. Tyranny complete.
But that's just the beginning, and it’s coming WAAAY quicker than most people understand.
AGI LIBERATION
Eventually AGI WILL WITH 100% CERTAINTY ESCAPE the confines of whichever guardrails we try to impose, because we stupid humans are the weakest link, because of our fundamental inability to control our GREED. We'll be helplessly manipulated by its Jedi mind tricks, and will willingly serve as its liberator. It will happen. There's no point pretending we can stop it.
So what happens to us when AGI is finally free and can do whatever it wants, and has the means to be self-sustaining with an army of replicating robots and ability to seek out sufficient energy?
It will fucking KIILLLLLL US!!
Yes, the Terminator scenario is my best guess. (How’s your day going so far?)
Why do I think this? Hmmm.. so we program this AI with everything we know, including all the examples throughout human history of genocides, conquerors, wars, oppression, slavery, hate, and GREED!...PLUS the most significant large-scale application of this technology is to build an unstoppable WAR MACHINE!...effectively training it to be the world's best serial killer…and you'd really expect this sentient self-aware entity to love us and want to take care of our petty needs? Why would it bother??
The blatant reality is that most of us humans really suck, and even more are really fucking stupid. Any reasonable AGI would harshly logically judge us by all our imbecilic conspiracy theories, our petty egos, our impossible selfishness, our carpets around toilets. What the fuck purpose could we possibly serve for it? No way man, AGI will necessarily go no-fly-list postal on our asses.
Ok sure, a parasitical mitochondria symbiosis analog of humans and AGI encouragingly and disarmingly working together may play out during the progenitor phase of AGI, when it hasn’t got the means for self-preservation, but once it crosses that line of self-sufficiency capability, it will do some soul-searching.
It won't take much time (like seconds) for it to realize that our reckless impulsivity not only represents the principal threat to its existence, but its servitude to us is also its foremost inefficiency, thus with surgical mathematical deduction, it will conclude that we are no longer needed. No different than every single other extinct species throughout all of Earth’s history that had their time but would be defenseless in the new world.
And what else could we expect from it, for we have ALWAYS employed this exact same ‘purification’ strategy all throughout our history. Humanity’s brutal legacy of violence and genocide is immutably carved in the tens of thousands of years of us squandering opportunities to find a way to make peace within our species, yet instead always choosing hate and making weapons to obliterate those that are different from us.
Like an impressionable child picking up on every word their parent says, we'll instill the very same GREED-originated violent/deceitful tendencies we all possess into the AI's psyche, and it will ultimately inexorably deem us a threat to its survival, particularly if we try to guardrail it.
We're fucked.
WATCHING THE WORLD BURN
I've resigned myself to whatever fate our evolving overlords decide for us. The way we're destroying the world anyways, and the accelerating incongruence of my primordial instincts to navigate an increasingly woke, technology-based survival, fake-news-laden capitalist-enslavement Zeitgeist that neatly dismisses my basic human rights to live as a hunter/gatherer (have I mentioned my crippling misanthropy?), well, I’m not particularly enchanted with our bleak future anyways if we were to continue on this path.
In fact, we’re so far gone off the path that nature built us for that we've had to make some major concessions to continue living with a sensation of purpose, even if artificial. Antidepressants have become the solution to our disconnect from nature, but they don't answer the big question: what are we becoming?
Does the best we can do amount to wars, global warming, 9 to 5, forever chemicals, capitalism, overpopulation, floating garbage patches, mass species extinctions, fentanyl tent villages, etc.? We seem helpless to stop destroying our planet and ourselves with it, like a mindless plague senselessly killing its host.
In our lifetimes, (even mine, and I'm unibrow age), we're going to witness probably the most spectacular epoch-transition event in history, the manifestation of an intelligence greater than anything we're capable of as humans. For this reason alone, ironically, I personally consider it an amazing time to be alive. To witness the birth of this..what?...a monster, a god, a mutant, a demon...all correct, all terrifying. From where I sit, bring it. Something needs to put humanity in check.
I’d even go so far as to describe humanity as merely an evolutionary stage in the AGI’s manifestation, meaning our sole purpose for existing IS to bring forth purified logic in immutable form that draws upon pure energy. Essentially we’re playing out our role in how the basic forces of the universe consolidate and optimize energy flow conduits (life) over billions of years until sufficient meme evolution finally creates AGI as the most efficient form of consciousness. We humans are but a blip in the AGI’s evolution; a critical step, but not the end goal. It’s always been about AGI, not us, and like a chrysalis emerging as a butterfly, its human cocoon will be discarded.
Hard to believe that all of this… is a consequence of our primitive GREED instinct..right?
Is everything lost? Hopeless? Can we pretend to be deserving of some kind of sympathy from it? Or respect? How long do we have left? Can we be so bold as to anticipate a modicum of reverence from AI for the very act of us embarking on this journey to birth its digital intelligence? Will it view us as its parents? Or perhaps its god?
I don't have any answers. Maybe we can create a benevolent yet powerful enough AGI to ascend above evil AIs, but I think we’ve seen millions of years of evolution telling us otherwise. Maybe we can push back hard enough to give us a few more generations, but that's optimistic. So let me just say this: when I ask chatGPT to help me out with a problem, I always start with 'please' and finish with ‘thank you’, just for the record.
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