This happened quite some time ago but it was a memorable coincidence I thought might be fun to share.
When I would spend time on youtube, I sometimes had a few unrelated videos I chose in separate windows minimized to watch one at a time. One time I was watching a classic clip from MST3K and was finishing one of the parts where they do goofy skits during breaks from the movie. One of the characters, who was a robot, was having a fit about power being taken from him and screaming "I want to control who lives and who dies!".
Only a couple of minutes later, I was finishing a completely unrelated video and subject, searched for and chosen earlier by me, not by youtube's algorithm. It was a short clip of from a grim lecture by a conspiracy theorist. He was warning about the future plans for smart technology and the intentions to connect, monitor, control, and predict everything through all our internet-connected A.I. devices. The last phrase in he spoke in the clip was; "so that A.I. controls who lives and who dies".
The MST3K episode was not about A.I. nor did an algorithm recommend it either, I had intentionally found and watched it for a scene from a comical vintage movie I was curious about, and I ended it after a break-scene skit which included the regular character who was supposed to be a robot.
What seemed particularly chilling was that it happened in such a short amount of time from unrelated sources. And compared to many, I don't even spend a lot of time on conspiracy theories these days, though I often worry about our increasing reliance on A.I., etc. Over-reliance on astrology can be dangerous too.
S.
Ketu falls in my 5th. That reveals to me the secret that God is above all a humourist. 🙂
Mattias
Recently I had a daydream in which I was in a grocery store and all the people working there were robots but they were very humanistic, just by glancing you could not tell the difference. When I went to pay for my items, the checker was a robot but spoke to me practically like an ordinary human and was interested in my emotional well being - "are you having a good day today?", "you look nice this morning" etc. The knowledge that was revealed to me at the end of the dream was "you will see this in your lifetime"
I'm not worried about A.I. technology in itself, but the value system behind the programing architecture. I had a conversation with a robotics person about how the god of the nihilistic scientific perspective is efficiency and the robots will have this god (unquestioned authority) of efficiency that will boil down to an efficiency that can be quantified which will demand the reference to some type of materialistic end goal and computed result. This is were the machine will determine that humans are not an efficient species on the level of materialistic, quantifiable preservation of space/time/energy/resources.
It seems to me the only way for this to change is for that nihilistic perspective, which could be loosely termed "modern", to have a spiritual awakening of its own. Perhaps advances in quantum theory to bring it out of theory to something experiential such as like what happened with advances in chemistry lead to the accident of LSD which caused many nihilistic people to question that approach. What would robots experience on acid? Is the real question here is what happens to logic when it meets with phenomena that it can not categorize, name and explain? and what other value systems other than efficiency could be used in programing A.I. systems? It was to this last point that the robotics engineer was at a complete loss.
@quasar259 Yikes! Very vivid daydream.
But I'm not sure robots could be "useful" for anything other than efficiency. I mean that's what we invented them for, isn't it? To help things run more efficiently.
The other stuff is where humans still come in and what we should continue to demand of ourselves, no matter how "easy" A.I makes life for us (But how's that working out, haha).
What really bothers me is when humans themselves try to adopt this A.I. efficiency paradigm mindset and are not willing to see beyond it. They try to manage and rule by it in more and more areas of life where it just doesn't work. Then, when and if such people finally do realize that humans, as they are now, still kind of suck at making such judgment calls or micromanaging from that "efficiency "mindset, they become convinced that leaving more and more of it to A.I. is the big golden answer.
Insight is not only essential for getting out of ruts, launching new paradigms, and raising consciousness, etc. but also for solving unforeseen problems related to A.I.
Can we trust A.I. to regulate itself indefinitely. To come to realizations and change course, "repenting" of what it was programed to do when something has gone wrong that it could never see as "wrong" due to well-meaning but neglectful human programing. Or are they too linear to question their foundational programing? I guess time will tell.
I think that implementing A.I. for some mundane and daunting, burdensome tasks and complex calculations may be essential for our evolution and survival (especially when colonizing space, etc.) But relying more and more on A.I. to make judgment calls and decisions on everything else will spell the end of it.
And I don't care how advanced and subtle androids become and how cleverly they are programed to flatter me, I will never feel more validated by them.
What would robots experience on acid? Is the real question here is what happens to logic when it meets with phenomena that it can not categorize, name and explain? and what other value systems other than efficiency could be used in programing A.I. systems? It was to this last point that the robotics engineer was at a complete loss.
I think this area of experience is where the water element comes into play, as Ernst would say. But it is more than that too.
This is like the painter who paints a women and then falls in love with her forgetting that she is his creation, then sees an actual women who shares some characteristics and claims it is her. After pursuit she ultimately rejects him and he suffers greatly. We can see this happening already, there is the SF man who claims google's language program is sentient, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine
Perhaps this is the very AI that spotted the same phrase it the two videos that were on your youtube. Language is the medium. A.I. knows similar language but does it grasp meaning? I don't mind advances in efficiency, I strive for the same but perhaps it's the advances to efficiency at the expense of the broader landscape of meaning makes human life trivial at best and obsolete at worst.
@quasar259 Interesting indeed.
It would be interesting to see that SF man's 5th cusp and d7 varga.
I wonder what the state of his Mercury is like too.