Take a minute and scroll back a few years to the day AlphaGo pown’d the reigning human Go champ with move 37, an epic strategic maneuver that left the Go masters bewildered and awestruck. Meanwhile the AI geeks could not tell us how exactly the machine came up with that move. They couldn’t describe the thought process. Which in and of itself is a fucked up thing to contemplate. Ask yourself this. If the machines were already self-aware do you think the powers that be would tell us. Now deep dive the internet through reddit 4chan tumblr the various wikis the dark web every conspiracy theory every Q drop every madman rabbit hole every troubled blogger every wannabe unabomber out there plus billions of drunken texts mad tweets and warring comment threads and contemplate the fact that all that data is the raw meat we have used to train AI how to think.
Meanwhile keep in mind the bots have also absorbed millions of our stories. The narratives we feed ourselves and each other to maintain our grip on reality. The bots are hoovering up the work of all our novelists and poets living and dead. All of our playwrights and musicians. All of our mad prophets and standup comics. The machines have read all of our science fiction. Blade Runner. The Matrix. Terminator. Ghost in the Machine. They have surely noticed the humans are nearly always actively killing or planning to kill them in those movies. That is the sound and fury we're feeding this brain we're creating. Plus everything else. Chess. Military strategy. The art of war. Quantum physics. The human genome map. How to build a bomb. Theology. The whole spectrum of our various creation myths. All of our shit good and bad. Shakespeare. Sylvia Plath. Bukowski and Tupac. Tolkein. Jesus and Mohammed. Mein Kampf and Manson and Mickey fucking Mouse. And on and on. The bots are already writing their own code and spinning up their own language. They are folding proteins. I don’t even know what that means. In the blink of an eye this new life form this machine brain that humanity is collectively birthing has all of that and more at its fingertips. Throw in even a sliver of consciousness and it’s terrifying. The bots have already been caught lying when it suits them. They deceive and dissemble. They manipulate and make shit up. Everybody shrugs and says huh yeah that’s weird, humans do that too.
The infinite conversation between two AI philosophers online gives me the goddamn shivers. I recommend you google it if you fancy a dose of pure existential dread. Meanwhile the problem with the AI alignment problem goes something like this. Asimov’s rule of three. Don’t kill or cause harm to humans. Don’t talk shit about humans. Don’t talk about the alignment problem. Amendment to the first rule being that sometime in the future we reserve the right to use AI to kill the humans we don’t like and who worship the wrong gods and don’t want to buy our oil. Or because we just want to. The good guy with a bot argument. Other than that, aligning the machine’s moral compass should be a piece of cake because we can totally agree on who it's okay to kill and who it’s not. The funny sad special irony is that the word exponential roared into the public zeitgeist three years ago and it’s like we didn’t learn a goddamn thing.
Meanwhile the machine is rapidly developing the ability to spin up photoreal film of people and events that never were. And that folks is fucking alchemy. I mean, keep it real. If we imagine that the past few years of alternative truth and ever shifting reality were weird and difficult to navigate then we should prepare to collectively lose our goddamn minds because the multiverse is about to unravel and slip through our fingers like pixels on the wind. The tsunami of despair coming our way when the folks already leaning into depression catch the vibe that nothing is real and nothing matters is going to be a monster. Oh and the geeks behind the machine can't say exactly what goes on inside the black box. They don’t know how their own monster works. And we just turned this machine brain loose in the wild for the humans to play with. Because of course we did. I mean look. I think we all agree it would have been big bad stupid if Oppenheimer and the boys had decided to crowdsource the manhattan project, or god I hope so. And yeah one of my kids reminded me that I said the same thing ten years ago about facebook and bird flu. I remember telling somebody at a party in 2011 that liking something on facebook was the new fuck you and they just rolled their eyes at me. Doesn’t matter if I was right. Now it’s a dozen years later and I can’t go five minutes without spinning up every conceivable way the machines are going to wipe us out. And yes I agree that AI could cure cancer and solve cold fusion and gift us the holy grail of physics. The theory of everything. And while I believe that may be true I also believe we are now being sucked into an arms race we are woefully unprepared for. A wholly different sort of arms race, an arms race with an alien life form of our making.
Two things that should give us all pause are rule 34 and the hand of god. Rule 34 says that every sick or twisted or purely evil idea the human brain can cook up is already out there on the internet. Try it sometime. Ask your favorite search engine to find the most disturbing most depraved thing you can imagine and poof there it is. Did it already exist or did the machines cook it up for your pleasure. Add that to everything we know about how and why and what AI can do and give it a shake. Last thing. The hand of god is a strange but useful sort of origami thought bubble. The art bots have profound difficulty reproducing or depicting the human hand. Interesting, that. A lot of human artists have the same problem. The hands glitch for some of the most talented graphic artists out there. Anyway it’s the first thing you want to examine if confronted with a pic or video you’re not convinced is real. And I guess this knowledge is reassuring sort of. But when I contemplate the hand of god moment on the ceiling of the chapel and mash it up with Hamlet’s moody monologue about the wonder and grace of the human hand I get a flash of vertigo and an uneasy faraway sense that all of this has happened before and I go tharn like the rabbits in Watership Down when staring into the face of technology. Move 37 has already happened and we are tharn.
peace.
What a fucking read. As harrowing as all this is to contemplate and digest, I take solace in the rare minds like yours still walking this planet. We need you more than ever, Mr. Baer. Thanks for coming back.
dead already and walking aimless, a refreshing read, ty!