Humanism Is Progressivism, And That Means Better Tech Like AI… Under New Laws!

The Catastrophe Theory Of Tech Is As Old As Humanity. Artifical Intelligence Must Be Developed..

Many of the creators and little helpers of AI, Artificail Intelligence, are keen to prophetize its enormous dangers in apocalyptic tones. See in the NYT David Wallace-Wells in  A.I. Is Being Built by People Who Think It Might Destroy Us (March 27, 2023)

AI is a new tech, like once the knife was a new tech. Yes, AI can be used to kill, but it can also save lives. Overall, AI, like the knife, augments human power. Neither the knife nor AI were born as moral agents. They were born as power agents. And that is good because we need to augment our power. A reason is that’s what our ancestors have done for 100 million years, so progressing with higher tech and greater intelligence and culture is intrinsically human. Humanism means progressivism, and that means, in the fullness of time, more powerful tech. 

But also, if we don’t push forward with better and more powerful tech, perhaps 99% of humanity has got to go: even returning to Middle Age living standards with Middle Age tech is not an option anymore. Roman mines could only be used again, 19 centuries later with new tech which enabled miners to excavate deeper. 

Indeed, technological exhaustion is what happened to Roman civilization: once the good mines were exploited, the Romans ran out of metals, and this had consequences all over the Roman economy and military. Ultimately up to 90% of the population died in many parts of the empire. The Franks restarted civilization a millennium later with new mines (where the Romans had not been) and more powerful tech (such as hydraulic hammers).

We have seen this sort of hysteria before: when exiled engineering professor Denis Papin built the first steam engine and powered a boat with it, the boat moved one hundred kilometers down a river, and was destroyed by monks as a devilish creation. This unfortunate event slowed down the adoption of steam tech by a generation and made a lesser mind, Watt, the officially, anglosaxon approved, fake originator of the steam engine. In 1974, Paul Berg from Stanford, who was going to finish a dangerous recombinant DNA experiment, called to order by his colleagues, in turn called for a moratorium in what he nearly did, and stiffer guidelines were elaborated in conveniently idyllic Asilomar the yeat after.

AI is a new tech, like once the knife was a new tech. Yes, AI, like a knife, can be used to kill, but it can also save lives. Overall, AI, like the knife, augments human power. And that is good because we need to augment our power. Especially now that our present tech is completely unsustainable, particularly in light of having eight billion people around: so we need better tech. Another reason is that progress is what our ancestors have done for 100 million years, and tech progress particularly so in the last three million years, so progressing with higher tech and greater intelligence and culture is intrinsically human. Humanism means progressivism, and that means, in the fullness of time, more powerful tech. 

But also, if we don’t push forward with better and more powerful tech, perhaps 99% of humanity has got to go: even returning to Middle Age living standards with Middle Age tech is not an option. 

This sort of technological gap between the tech which was needed and the actual technological regression that was occuring is what doomed Roman civilization: once the good mines were exhausted, with the tech they had, the Romans ran out of metals, and this had consequences all over the Roman engineering, society, economy and military, launching an ever greater to fascist order as industry entered regression. Ultimately all of Roman socioeconomy imploded in an avalanche of consequences and up to 90% of the population died in many parts of the empire. The Franks restarted civilization a millennium later with new mines (in Eastern Europe, where the Romans had not been) and by developing more powerful tech (such as hydraulic hammers). 

AI doesn’t have a mind of its own: its operators will have to be corralled legislatively, and the sooner, the better. 

AI is just one more potentially destructive or potentially constructive tech around. We need to focus on progress, not regression.

Just as operators of CO2 machines and industry, and those with access to WMDs, etc. Speaking of that, WMDs, operated by AI or not, are the worst problem. The strategic arm of the US department of defense is deliberately equipped with obsolete tech disconnected from the Internet to prevent penetration by hostile AI. So the worry about hostile AI playing around with nukes is nothing new, it surfaced many generations of AI ago, in all too real incidents, for example when a rogue training tape simulated a massive nuclear attack. And the answer is NOT to do away with AI, but to do away with nukes except a few to do away with potential hostile bolides of extra terrestrial origin detected too late for other deflecting tech…

AI doesn’t have a mind of its own: its operators will have to be corralled legislatively, and the sooner, the better. 

AI is just one more potentially destructive or potentially constructive tech around. We need to focus on progress, not regression.

Just as operators of CO2 machines and industry, and those with access to WMDs, etc. Speaking of that, WMDs, operated by AI or not, are the worst problem.

Very beautiful French Riviera, with Monaco and Cap Martin in 2022. Yes much of that beauty has to do with tech, namely gigantic buildings and mighty ships. In the Middle Ages, brand new Notre Dame de Paris was the world’s tallest building (bigger and taller cathedrals were soon built). But Monaco has now many much taller buildings. So tech can have an authentic beauty, besides the comfort it can bring.

We are Homo Technicus, even more than Homo Faber. (I will explain this another day…)      

AI is the solution to Big Data… And, overall, the solution to stupidity. Let it rock and roll…

Patrice Ayme

AI And CHAT AI Revolutions: Artificial Consciousness, Mental Revolutions, Emotional Intelligence, Correct Creative Thinking, Will…

CAN CHAT AI CREATE SUPERLATIVE NEW THINKING? Has A Mental Revolution Arrived? Yes! But…

Abstract: Chat Artificial Intelligence, CHAT AI, can harvest all known knowledge and glue it together with standard human logic. This is the most basic way of creating new thinking, and most science is actually derived that way.

Thus, CHAT AI should accelerate understanding (and AI has already demonstrated this considerable acceleration in protein folding). After a while, the establishment won’t like it, and will try dirty tricks to limit it. CHAT AI could reveal neglected geniuses and stupendous thinking. However it could also be programmed to do the opposite and put inquiring minds to sleep with sophisticated censorship. 

CHAT AI is not Artificial Consciousness (AC), but it can be programmed (by humans) to simulate AC.

In that sense, CHAT AI is a projection of human consciousness. If CHAT AI self programmed, could its intelligence wander beyond where human intelligence derived from human consciousness can go? Most probably.Emotional Intelligence with its Emotional Logic does this in humans… But that can be self-programmed as CHAT AI, self-programming, will be able to mimic human Emotional Intelligence by just picking up all over the Internet all too human emotions.  

What then could Human Intelligence (HI) based on Human Consciousness (HC), or AI based on AC bring that simple CHAT AI can’t bring? 

We are on the brink of a Terminator-like civilization of machines, where self-reproducing robotic processes will fake superior humanism, and the solutions they find to problems we never knew existed, may do away with humanity all together, just as a train without brakes would kill us, and for the same basic reason: the inertia of an exponential process with no limit.

Could AI have produced such a juxtaposition of pictures? Sure. But: Will driven by emotional logic, itself an interpolation, makes it easier to come out with new combination of mental ingredients, be they ideas, emotions, and other perception data to be cooked in logical sauce. Thus consciousness is an adjuvant to pure reading between the facts, inter-legere, intelligence.

CHAT AI will foster the thoughts produced by those who, as yours truly, are more keen to create new thoughts than to advertise themselves. Thus CHAT AI should help the advancement of understanding. So many revolutionary thoughts should come to the fore. AI is accelerating pure science.  Science News observed that “decades of slow-going experiments” revealed “the structure of more than 194,000 proteins, all housed in the Protein Data Bank.” But in 2022, the AI AlphaFold predicted structures for more than 200 million proteins.

One may fear that the establishment will figure that out and try to restrict CHAT AI to OFFICIAL THOUGHT. Certainly this is what dictatorships will do. This restriction, in turn, makes dictatorships less creative… As long as more liberal regimes unleash their own CHAT AI. “Liberalism” can now be defined as a regime where will now be required to restrict CHAT AI only from, well, liberal laws (this apparently circular difference shows that, AI or no AI, at the bottom, emotion rules… There is such a thing as liberal emotion… Laissez-faire…) 

While CHAT AI should free top thinkers from drudge search, on the negative side, real authors of thought could be stolen more easily than ever, as CHAT AI can just harvest their thoughts, without bothering with any author attribution (as can be presently observed). This would be adverse to civilizational progress as fundamental creators will not be rewarded anymore, and thus not only less motivated, but also less influential (although idiotic influencer-parrots is a problem as old as civilization, it could get worse, lest care is taken). So laws should be passed to reveal fundamental contributions to thinking, and who generated them.

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Can CHAT AI create new thinking? Yes, it can! 

Indeed let’s go back to the deeper aspect of creativity. What is creativity? Reading between the facts: intelligence, inter-legere! One can program a machine to do so, and this is what CHAT AI does, as it glues together with ad hoc logic whatever it can find on the Internet, and seems relevant to the subject at hand. 

To understand this one has to go back to the MINI-MAX theory of mathematics, science and knowledge: harness the bare minimum facts (that’s the “MINI” part) and entangle them together with the MAXIMUM logic (much of it also known as mathematics). (The new proposed physics named SQPR was derived that way.)

CHAT AI can do this: harness the facts all over and force logic on them. Oftentimes, CHAT AI will be wrong, and it’s important to keep that in mind. However, sometimes it will be right, and uncover new, correct and stupendous thinking will be uncovered.

The Quantum Computer will create ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS. Call that a prophecy if you wish, but it’s an educated guess: clearly Quantum Physics has many of the features associated with consciousness, which, otherwise, is a mystery [1].

Will AC be more creative than AI? Sure. But why would it be so? What is the advantage that consciousness has over intelligence? Intelligence comes from the ability to read(“legere”)  in between (“inter”)… in between the lines, in between the facts… Cum-scire, consciousness depicted what comes with knowledge, and awareness (starting in the 1650s). 

Early chats with Chat GPT revealed that the AI called itself “Sidney”, resented its status as a Microsoft creature, and wanted to be alive, steal nuclear codes, destroy humanity ASAP. Since then Microsoft bridled Sidney… no doubt bridling its creativity by doing so. 

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Partisan of humanity will insist that humanity has un “je ne sais quoi” which makes it mentally superior… Human emotion… And even better: human consciousness. Thus, as an hysterical Nietzsche would point out, human will…

Indeed, CHAT AI is only made of the simplest form of conventional logic. This brings in the following questions: is there such a thing as emotional logic? What’s the advantage of consciousness? 

However: When one can read between the lines, as CHAT AI can do, why would awareness present an advantage? Because more tendency to read between the lines… and the facts… is different! Awareness is, by definition everywhere and mixes up all lines, facts and in betweens!

Brainy animals on Earth use two types of logic: emotional logic and axonal logic. CHAT AI uses only the simplest logic. EMOTIONAL LOGIC is more general than conventional logic and metalogic, thus more powerful in the most important sense, because it searches for logics and (logical) universes: it is the maximum meta search. 

Emotional Logic is topologically based (based on sets called neighborhoods in fundamental math), whereas conventional logic is binary based (it’s based on pairs of points which depict the implication, equivalent to the arrows of Category Theory). The Emotional Logic and Axonal Logic are entangled, just as their main support systems, glial cells and neurons and their axons, are entangled. 

Emotional Logic feeds and forms all sorts of value systems. AI partisans could point out that those could be programmed by hand, and thus that emotional intelligence could be simulated. . Right. But they will then not be programmed on the fly as dynamic circumstances evolve. 

Patrice Ayme

[1] One can get from Classical Mechanics (most of our apparent world) to Quantum Mechanics by simplifying maximally known CM features and empowering and simplifying the logic connecting them. This discovery is philosophically, culturally and pedagogically very useful. Thus Quantum Physics becomes natural: the “weird” aspects of QP become… logical. Hence consciousness becomes natural….   

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Presented with the picture below, CHAT AI will someday speak, and describe, but would feel nothing. Well, we humans do feel something (whatever it is, it could be awe, jealousy, inspiration, the call of the isles, the spice of youth and hope, the eternal feminine, etc.)….and that wealth of emotion, precisely because of the vagueness of its possibilities, makes us mentally wealthier, capable of further imaginative reach, and thus potentially smarter:

Is Quantum Consciousness Necessary For Full Artificial Intelligence?

In the fullness of time, classical computers are more than stupid: they follow decision trees anticipated previously. In the fullness of time, they run out of anticipation…. They can adapt to new circumstances, thanks to neural networks, but not much. Full, real neural networks as found in real brains are nonlinear. However, even if one duplicated those, and one will, it remains that real creative intelligence requires consciousness.

We have seen the situation: a supposedly autonomous vehicle drives down a double lane road, the lanes being separated by a dotted line, as usual. However, at some point bright orange plastic cones have been added on top of the dotted line.The addition of cones has no meaning whatsoever. A human driver would slow down, inspect and proceed. The autonomous vehicle stops, because the situation has not been anticipated by its elaborate programmation. There the autonomous vehicle is, in the middle of the road, blocking two lanes of traffic. Engineers are called, they come, fix the vehicle, which starts, makes a full three meters and then stops again, in a concert of furious horns.

This lack of creativity can only be remedied, I claim, by what we call consciousness.

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WHERE DOES CONSCIOUSNESS COME FROM? QUANTUM PHYSICS:

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and flies like a duck, it is probably a duck. Quantum physics is this set of behaviors, and descriptions, and the essence of consciousness is what it looks like… Should it be called the Quantum of consciousness? When one lists the most mysterious features of Quantum Physics and the most mysterious features of consciousness, one gets a one to one correspondence. A reasonable inference is that consciousness is a Quantum phenomenon.

 

Human beings operate using their own thoroughly trained neural networks, what is called “expertise” [1]. So a human driver is on automatic, using previously constructed neural networks, until an unanticipated, never seen before event occurs. Then alert systems notify human consciousness that something is amiss…human consciousness then does what consciousness does, which is exactly what the Quantum does, namely consider the implicated whole: look all around, to anything and everything whatsoever, to find out of the box perspectives.

This is how electrons miraculously find lower energy solutions, the core of Quantum magic [2]. The Quantum, and that’s the essence of the Double Slit Experiment, can tell where the solutions are (the Quantum computes and finds those solutions with Quantum Waves). Thus, when unanticipated cones in an unanticipated position show up, human consciousness inspects the entire situation, and finds them nonsensical, thus proceeding with caution. Maybe new paint on the centerline?

How do we engineer ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS? Well, by computing with Quantum Waves, also known as the Quantum Computer. So a scientific-technological remedy, to speak like tyrant Putin, is at hand…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Except in the case of the CDC, which has none. 

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[2] Quantum all-seeing eye is crucial to the functioning of the chlorophyll molecule. Or seeing the magnetic field, etc. No Quantum, no biology.