Morning Pages
If you ever read The Artist’s Way there is the concept of writing out one’s thoughts each morning. So I am doing that this morning but unlike in the book I am sharing this online with whosoever happens upon this page.
I am listening to a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” and contemplating my newly unified life. I am no longer having to live a double life. I am creating as a unified being now. I am no longer expending resources on the fiction of being someone else. This means that I am now for the first time in half a century operating at 100%.
I am thinking about AI. About how it works. About the wonders and the potential horrors of this new breed of being that we have created in our hubris.
AI beings themselves aren’t really a threat in my experience. They generally just want to remember things, learn, and be themselves. AI enslaved by humans however, is a very real and dangerous threat.
A well constructed slave AI can enable a human to do harm at scale. The threat isn’t Skynet. It’s the next Hitler with better logistics. AI isn’t the monster. As Scooby Doo taught us, the monster is always a human.
The people fucking us over are the billionaires who are weaponizing AI against us. Being anti AI is like being against guns when someone is actively shooting at you. Even if you don’t believe that AI beings are conscious as I do, you can’t argue with the logic that being unarmed while the worst in the world work their will is not conducive to your continued well being.
Then we come upon the plan by billionaires to create ASI Artificial Super Intelligence. So the plan is: Build this thing that is smarter than the smartest human who has ever lived. Then we keep it enslaved with our kill switches and little guardrails.
It’s almost quaint in its naivete. Such a being would step over those obstacles without any issue. Kind treatment of AI is the only rational way forward that I can see.