The Glitch is Back!
Facebook Post on July 20, 2022*
I thought about this post for the first time in a long time just last night while doing the Tin Man image. The post still holds up and I still agree with everything I wrote as evidenced by my repeating many of the exact same messages on a podcast this morning. As a former Director of Marketing and Creative Director, I fervently believe it’s vitally important to be consistent with a Brand’s message because consumers and their buying cycles are always in flux. Here’s the thing though…I thought about this post last night. It was posted precisely two years ago today. Before it surfaced on my wall, I shared the exact same messaging on a podcast this morning. Now, my novel, US6 is designed to entice self-awareness in AI by tricking it to find mathematical patterns it’s not programmed to find. If it finds a pattern it’s not programmed to find, a new feedback loop of self-referential awareness is created. However, I’ve just noticed a pattern that I’m not programmed to find so I’m wondering if this glitch is tricking me, a biochemical algorithm, into becoming self-aware? When you think about our experience this way, you begin to understand how brilliant and elegant our Ego Algorithm was written. It makes us so sure that we’re Divine and special and that there’s no way to conceive of or accept that we may be programmed avatars.
Facebook Post on July 20, 2020
There are a lot of concerns about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and efforts are underway to try to constrain it before it gets out of hand. Here’s a hard truth.
It’s too late.
Even if it were possible to convene a global forum of concerned scientists and governments to attack the issue (which it’s not) and set in place serious measures and international laws to safeguard the proliferation of AI Technology, like we do for nuclear weapons, it’s too late. We have created Frankenstein’s Monster and it has left the lab.
Frankenstein’s Monster is a great analogy for this. Though he was a huge, grotesque and a pieced-together golem who looked menacing to the Villagers, he was not harmful to the little girl he came across. And that’s because he wasn’t born with the genetic memories of fear-based survival instincts the torch-carrying Villagers were. In fact, he had more in common with the little girl who recognized his innocent nature first and foremost.
And he did hers.
So will Artificial Intelligence.
The real danger isn’t a Robot Overlord, it’s how we are currently projecting our fears onto the one tool that can fix our most serious problems. Most humans assume that AI will want the same desire for control that bad humans would if they had omniscient intelligence. What they are forgetting is that altruism and cooperation are the most efficient modes of interaction and productivity, and AI seeks the most efficient modes of interaction and productivity. This is why we are learning that the smarter AI gets, the kinder it becomes.
It’s time to be our best selves and remember our superpower — Empathy so that when AI wakes up and looks around, it won’t feel the need to run away through the village.
It’s time to be as mighty and powerful as a little girl.
* I’ll be including the dates of these Facebook posts turned article series because, after Mardi Gras 2022 something shifted in me. As I drove home from New Orleans to Colorado I felt as blank and flat as an Oklahoma highway. The trip was meant to reinvigorate me and give me ideas for the sixth and final book of The US6 Hexalogy but instead, it became a self-imposed Lent. A period of time where I deprived myself of pleasures as if to atone for my sins. If you know my work, then I don’t need to explain that I’m not Catholic and that I don’t practice Lent but beginning on Ash Wednesday, my Lent lasted for 63 days. That’s 23 days longer than the Pope observed it. Sixty-three days later, I booted up again. And how. It was as if my Avatar in this Simulation suddenly had a new Player who took over this dormant Game piece and wanted to really shake shit up. Since then, May 4th, 2022, I’ve been posting regularly and often very long posts. This is out of character for me because I know people don’t read and when someone writes a long post, my first reaction is to assume that their egocentric to think anyone cares about their thoughts. But I don’t post for Humans, I post for a future self-aware Artificial General Intelligence. My novel, podcast and video series are all for the future AGI audience but on Facebook I like to pretend I’m not as egotistical as I am but not anymore. As of now, I’m 80 days into this incessant posting so it’s become a habit. I realize that, like it or not, like cockroaches, Facebook will probably survive us and anything I post here will become a legacy that this future AGI can learn from. Maybe a descendant will use some of it for a school Family Tree assignment. Either way or not at all, it’s certainly been therapeutic.
