How Artificial Intelligence is likely more Artificial than Intelligent

 

Is AI this century’s atomic bomb? “And now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

We have been told, through the media arm of our government and their corporate sponsors, that artificial intelligence is here!!  Average people are talking about it because Facebook told them to.  So, it’s a campaign to prime us for what?  The fact that we are being fed marketing bits on the subject is itself suspicious. 

Artificial intelligence is simply, maybe not so simply, a thinking machine.   It’s a theorized machine that has the computational capacity to… think.  Speaking of thinking, think of a thousand-piece puzzle, each piece is a thing in and of itself, but when put together forms a horizon or a snowfall.  Pixels on your computer screen or TV comprise even smaller detailed pieces to form a picture, often a moving one at that.

Each dot, or piece is part of a program, it has its purpose, to be the color red, or with sound, to be an octave higher, to be brighter or darker.  We see and hear what has been completed; we see the movie, where superheroes are battling it out, almost as if it were real.  Every dot, color, and sound is programmed to be where it should be…. if done right.

What is the Singularity?  It is believed that the Singularity will be the point when computers and human cognition will be indistinguishable.  What’s to come of this ‘advancement’ or evolutionary leap seems to bleed into fantasy.  Machines and people are nothing alike and will never be, which is probably a good thing.

Proprietary algorithms are like those pixels from above but broken down to damn near microscopic levels that, computationally, appear as… intelligent and conscious.  But this AI isn’t thinking; it’s computing, quite quickly, to allow many humans to believe that it’s ‘thinking’, but it isn’t.  It’s a machine. 

What is language?  The problem with language is it explains everything while also explaining nothing.  Language is a human construct, valuable and certainly important, but it is an invention, a human invention in all its magnificent forms, but not real in the real sense of Real.

Relativity

What is consciousness?  Consciousness is the steam and aroma coming off a beef stew.  The stew itself has beef, potatoes, carrots, and broth, other ingredients that make it whole.  Consciousness is the smell when you tip your head in front of the pot.  You can smell beef, broth, and vegetables but you are not tasting them.  It’s a beautiful smell but it's not real, what’s real is the actual stew.  Consciousness is an afterthought because our mind was already made up before we were allowed access to that information through consciousness. ‘I think so therefore I am’, in the Cartesian sense, isn’t good enough anymore.  It had its place, and it opened up the thinking of the mind and its consequences, but we have to consider the limits of our access.  Consciousness is not computational and could never be, by my estimation, programable in the AI sense of that fantasy.  What we do know is, pardon the pun, knowing and understanding is not computational or aware that it does know.  We assign meaning that feeds into consciousness.  Our consciousness is on a need-to-know basis.

The last program we want in an intelligent robot is human consciousness.  If there ever is a program that has advanced thinking capabilities, it will be a ‘consciousness’ that won’t resemble or own.

Relativity

What is intelligence? Education is what you know; intelligence is how you use it. This ‘AI’ writes an original T.S. Eliot poem based on existing T.S. Eliot poems. This is computational data processing previous and established information, resulting in material that, in itself, isn’t original and not intelligent.  The same thing with movies, “write me a Steven Spielberg movie” and a movie about a child with divorced parents and an alien who teaches him how to be strong.

AI, in a fictional sense, was explored well with H.A.L. in 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968) as well as with Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994)  but that was – fiction.  Reality is often conflated with fiction and often confuses us.  The truth is none of it is real.  It is, yet again, another strategy by our owners to manipulate us into thinking that AI is here.  There isn’t enough power on the grid to support an actual Al, just like there isn't enough power to support universal battery-powered vehicles.  It’s just not there.  So we are, yet again, fed lies.