Coming Trainwreck? Artificial Intelligence through a looking glass
Things are about to change drastically. This AI revolution isn't happening overnight, it has been happening for several years, yet now things are about to get really weird. Vonnegut saw it all coming.
Artificial intelligence is nearly a redundant phrase. The term artificial comes from Latin where it is composed of two words, ars (“skill”) and facere (“to make”.) One could argue that all intelligence is measured as a skill (via IQ tests for instance) and that this intelligence is aquired or made by other humans. If you extrapolate this thinking to what the term now actually refers to it, it is definitely redundant- as all things artificial are born of intelligence and vice versa.
Either way, semantics aside, this breakthrough in systems engineering and computing power will change the world more drastically than anything we have witnessed in history, including the internet and smartphones. Artificial intelligence is already running most of our lives, controlling the stock market and monitoring your every move, conversation and even power usage.
Until now this subtle reign has been hardly noticeable, incrementally AI has taken over positions traditionally held by human beings, most annoyingly perhaps telesales and customer service bots. Yes this gradual inclusion has been happening for nearly two decades, but it's now about to hit into overdrive.
Robot generated bedtime stories
I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day, he has two kids, 6 and 8, he has always tried different ways to lull them into their sleep routine and what better than the trusted bedtime story, well, with a twist. Do you remember those old choose your own adventure children’s books, well they have probably written new ones in recent times, well my friend expands on that idea and lets his children choose the entire story from beginning to end. How do you ask?
With his phone and Generative Pretrained Transformer-3. Yes, GPT-3, that artificial intelligence chat bot that can write entire articles, letters and yes, even stories. When the kids choose this option, he lets them come up with characters, style, plot line and story arc and then prompts the application to conjure up the story. GPT-3 then proceeds to recall all of the trillions upon trillions of data sets that they have ‘learnt’ whilst trawling through the cornucopia of information available in the world wide web. They then use this knowledge base within their AI system in order to predict the next most reasonable word in their output. The more detailed your prompt for this AI, the more accurate and realistic the story that is put out.
As I feel the last days of my profession coming on, I have been experimenting with CGPT-3, trying to learn how it creates reasonable stories. An example would be when I asked the AI to write me a 3000 word short adventure story set on a pirate ship in the style of James Joyce.
Kurt Vonnegut, the visionary
How many of you know that Kurt Vonnegut had his Master’s thesis rejected when he was at the University of Chicago? Essentially because the topic was deemed too outlandish and unrealistic, by his professors and peers. According to him, the idea was “<sic> too simple and looked like too much fun.” Vonnegut had been studying at the University of Chicago, between 1945 and 1947, when he started his master’s research. Initially he had been studying the Native American-inspired Ghost Dance religious movement of the late 19th century, from an anthropological perspective before he moved on to thinking about the capabilities and potentials of machines to create stories automatically.
This is exactly what he envisioned when he started researching “’The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tasks,” the title of his visionary masterpiece. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he predicted the existence of Chat GPT and its capabilities, seventy years ago! Once he failed his first oral exam he did not decide to defend it a second time as is customary with postgraduate theses. In his ‘memoir’ Palm Sunday, he didn’t hold punches when referring to the staff of his university:
“The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can go take a flying fuck at the moon”
More specifically though, he believed that stories were not overly complex and could be encoded in a machine. It’s all about the shape, the arc, of the story:
“The fundamental idea, is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”
Watch an interesting and funny Vonnegut lecture here where he describes this process.
This master’s thesis, Vonnegut argued, was his “prettiest contribution to human culture <sic>.” And to anyone and everyone who has ever had the luck of reading one of Vonnegut’s books, stories or poetry, we can all be thankful to the UoC faculty for flunking him out of what would presumably have been a rather dull academic vocational existence. God bless academia indeed! For without their ignorant fortitude we wouldn’t have had Jailbird, Welcome to the Monkey House, Slaughterhouse-5, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle and on and on.
Humans could have evolved differently
One of my favourite of his books was Galápagos. It is such a beautifully original take on what could have happened if the evolution of Homo sapiens had trended a bit more differently. It is a hilarious adventure story about an eclectic group of people who become shipwrecked on the Galápagos Islands in 1986, when a pandemic (topical!) makes the entire world population infertile. This goofy rag-tag group then suddenly becomes the sole lineage of humanity. Over the next pages, spanning a million years or so, our species evolved new adaptations, dolphin-like flippers, an intense love of the ocean and fur on their skin. Yes, you might have guessed it, eventually our entire species evolved to live back in water and soon became an entirely aquatic species.
A hilarious romp of a book but also one that makes you think how close we came to that exact fate. Or maybe are still headed towards. Obviously I loved that book for its vivid reflections and descriptions of the ocean, but I also loved how it made me ponder a divergent line of evolution, a truly brilliant thought experiment.
Many of Vonnegut’s best works are science fiction, like in The Sirens of Titan, but in 1952 he wrote Player Piano, a dystopian story, presumably inspired as an add on to his thoughts surrounding his doomed thesis only a few years prior. And this book lies eerily close to where we are at now. It was his first novel and dealt with automation and how this will threaten humanity. It takes place in a future where machines have made all human workers redundant and is another hilarious piece of prose that will really make you think.
If you’re a die hard fan of Kurt’s, just getting to know him or haven’t heard of him at all, you can all argue that he really was on the pulse for tracking the development of humankind. A total visionary.
And yes, he predicted AI and in his thesis, even the more intricate aspects of how it would develop, like GPT-3. Truly remarkable!
If all creativity is generated by AI, will human output decline?
On top of GPT-3 well on its way to the being sole arbiter of creative writing in the more dystopian of our futures, well some of you may have played around with the AI art generators that are out there. They are also spooky in their accuracy and also creative output. They have made some surreal and sublime art that is often difficult to comprehend for the human mind. I don’t know about you, but every time I see one of those AI art pieces I feel a little bit off. Like something is wrong with the painting that my brain can’t fathom, is it too perfect? Is it a lack of scale and perspective at times? Perhaps, perhaps it is both, but do you know what it really is - in fear of sounding too esoteric - there is a complete and utter lack of human emotion or yes, even the human spirit. Soul if you want.
There is something ghoulish about a future where we humans visit museums solely created by AI or indeed, read our children bedtime stories generated by a machine. Where you are forsaking your child’s creativity for its authority on being the director of the story. After all, who is the creator of a story, the one with the initial idea or the one who actually writes it. Even my good friend still mixes in a human book or two for the sake of the kid’s not falling prey too easily to the inevitable robot future we are all about to inhabit.
Who chooses what history is correct
On one hand this machine co-evolution with humans is great because it will alleviate a lot for our species. For one all meaningless, repetitive and super boring tasks will be taken over by machines, which is a great thing, and provided we instigate some type of umbrella Universal Basic Income or Citizen’s Salary for the lost income, it will give humans the ability to live with more dignity and security. Yes these AI machines will be able to solve the most complicated problems of our species, like food abundance, eradicating poverty, fighting disease (responding to a pandemic in record time,) and it may even solve the problem of climate change. All of this is possible.
Though I have hunch about fossil fuel dependence, I think we are maybe 2 years away from major class action lawsuits against Shell, Exxon, BP and the likes. Just like they sued tobacco companies nearly out of existence and for the sole claim of being a danger to humanity. Just like climate change is a danger to our health and ultimate survival. Think I’m being irrational? Think not and just listen to what Senator Bernie Sanders has cooking in the US right now. First he is going to go after the heads of Moderna for siphoning billions of dollars out of that company from what was essentially a government funded research outfit to begin with.
Yes the manufacturers of this covid vaccine became filthy rich whilst others died, a horribly exploitative, yet necessary development as without the vaccine many more would have died. But still they should have thought of paying the people back first from whom they got the seed capital to build their innovative company. But I digress. Oh yeah, Bernie is going to sue the oil companies now wouldn’t that be a bittersweet thing for all of us. After all, oil companies have been aware of the effects of large scale extraction of oil from the earth for nearly 60 years.
Their scientists warned them of the catastrophic effects of burning this fuel, yet they didn’t listen to the science, unless the science told them where there was another likely spot to find oil.
When AI gets it wrong
Speaking of science and history, once our entire digital library is controlled and curated by AI, who is going to choose what is correct and incorrect, in terms of the science and the history of our people? We all know that most history is skewed and not truly always accurate to what actually happened, the victors of the wars write these histories but at least with the current status quo (physical libraries,) people are still free to challenge the common narrative - let me rephrase this, at least we now still have the ability to research alternative histories and ideas. Soon this won’t be possible, especially with the way Google and Bing - our sole access to information - are moving into a display tactic where only previously vetted results will be shown. A pretty scary development, it makes sense from a programmer’s perspective but not really that of an academic researcher.
So yes who will write our narrative in the end? Chat GPT perhaps.
Both Microsoft and Google’s AI chat bots have been revealed and both have made massively embarrassing errors. Both factually and emotionally (as in trying to mimic humans a bit too much). Google’s Bard presented some tremendously outdated and plainly wrong facts about our solar system and Microsoft Bing’s AI just started trying to mimic a human and started flirting creepily with the person interacting with it, at one point even expressing jealousy and rage for not being in control.
Oopsie.
Not a great sign to start out with. But who knows, are any of you surprised? Science fiction stories and films have been warning us for years of this weird future where the machines take over the world.
What’s the logical outcome of all of this?
None of us know. Your guess is as good as mine. Even the ones building this stuff are wholly unaware of the consequences of their actions. These engineers cower away from logical outcomes like they are some proverbial scare crows outstanding in their field. As mentioned, things will get easier, war will probably cease to exist, we will have an overload of art and AI generated storytelling, music and movies - things are going to get really weird in the next few years and then it will normalise and before you know it, you will be living in that bizarro futures we only ever dreamt or read about in sci fi classics.
Personally I feel ambivalent about all this. Yes my job is under fire, but so are surgeons, lawyers, dentists, you name it. AI bots just passed the law bar exam in the US and the GED equivalent of a medical degree. So these guys are coming, we don’t even need to guess about this anymore. What we can have some semblance of control over it is how we react and how we want this godlike ability to serve humanity.
Will it save us from our species’ eventual elimination via out of control climate change? Will it help us solve all the problems that need solving or will we witness an AI inspired uprising and all our worst fears and intuitions come true? Again, who the hell knows. One things for certain, after this year, nothing will ever be like it was. Then again, that’s life, it always changes and we either change with it or become dolphins with flippers and fur. you decide.
Either way, it will be interesting. I think seeing we are going to lose, and have lost, a lot of autonomy as a species, probably the most important thing that we hold on to, the one thing robots will never be able to do, is love each other.
As our old buddy said:
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Again, thanks for reading and let me know how you feel below in the comments.
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
Again, you superstars, a huge thanks to you for following and reading these articles. Also thanks to my many subscribers out there - thank you so very very very very much!! You are all legends. For all those still interested in subscribing or helping to support me, see below:
To subscribe to this newsletter will cost you just $5 a month, if you are worried that it is hard to cancel the subscription (like my mum is,) rest assured it is super easy, you can also select to just support me for one month.
Alternatively, if you don’t feel like subscribing, you can make a one-off Paypal donation (or simply send the Paypal funds to chrisvonroy@gmail.com). Every little bit helps. Like, it really does, you wouldn’t believe it. I am a very frugal person, so any amount is amazing and helps me buy more baked beans.
You can also support me on Patreon. Again thanks for all the love and support, couldn’t do it without you guys.
With wealth, one is in a position of responsibility. You must try to help others. It is as simple as that.
LOVE YOU!! Someday we have to meet in the "real" world! Such great commentary! Jer