A.I.

If you take a few billion from a multi-billionaire, it probably doesn't hurt as much as you'd think. But it was a nice bit of Schadenfreude when Facebook (now "Meta") lost a record 232 billion of market value the other day.

There were various causes: Loss of users (youngsters are trending toward other apps); Apple's non-ad-tracking ability (on by default in iOS and the overwhelming number leave it that way); and probably not a lot of investor confidence in the "virtual reality" software/hardware utopia that is called the metaverse.




Still, Apple believes in some kind of "augmented reality" which they already partake in to some extent and will be delving more into when their upcoming"Apple Glass" hits the market. They are wearable augmented-reality glasses. Presumably you can check your email (or porn) with a sort of heads-up display. Look for traffic accidents to balloon and lawsuits to run rampant.

Perhaps the Bruce Willis movie, Surrogates, gets to the heart of what the metaverse is supposed to be. You plug in some hardware and then get lost in a virtual, utopian world. Good movie, if you haven't seen it.

Listen, I'm on record as stating that one day (sooner rather than later), robots will replace women for a lot of people.

These robot women would be almost completely life-like in looks, feel, and behavior, although, of course, you could buy whatever "behavior package" you preferred. I can see many men surviving just fine with a dog, a good bottle of whiskey, and a lovely and compliant (if that's your preferred programming) woman. She would be good for cooking, cleaning, sex, going to the movies, etc. Everything the typical woman used to be good for before they became disgruntled, unhappy, ball-busting feminists.

But the central problem with the A.I. kooks is encapsulated in that one part of your quote: ... babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world. This show you that clearly these A.I. kooks think the "real" world is open for negotiation. It's not even real, after all. A "simulation" could be just a real, in their demented minds. As many of these kooks think, we are probably living in some kind of simulation (a la The Matrix).

Well, until you have the technology of the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation (wherein the "simulations" were hard and very physically real, although everything moved via programming), you're not anywhere near being able to confuse "virtual child" with a real one.

But do note I have seen how young males get completely involved in the most mindless video games. I don't suppose for a minute that they are mistaking it for real. But I think the point would be that if something comes via a computer, it would be real enough for them. Even so, I doubt many of these would be stupid enough to say that a virtual reality is the same as real reality.

A.I. advocates are peopled by more than their share of nuts and flakes. It's embarrassing. Or, I should say, I'll be embarrassed for them because I don't think they realize just how ignorant they are.

Ditto. We may not live to see men living on Mars but computer technology advances so fast, we'll certainly get a glimpse of any of this AI stuff can take us to a Brave New World.

Good as far as it goes, but he leaves out a very important part, i.e. we won't be able to trust any photo we see. If pixels are so malleable as to be rearranged completely at a user's whim, then trust will be further eroded in society. I suspect people will get used to this and accept it. The long term effect will likely be a further loss of touch with reality. Of course, that is the goal of some of these people. 

Zuckerberg and his ilk are frantically trying to perfect this and other virtual reality platforms in order to get it ready before they "shuffle off this mortal coil." Their hope being that with AI and computer power, they will be able to download their brain content onto a chip. (They haven't come close to figuring out how to properly maintain the actual body so a chip will have to do.) They will then plug in the chip to their virtual reality machine and "live" forever. At least that't the theory. 

There is no doubt that this is the goal. And I can’t say that it is not, in principal, achievable. We have only to look back on our increased lifespans. We currently throw a large portion of our technological resources at fighting diseases, extending life in various ways, etc. And we’ve been very successful at it.

But the real battle isn’t technical. It’s metaphysical. Whether one can actually transfer one’s essence onto a chip is, from what we know now, a leap-of-faith regarding the metaphysics of who we are. If we are nothing but “jiggling atoms, carefully arranged” then it’s conceivable that the Lizard Man (I love that he was called this) could live on to bake his social dystopia onto other generations.

But life sure does seem far more complicated than to be explained by purely mechanistic answers. What we are almost certain to see is very good facsimiles of Lizard Man (or whomever) that then demand (or others demand) that we accept them as real. This would be directly analogous to the legions of weirdos who take hormones, put on a dress, and/or mutilate themselves and now Brett insists we call him Brenda.

It appears to me that the clause after the second comma is a contradiction of the clause between the first and second commas. It does what it asserts it cannot do. Must be a leftist.   

A sensible article written by a chick, and worth a read: thefederalist.com/2023/05/10/snapchats-my-ai-is-a-dumpster-fire/

One day, a la the Terminator franchise, we may be fighting the AI. For now, yuge tech companies are fighting titanic battles against each other over it.

I just heard a very clear and concise comment on algorithms, which would explain the bias of ChatGPT even if the bias was not intentional. 

"All algorithms reflect the bias of their programmers, whether the progammers are conscious of it or not."

This was said by a PhD statistician who is also a programmer and has studied the problem.