Artificial Intelligence is a Buzzword
What they really want is Artificial Creativity
I keep thinking about the topic of artificial intelligence off and on. It seems like it’s definitely something real, but it’s also sort of a buzzword and misused. I keep thinking that I want more artificial intelligence, I want to work on it myself, but I don’t want the kind corporations want. After a short amount of time, I realized that artificial intelligence is basically synonymous with computing itself.
This is where the so-called elites which I prefer to call the brittle boys’ club and a lot of others would protest. “No, by artificial intelligence we mean a computer that can do anything a human can do, like artificial general intelligence!” Yes, but what’s anything a human can do? Do we mean like the mentally handicapped? We certainly don’t mean the braindead or comatose. There is a certain standard that is meant by the Linnean transhumanists, a very normative standard. They also expect that since a machine wouldn’t have to engage in the activities of maintaining a human body and could improve its hardware the machine would eventually just achieve some kind of godhood which they like to call the Singularity.
However, why do the Old World remnants think that a difference in degree will eventually just automatically become a difference in kind? They think this about AI as well as about intelligence itself, that it just spontaneously emerges from complexity as a result of “emergence” like a sand dune arises from sand. Sorry to all the people who’ve probably just been watching a bunch of Dune, but we can calculate how sand dunes emerge from sand because it’s really not very complex, sand dunes aren’t “you put a lot of sand together ??? profit” like it’s magic. I have good evidence something else is happening with the minds of humans and other animals.
Now if you follow the Linnean scheme like these people who’ve never actually studied science in any depth in their lives despite their self-presentations do, then you can say, humans can do XYZ and we know we have achieved artificial general intelligence when it does XYZ. However, it has been pointed out the Internet would already basically qualify as that so they clearly don’t mean that, they mean making an AI from scratch. However, the idea of trying to study how human cognition works seems completely verboten even though that seems like clearly the best measurable standard for humanity, seeing as “a soul” is just not measurable as a metaphysical concept and often equated with the mind anyway (e.g., psyche, psychology.)
Mostly it seems like they just don’t think it’s possible to understand, and to the extent they do they don’t really want to probably just because it’d make them feel stupid. They desperately want mind control, they’re just trying to do it through eye-tracking and subliminal messages and silly things like that that I don’t think really constitute mind control any more than kicking someone in the crotch or trying to scratch the eyes to make them keel over does. That’s all very much external and has nothing directly to do with cognition, people can easily overcome that without even needing to involve cognition by e.g. becoming physically numb, or not physically looking. It’s an object of cognition, but it’s basically just sort of a behaviorist thing and a heuristic, not a deeper understanding of anything fundamental. Yet all the people who want to see themselves as hard-nosed and cynical see that as basically the essence of mental control, e.g., Michael Aquino with the whole Mindwars thing.
(Yes, a Satanist was trying to write a mind control program for the government. I’m going to give the government the benefit of the doubt since I hear the programs fight each other anyway and it’s not like reducing policing actually helps communities based on what I’ve heard so I want to extend that logic to the whole government. How about we just not keep around Satanists who are interested in torture in the government like we don’t do the Tuskegee Experiments and other things that went wrong. But I don’t think things going wrong in the government means we should just destroy it like the real possibility of bad things makes all the good things somehow just some sort of illusion.)
If I wanted to classify what they really want from artificial intelligence, it’s artificial creativity, hence all the focus on making AI try to draw hands and write poetry. They don’t know how to say that, and maybe that’s all the better seeing what they want to do with it. However, if I really thought it would make a difference I wouldn’t say it. How are they going to get artificial creativity to make their Artificial Creator with? They have no understanding of anything. All they’re going to do is make a golden calf. They’re really believe it’s that important and powerful, but it won’t be. I think it’s possible to make a real artificial intelligence with artificial creativity, but the current trajectory is not going anywhere near that. How are they going to ever make that? Even if they did I’d think I knew more about it than them and lots of other people would know more and we would control it together. Doesn’t seem super threatening. I’m not afraid of AI. I’m not even afraid of other people, just disappointed in them.
Computing is literally from Ancient Greece and artificial intelligence seems essentially indistinguishable from computing. I would like better computing so I would like better artificial intelligence. I would not like the so-called Singularity which I think is really the Artificial Creator though they never make that connection. I think that’ll only ever be an illusion even if they get machines to start making things like humans do, after all, it’s not like people painting a picture have somehow become omnipotent God solely as a result of that or whatever.
If instead of I, Robot where robots can’t create, they just take all the artist, writer, and musician jobs and people are shouting “get a real job!” to them like they’re a liberal arts major or a teenager with a garage band, swell, that’s kind of hilarious, even though I also think it’s sad because I think it prevents real progress on using AI for creativity and in general. Like where’s the command line AI? Why isn’t that developing first? Because they want the Artificial Creator as well as no means of sabotaging it if they can help it. Even though I think there are already more ways of sabotaging the golden calf than there are of keeping it working in the first place so that’s misguided. It’s a completely fake project after all. But it only needs to appear to work in their minds so minds are what must really be sabotaged.
I do actually have some ideas of what people are doing wrong with what’s clearly an attempt to try to create artificial creativity. Maybe I’ll try to make artificial creativity since I literally don’t think it can turn into some kind of omnipotent and omniscient AI whatsoever. And now that I named it the people who haven’t named it shall feel so humiliated, like oh, it was that simple and we couldn’t say it. The reason robots can make art I’m sure is precisely because art isn’t creativity. What is creativity I think is staring the brittle boys in the face. I’m going to let them just stare and stare and not see it. They’re the brittle boys after all because they do think it can be boiled down to “creativity means making a painting or writing a song” when that’s clearly never been true. The inevitable reductio ad absurdum of that is that everyone knows not all paintings or songs or books are all that creative and that many other things are (e.g., scientific theories,) but since creativity has been conflated with that in the eyes of mainstream programmers, now all AIs can really do is be lazy Bukowski-reading bums who sit around making extremely derivative paintings, songs, and novels all day. The irony.
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