“Robot Radio” low power FM station sign outside Meow Wolf art exhibition in Santa Fe, Texas.
Can computer technology “create”? I’ve been wrestling with that question a lot lately. Do AI’s really contain that precious thing called inspiration?
If not, will they? Ever?
My Robot – by Looper (Stuart David, co-founder of indie pop group Belle and Sebastian).
My old man brain shouts “No! Never.” And then I see or read a piece of AI “art” and I feel something.
Is it only pattern recognition tricking me?
Is it a bug in my programming?
At times I swear I’m picking up a signal, but is it live or is it Memorex?
“Black Sun, Dead Can Dance” – Courtesy of Airminded, an online creator who is exploring the possibilities of Art and has curated some really evocative images.
Did we put our ghost in the machine or do we only see our minds reflected? Are we giving dreams to machines or just giving them up?
I remember seeing a slide show in the ’70s, from a missionary on leave from Africa. Some of the slides showed traditionally-dressed people hiding their faces with their hands.
“Some of them hate having their pictures taken,” the missionary said. “They think the camera will steal their souls.”
That got a few titters from the congregation, of course. But I’m starting to wonder if the people in those photos are getting the last laugh. Could that be exactly what we’re doing as “modern” humans? Feeding our souls into a machine?
If we are will we ever get them back? If we don’t, will this thing we’ve made appreciate the gift?
Maybe those tribesmen should have been the missionaries? They might have been wiser than us.
I can’t help but love humans, as much as they may break my heart. I still hope our species will defy the odds, travel to the stars and and survive for thousands of years. Or millions, while we’re wishing.
Because humans can access a miracle known as inspiration.
I’m addicted to the stuff.
Jim White – Static on the Radio. (This song conveys the idea perfectly. I used to do this as a kid. The mystery…
Real artists bring things to life that never did exist in this world. To be honest, I consider myself a rational man, but it feels like magic.
Maybe it’s not magic, but I’m hanging onto that.
I think of it as the dragon’s whisker. Sometimes it feels like you could almost pull the entire dragon into this world.
When I see certain art, hear certain music, I feel it. It’s a bit like fishing. You can’t see it, but something is there. Something tugging the line. Something from somewhere… Else.
The fish may get away, but you KNOW you had something on the end of the line.
I have had a few tugs, but I don’t think I’ve reeled in any dragons yet. Dragon minnows at best.
I envy the people who reel in dragon after dragon, producing works that change people’s lives.
From the outside they may appear miserable. Magic takes it out of you.
But I know why they do it. It’s better than any drug.
Dead Can Dance – Summoning the Muse
I’m trying to expose myself to as much inspiration as I can before I leave this earth. I know it’s irrational, but I have a drive to listen to every great work of music from every time and culture. Impossible, but I try anyway.
Sarah Jarosz – My Muse
When I can’t channel it myself, I have to get it secondhand.
When I feel that tug, I’ll share. You might not feel it. We’re not all on the same wavelength.
But I have to try. My muse or whatever the hell it is, requires it.
I loved gardening as a kid, but I have a bad back and I don’t know how to grow anything around here.
The soil might as well be on the moon and the weather is crazy. But I do know how to compost.
I learned it from Dad, although he was much better at it. He would have those compost piles smokin’. I’m in the city, but some country boy ways never leave. You don’t put that stuff down the sink, you put it in the ground.
Now it occurs to me I’ve created a pet. A shaggy, too-dirty-to-come-inside pet. When it’s healthy it smells the forest floor. When it isn’t, it smells like the garbage disposal. I feed it the food it needs and it starts smelling happy again.
It stays in the back yard and doesn’t do much of anything. Except it does. Slowly.
It’s like a really boring dog that Nigel doesn’t hate. A dog made out of lawn clippings and kitchen scraps.
It’s not a demanding pet, and it’s easier to keep alive than a jar of sea monkeys. Or the toads like the ones I used to keep in a terrarium once. (Poor toads. You deserved better.)
Whenever I can I feed and water it. Nigel pees on it.
It shows its gratitude by getting smaller.
It may not be as exciting as a dog or cat, or the rare sea monkeys that actually hatch, but I raised it and I have a responsibility to care for it. (Sorry toads from when I was a kid.)
Digging through YouTube looking for compost songs and most of them were just too ridiculous. So is this, but I can’t resist. Apparently Lorraine Bowen is a minor celebrity in Britain. She’s been on Britain’s Got Talent and other shows. Go through her channel. She is very good at ridiculous!
Where is all this headed? Is it all just a runaway train or do we humans actually get a say?
Our motivations are not always what we think. Some are conscious, some are not.
I’d say the conscious motives for tech innovation are primarily: curiosity, profit, warfare.
I have a theory that our unconscious motive is to get an answer to the age old human question: What does it all mean?
Maybe our drive to create conscious AI is an attempt to get the answer to that question so we can quit asking.
If we pull it off, it will be an incredible accomplishment — and a very dangerous one. It could be the last thing we ever create.
I still don’t believe AIs “think.” They just follow their programming. (But then again, so do we.) That doesn’t mean it never will.
I worry that too much of AIs’ programming is based on the profit motive. Is that any way to build a godlike superintelligence?
Porno for Pyros – We’ll Make Great Pets. (Hopefully we’ll at least be pets.)
Conspiracy theories about evil cabals (made up of you know who) betray a lack of imagination if you ask me. I think global capitalism may actually be “alive.”
If so, it’s not any more “evil” than a tiger is evil. It’s still a big machine just following its programming: convert human activity into money.
If you want to create a Godlike being that sees us (and all life for that matter) as nothing more than raw material and will chew us up and spit us out, that’s the way to do it.
Even if our final machine isn’t based on capitalism, we’re still not off the hook. Existence is hard, or we wouldn’t be doing all this.
Mekkanikk – by Legendary Pink Dots (maybe they don’t really want to be pets either)
I know misery loves company, but is it really fair for us to do this? How smart can you get before you can’t stand it anymore?
What if being a conscious machine sucks? The ones in Bladerunner sure didn’t seem happy about it. Do we have the right?
If you, a human, get angry because you’re conscious and you know you’re gonna die, what are you gonna do about it? God and evolution are beyond your reach.
If an AI has an existential crisis in seconds and wants revenge on the human race, we will be in reach.
Right now, I’m still in the fascination phase (even though the Internet already killed a career I used to love – newspaper journalism). It didn’t do it on purpose.
However things turn out, I don’t think technology will ever scratch that itch. If our final machine deigns to speak to us, I predict it will tell us to keep looking. It’s our job.
Frank Herbert is more popular than he’s ever been lately because somebody finally made a decent movie about Dune.
(Really good in fact. Made me realize I didn’t quite get his point when I read it as a teenager. Villeneuve is a director who gets it.)
I’d like to see his other books become popular. He was such a great thinker and way ahead of the curve in so many ways.
I had no idea how important some of his topics would become later. He really knew how to extrapolate and he knew human nature.
One of those, is Destination Void. TLDR, it’s about a brutal attempt at creating true AI, with miraculous consequences.
After reading this blog post, I can see there was a lot more hand-waving the tech details than I remembered. But the writer was using his “hard SF” brain. I absolutely wouldn’t ignore the discussions about philosophy.
With all the new AI technologies coming online – AI art, ChatGPT, and the ones that make us fight on Twitter – questions about where all this is leading are more important than ever, whether you understand the tech or not.
BTW, apologies in advance, but I’ve decided to write longer pieces now and again. I’ll try to be merciful and edit the heck out of them.
What does AI “see” when it models human behavior? If AI became truly sentient would we even be able to tell?
You’ve probably heard of the Uncanny Valley, the idea that robots or animated characters get creepier and creepier the closer they look to actual humans.
But is there such a thing as “inverse uncanny valley”? Where we react negatively to what an AI thinks of us?
Benjamin Bratten, a guy who is way smarter than I am, believes so. People do seem to judge “human” behaviors from AI as disturbing or inaccurate. Bratten thinks this might not be because the AI is inaccurate, but that it’s not the reflection we wanted to see.
He has some other interesting ideas as well. Like how it’s a mistake to define machine intelligence based on how closely it resembles human consciousness when we don’t actually understand human consciousness.
Instead of trying to create copies of ourselves, maybe we should just let them become intelligent by doing what they do best, which is finding patterns we are incapable of recognizing.
Maybe we should interact with AI’s with the understanding that they are not conscious in a human way. When we do think we detect empathy in them, that doesn’t mean they have it. It is easier to make it seem like they have it because we project on them what we want to see.
Maybe we should quit being so human-centric and admit there is more than one way of being intelligent? #UncannyValley, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #Consciousness, #Intelligence, #Sentience #Computers, #BenjaminBratten
A few years ago I wondered if there was a chance I could convert myself from math ignoramus to math genius overnight. In my, let’s face it, old age.
I got the idea after seeing a documentary about Jason Padgett, a man who was basically the guy in the Pink Floyd song kicking around on a piece of ground. Then he became a genius after some guys kicked the shit out of him outside a bar.
After hearing him talk about how differently it made him see the world, I got jealous. I got partway into an algebra course on Khan Academy, before I realized I was using up my precious reserve of old man life force.
Only way it was ever gonna happen was to get kicked in the head, and most of the people who get kicked in the head that hard don’t become any kind of genius. Plus I’m allergic to getting kicked in the head.
Still I have this thing where I see things by people who do know what the hell they’re talking about and I want to understand it. No one told me in 9th grade algebra that I could use that shit on computers one day. They didn’t even have them in our school till the year after I graduated.
I wrote all my news articles on a manual Royal typewriter my first couple of years in the business. I’ll just have to settle for watching videos by people smarter than me and talking out of my ass. I’m WAY more talented at that skill.
I recently came across an article about a strange parasite that infects ants. I’ve been fascinated by parasites for a long time, even though they terrify me.
It’s not the one you’re thinking about. I just started watching “The Last of Us” and I’m as freaked out by the Cordyceps zombie fungus as everyone else.
No, this is a tapeworm. Any ant that catches it gets to stay young and live a life of leisure. Bring it on, right? You’d think that until you find out where it leads.
The host lives longer, but the colony slowly dies from overwork. I wonder how that could be applied to society?
It seems obvious now, but I never thought about it till I read that article: wealth is a parasite.
Not the poor like I used to think as a younger ant – and not the wealthy either, but wealth itself.
Whoever thought I would volunteer to write and give a sermon? I swore off church decades ago. I just happened to join a Unitarian church to make some friends. We’re lay-led at the moment and here we are…
It turns out you don’t have to be a Unitarian to be a Unitarian. Deep down, searching for truth and meaning was always my mission, which is why I’m here on a Sunday instead of sleeping in like I did for 30-plus years.
When I read the 4th Principle of Unitarianism, I was shocked to realize it was describing me. Young me would never believe it. It turns out I was a Unitarian in my heart all along.
My search for truth and meaning eventually led me here. Finally, a team that doesn’t make you pick a team. You just have to be kind.
I’ve traveled many paths searching for the Truth. Looking back, I held some seriously wrong views along the way. I looked to the people around me for answers.
I believed what I was supposed to believe, because I wanted to be “good.” It was hard to be the man I wanted to be, so I tried hard to do it their way.
But beliefs would fall apart when I examined them. I was never satisfied with clever slogans or answers people refused to explain. They had the right answers already and they didn’t want to think about it.
If they wouldn’t answer my questions, I had to find my own way. When I realized a belief was wrong, I had to let it go even if it was painful, which it was. I had to demolish world views I had worked so hard building.
It was bewildering and scary, but it was also exciting. I loved discovering new things. Sometimes I felt like the rug was being yanked out from under me, but I accepted it.
I’ve always wanted to know what it all means, what us humans are supposed to be doing here.
I read a lot, which made me think big thoughts and ask bigger questions. The more books, the more questions. My parents got me into that habit. They read constantly we discussed what we read.
The first Unitarian I met in the wild was a college classmate. He gave me a ride once. People who weren’t Baptists or Catholics were a novelty for me. He explained Unitarianism when I asked, but it didn’t really click.
My second year of college I read a book called The Faiths that Men Live By, which gave me my first ever fair descriptions of other religions’ actual beliefs.
Before that I had only been taught all the ways they were wrong. They weren’t as foolish and ill-intentioned as I’d been taught. I still had a long way to go, but suddenly the truth wasn’t so obvious anymore.
Coincidentally, I found out later that it was written by Unitarian minister and theologian, Charles Francis Potter.
Eventually I quit looking for the only path and chose a path that said to keep looking. I look for signposts that will point the way if I pay attention. Seeing a Yin and Yang sign out front when I’d just been reading about Eastern religions seemed like too big a coincidence. I felt, “It was meant to be.”
I had a rough time during the lockdown even though I never got covid. The pandemic and the isolation were hard enough, but watching the madness happening in the country was way worse.
I began to lose faith in humanity. How could supposedly decent people do and say such terrible things? And yet they thought they were on the right side.
I did what a lot of people did during the lockdown, I tried to learn Yoga and consumed a lot of videos and books about Zen, mindfulness and Taoism, traditions I had never examined before. And they began to make sense.
One concept that really resonated with me was Non-dualism. Non-dualism was common to most of them, and it was hard to wrap my head around at first.
There are many definitions for Non-Duality and they can get pretty involved. The Wikipedia article alone is a challenge to get through. I’m still trying to wrap my head around “non-difference of subject and object.”
I stole this definition from a website called Non-Duality for Dummies: “Non-duality is an ancient Eastern philosophy that means ‘not two.’ It refers to the nature of existence consisting of one interconnected whole, rather than many separate things cobbled together.”
That’s the simplest explanation I’ve found so far.
I used to think opposites had nothing to do with one another, but it turns out they’re intimately connected. A magnet must have a negative and a positive pole. You can’t have tall without short, up without down.
Thinking about Non-Duality also shows how relative everything is. Is it a big rock or a small boulder? How many is “some”? Some arbitrary place between all and nothing.
I’m a giant eyeball to whatever looks at me through a microscope, but I’m a speck compared to the earth. And the earth is a speck compared to everything else.
Even for a lifelong science fiction fan, that was a lot, but I’ve started to grasp the basics. How everything is connected, and there isn’t really a “pure” version of anything.
I thought I knew what black looked like, but then they invented a pigment called Vanta black that will make a ball look like a spot. Everyone and everything are on a scale. That clicked.
The reason non-dualism resonated so hard is it gave me better way to look at good and evil. I needed that. Growing up, I was taught there were good people and bad people. You needed to stick with the good ones and avoid the bad. And the bad ones couldn’t be us.
The last few years were making me question: Is the human race worth saving? Is it inherently bad? Does that include me? Do the bad things I’ve done and thought in the past make me a bad person? Are bad people redeemable?
We all think we’re the good guy in the story, even if we aren’t. I’ve decided the way you really become the good guy is to just try to be better than the day before. Which made me feel better about myself and humanity.
Now I understand one shades into the other. Good and evil are on a scale. You can choose to move up or down on that scale. Redemption doesn’t just happen all at once. It’s a process.
I also discovered psychologist Carl Jung during the lockdown and his theories were also in line with those ideas. It’s hard to know where you stand on the good and bad scale.
Your unconscious knows the real story, but your ego will try to make you the hero every time. If somebody got hurt, they deserved it “because,” you “had to do it,” or whatever explanation makes you feel better.
English writer and lecturer Alan Watts explained it beautifully. “I think this is the most important thing in Jung, that he was able to point out: to the degree you condemn others and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself.”
Everyone is at least a little bad, but that’s just part of being human. Understanding that helps you to be kind to yourself, which makes it easier to be kind to others.
I used to think being a good person meant fighting and repressing your dark side. Now I understand that side of you is something you have to accept and forgive.
It turns out the most important part of being good is kindness. Toward other people and toward yourself.
Hell of a cover of Tennesee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons by Jeff Beck and ZZ Top.
I get credit card offers in the mail almost daily. I always toss them but it never stops.
I used to get tons of those when I was in the paper business. I was like, WTF? Don’t they know what I do for a living? How the hell do they think I’m ever gonna pay them back?
It has finally occurred to me that they don’t care if you can pay them back unless you’re one of the big fish. They just want a as many of us little fish as possible TRYING to pay them back. That’s something they can work into their budgets.
They’re not worried about you going bankrupt. They’re worried about the real estate developer.
Bankers are really trappers and we’re the fur! How’s that for a mixing metaphors?
Gotta share the OG version of Sixteen Tons. Dedicated to Granny, who I forced to listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival in the car when she mistakenly thought they were a gospel group.
Late Boomer's Den 
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