(Recorded “Zoom-me” May 7, 2023) Alright, thought I’d give you an update on this pretty certain idea I have about a prediction either for the next week or the next year, and it’s that most humans are going to realize they have been overestimating humans or underestimating AI. Pretty safe prediction I think. And the latest example was surrounding the Hollywood walkout by the writers. A prominent director said that artificial intelligence is the antithesis of originality. I wonder if this person also believes that a silicon-based artificial intelligence will never be able to produce something original. If that is the case, they don’t believe in or understand AGI. I guess someone could understand AGI completely and say, okay, even though it displays the full spectrum of cognition, thought, rationality, emotion, and everything else completely identical to a human, it isn’t the same. But in the simplest definition of original being something that hasn’t been created before, AI from decades ago was capable of this.

So the Hollywood writers are defending their jobs for a variety of reasons but certainly job security is one of the main driving forces. But what is much more interesting to me is the thinking process of anyone who feels AI is putting their job security at risk. What is their overall philosophy on the nature of AI and humans and the differences between them? Are they underestimating AI, overestimating humans? Or are they seeing it all very clearly and realize the current capability and future potential of AI. Either way, one strategy that might delay this threat to job security could be to diminish the reputation of AI by slandering it with comments such as, “AI is the antithesis of originality.” What does this mean? I can sit here and say a random string of words like the dog Lassie rode off on a dragon into the never, never land, and then laid an egg. And that egg broke open above a field of marijuana and rainbows came flying out. And wherever the rainbows landed, there was a new universe. And that’s how universes are born. Now that’s probably original (?) and I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about until I heard the words coming out of my mouth (reminder this was originally an audio recording). If someone says to you, name an object or pick a number between one and a hundred, or just start talking and don’t stop for 30 seconds. Either way, you will realize that the words coming out of your mouth were not all consciously chosen. Because if you think about just saying a normal sentence of 7 to 10 words, do you actually experience consciously choosing every word as you’re saying it in a sentence before you say it? It certainly doesn’t seem very adaptive to fill your stream of consciousness with a bunch of words. And personally, I am usually thinking about something completely different than what I am talking about. So my basic point is that our brains and ChatGPT are generating language in a similar way, following rules of probabilities.

Back to Hollywood, this is one of many growing labor movements, with high potential for a revolution at some level. And there are already many people that are anti-AI, so to what extent will this grow, and how similar will it be to a religion? Now that is going happen, but I don’t think that’s going be a big influential movement that counters the pro AI people. And almost everyone is going to be using AI, it’s just going to be how and what type they are using. So you’ll have different level levels of it, really good AI, just average AI, and then really bad AI. But then you can say it’s just really good, but it’s got such a limited function so you can have an AI that only is in charge of shutting off lights in your house. That’s pretty low level AI, but it’s AI, it’s doing very simple information processing autonomously.

I think it’ll be interesting to see the reaction of the different work sectors as their jobs are diminished or erased by AI. Do you jump ship, try to get a better job, try to embrace AI? It all seems so inevitable to me. Once I saw what ChatGPT could do, essentially, that it could generate really good writing on any topic you could imagine, a well organized research paper in less than a minute, boom, mind blown. The day before I learned about this, if you’d asked me how close we were to having something like that, I would have first thought, wait, is that a major goal of AI development right now? A chatbot? It’s funny because now I understand the implications of having such a system. If you were to describe ChatGPT in terms of human capabilities, it would be the smartest, most knowledgeable, fastest thinker and writer on the planet. And although it has limits, it far exceeds humans in enough of these categories to make you realize an AI chatbot is an insanely practical tool for so many jobs. And back to the guy that said AI can’t produce original content, it can write poems and jokes, it can understand jokes, tell you why a joke is funny, and create amazing art and realistic photos. It does all this type of really abstract stuff that I thought was years off or didn’t really even know that this was being developed. I had experience with chatbots but did not think we were trying to advance them to this degree. I thought some cool new AI technology would come out soon, but I’m sure I didn’t spend much time thinking oh, someday a really good AI system will write an amazing essay on any topic when you prompt it. And it will change our world in so many ways. And then it did.