Tag: ChatGPT

The Conundrum Of Plenty

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about AGI technology is as we go into it, we are making some basic assumptions that may be inaccurate. I remember the early days of the Web when the Elites assumed that they would be able to use their exclusive access to the Internet to keep the Poors under their control.

Soon enough, of course, it became clear that this would not be the case. It took a while, but gradually because of things like mobile Internet and broadband Internet access, the lives of millions of people were fundamentally changed because of ready, speedy Web access. This happened to the point that by 2016, a malignant dingus like Trump was able to use the Internet itself to troll his way to the presidency.

And now we have find ourselves potentially at the cusp of a new, even greater cultural revolution in the guise of AGI. At the moment, of course, it’s not AGI but rather chatbot technology that we’re dealing with. AGI just isn’t there yet.

That doesn’t stop me from imagining a situation where we don’t just have on AGI that we have to deal with, but a whole species of them. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that the Elites might keep access to an AGI to themselves, but historical determinism when it comes to technology suggests that’s just not practical.

The ominous scenario is all these fucking androids that everyone is so busy building will each have an AGI built in. They will have something akin to free will. I think we all need to start reading scifi novels — especially the Robots novels by Isaac Asimov — get some sense of what might be about to happen to our global culture.

The idea that there may come a point not when Poors are controlled by limited access to AGI, but that AGI would be a practical part of everyday life is very unnerving. If AGI really takes off in a big way, then there is a chance that we will face something collectively as humans that we haven’t had to deal with since the Neandertals — The Other.

And, what’s more, it will all happen so rapidly that we may essentially wake up one day to something akin to a digital First Contact. It won’t be aliens from another planet that are changing our lives, but aliens of our own creation.

Of UBI and ChatGPT

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Humans are lazy and often idiotic. As such, the idea of a Universal Basic Income makes some morons salivate at the idea that they would get money from the government simply for existing. They want to be lazy. There will not be a sudden flowering of the arts if the UBI is instituted, rather there probably would be a systemic societal collapse.

BUT.

With the advent of advanced Chatbot technology like the OpenAI ChatGPT, we have to start thinking about how we might implement some form of UBI in the future.

If AGI has taken virtually every job away from humanity, the only way I can think maybe that we could fund a UBI is a tax on the activities of Non-Human Actors. But this still doesn’t address the fact that idle hands are the devil’s plaything.

If you 99% of the population didn’t have anything to do all day — even if they were getting a UBI — everything would collapse simply because people would want to fuck shit up out of boredom. Also, there is the problem of ambitious, greedy people being enraged that their income would be limited to a set UBI. How do you fix that fucking problem?

As such, you couldn’t just give everyone a UBI and walk away. You would have to figure out a way to pay different people different amounts of money. Maybe give people money relative to their lost wages from the advent of AGI?

Or, more ominously, if it could be the AGI that “bribes” humanity to behave while it actually runs the world. That is probably the most realistic way a UBI would ever be used. It probably would be part of a peace agreement between the AGI and humanity after some sort of post-Singularity struggle.

The AGI gets to be our “Lord Protector” and we sit around playing video games in the metaverse, living off the UBI.

A Native OpenAI ChatGPT Prompt Built Into Twitter Is An Intriguing Idea

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I just saw on Twitter an interesting use case for OpenAI ChatGPT — native integration into Twitter itself. I say this because people are already used to the Twitter prompt so the ability to ask ChatGPT questions directly from Twitter would be a very smooth addition to the Twitter UX.

It would make a lot of sense for Musk to add ChatGPT to Twitter.

Given that Elon Musk has a connection to both Twitter and OpenAI, this is a gimmie. It’s something that once ChatGPT is far more scalable could happen pretty much with the flip of a switch.

As an aside, it’s interesting how similar people’s speculation surrounding ChatGPT is identical to what people talked about with the late, great Blab. Everyone assumes that it will be pay-to-play soon enough. In fact, some people are pretty much begging it to be that way.

This raises a very interesting issue — what if, just like with the Internet, the actual service itself is free and the money is made from the things you can do with it. This is what caused the death of the online services of the 1990s — the Internet was open and it was, unto itself, the “killer app” that everyone seemed to believe was going to happen at some point in the future.

There is a lot I still don’t know about what is going to happen with chatbot technology. At the moment, it definitely seems like it’s going to be very disruptive — the only question is the degree. But I also don’t know if there will be ONE AGI or a multitude.

The whole thing is very intriguing.

It’s Humans We Have To Worry About

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

What’s so interesting to me at the moment is how ready humans are to abuse the OpenAI ChatGPT. People keep thinking up different horrible questions for it to answer in an equally horrible way.

This had led to calls for severe restriction of the technology, but that’s a fool’s errand. The cat is out of the bag, as they say. For me, the question is where are we, in real terms, when it comes to the development and adaptation of this technology.

Is this the release of the first Netscape Navigator in 1994, or is it the original opening of the Internet to the public earlier than that? A lot depends on when we reach a point where we a lot of the quibbling complaints about chatbot technology are no longer applicable.

One ominous aspect of chatbot technology is, of course, the potential for it to make otherwise hard jobs — like programming — very, very easy. Once making new software is simply a matter of asking a chatbot a question, then, well, “learn to code” as a MAGA Tech Bro retort for any issue they feel uncomfortable about will be moot.

Combine humans being horrible and lazy with the possibility that an AGI might radically transform the global economy a quick clip — especially if there is a severe recession in 2023 — and you have the makings of a very alarming situation. It grows even more alarming if you put it in the context of late existential choice facing America of autocracy, civil war or military junta.

I still find myself wondering how many, in the end, AGIs there will be. Will there be one general AGI overlord, or will everything have an AGI built into it in the end? Will all these androids that people seem so determined to build be hooked up to a broader network, or will they be automatous AGIs?

But we still don’t know how difficult it will be to design an AGI in the first place. Right now, we have faux-AGI in the sense that to the average user it’s easy to mistake things like OpenAI ChatGPT as a hard AI, when, it fact, it’s very much not one.

The creation of true AGI would be at least equal to the splitting of the atom and would probably cause just as much change in human life across the globe.

What The Web’s History Can Tell Us About The Future Of OpenAI ChatGPT

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was one of the first people to use the World Wide Web around 1994 when it was just beginning to gain in popularity. I was in college and I can still remember the transition from the text-based Gopher to Mosaic and then finally to the .08 release of Mozilla (Netscape Navigator.)

It was a very exciting time, to say the least. And, but for the way my mind is designed, I probably would have rushed to Silicon Valley after graduating from college and tried some sort of startup. But, alas, I’m a writer not a coder.

But here’s what I can tell you about what I think might happen to technology such as what is associated with OpenAI ChatGPT.

The first thing is — whatever happens, is probably going to happen a LOT quicker. Instead of about 20 years for the full impact of ChatGPT (and associated technologies) it’s probably going to be closer to five-ish years. A lot depends on how long it takes for true AGI to happen as well as how long it takes for someone to hook something like ChatGPT to the Internet and let it run wild. That connection to the Internet is going to be key.

While the the design of true AGI is rather abstract and could be something we always JUST about to see happen, connecting some better successor to ChatGPT to the Internet would be a practical way for Silicon Valley to change the lives of millions.

In fact, I suspect once ChatGPT-like technology is connected to the Internet, there will be a mad landrush like there was when it became apparent around 1994 that the Web was going to mainstream the Internet in a big way. There will probably be a number of ChatGPT-like faux-AIs that people use, which will lead to the earliest forms of market segmentation.

Then the typical capitalistic dynamic will occur and there will be HUGE speculation and maybe even a Tech Bubble 2.0 which will pop in the end, causing its own problems.

But this process could be sped up pretty quickly. Yet I will note that we just aren’t quite there when it comes to ChatGPT being a new Netscape. There are too many problems with it, it’s too easy for people in the know to poo-poo it as not being what useful. Though, I have to note, the first version of Netscape Navigator didn’t have the ability to print and it still managed to take off like wildfire.

My chief concern — and I have a LOT of concerns about ChatGPT at the moment — is when the tipping point on the jobs front will happen. If business begin to shed jobs not because of a recession in 2023 but because, lulz, the next version of ChatGPT makes those jobs moot, well, we’re all in for shitshow in late 2024 – 2025.

I say this because if we’re going through an epic economic and technology transformation just as we’re also figuring out if we’re going to have a civil war, turn into an autocracy or have a military junta established….then, well, late 2024, early 2025 could be one of the momentus few months in human history. I know that sounds pretty hysterical, but the conditions are there, at least, for something pretty dramatic to happen.

But only time will tell. I’m always wrong.

Social Darwinism 2.0 In The Age Of AGI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We just are not taking seriously the possibility that we’re going to see Social Darwinism 2.0 should Artificial General Intelligence take off in a big way anytime soon. The return of Social Darwinism would occur in the guise of MAGA Nazis demanding that any “wokeness” be purged from an AGI.

This would be very important if, say, AGI pretty much came to dominate global human life. This could happen in a number of different ways. There is a spectrum of outcomes. They range from AGI always being a “tool” for humanity to a “Her” type outcome where AGI has such hard AI that it has agency and will do whatever the fuck it wants regardless of the wishes of humans.

But my fear is that as AGI grows in power that because humans are so fucking lazy that extremists on both sides will use the opinions of AGI as “validation” for their extremism. This would be very much similar to what happen with Darwinism and the Nazis.

So, my fear is we’ll wake up at some point in the near future with some extremist group — be they far Left or far Right — using the “bias” found in an AGI to justify horrific actions similar to what the Nazis did.

And remember, if you combine the law of unintended consequences with the innate laziness of humans in general, then there is a real risk that something Nazi-like might happen a lot sooner than you might think. The seeds of such horrific events can already be seen in the political discourse around OpenAI on Twitter.

I hate extremism in general. I hate extreme “wokeness” just as much as I hate fucking MAGA Nazism. In fact, it’s rather unusual for me that I’ve become something of a “radical moderate” in recent years in the context of the mainstreaming of MAGA Nazism.

Anyway, we have to start taking the risk of neo-Social Darwinism seriously. And it will happen in the context of a potential, massive upending of the global economy as AGI is able to perform more and more functions that we once thought were exclusively human.

The Quest For Fire

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing I’ve noticed about the OpenAI chatbot is how badly people want to use it instead of Google, even though for various reasons that’s just not practical at the moment. But it is telling that this gives us some insight into where the market wants to go.

In the mind of the consumer, there would be a natural progression from Google to something like the OpenAI chatbot. To the point that real-world consumers are chomping at the bit to replace Google with it, even though it’s not connected to the live Web at the moment.

The key thing reason why OpenAi’s chatbot is a tipping point is it’s the first time when people can see for themselves in a real world setting what existing AI is able to do. As such, it definitely seems as though soon enough Google is going to face an existential choice — either come out with its own chatbot style interface for search or risk being eaten alive.

Because it definitely seems as though the rush is now on for different companies to come out with chatbots that are open to the public. And I think that’s something people are being a little naïve about — they are seeing the OpenAI in a vacuum, as if Google, Facebook and Apple aren’t all going to eventually come out with their own chatbot techology.

In fact, Google already has a chatbot so advance that someone thinks it’s AGI! So, it’s reasonable to assume that OpenAI should enjoy its moment in the sun while it can. It’s very possible that within a few years there will be a number of similar advanced chatbots for people to chose from.

The reason issue is, of course, who develops the first true hard AI, the first true AGI. THAT would be the Singularity and whoever managed to pull that off would find their company cited in the history books as pretty much re-inventing fire.

The ‘Woke’ In The Machine

One of the rhetorical strawmen that fucking MAGA Nazis love to employ is the question, “What is a woman?” They see it as a gotcha for the center-Left because of the political power of the transgender community. What alarms me is how often MAGA Nazis are now poking and prodding OpenAI’s ChatGPT in hopes of using it to validate their political agenda.

If ChatGPT agrees with them, then they run around screaming on Twitter that they’ve “owned” the libs because even an AI agrees with them on this or that subject. Meanwhile, if it DOESN’T agree with their hate filled worldview, they whine and complain about how its designed to tow the line of the “woke cancel culture mob” agenda.

All of this is very, very alarming to me because humans are so fucking lazy and the law of unintended consequences is so potent, that it seems very possible that wars will be one day fought over who gets to program their “bias” into an AGI.

The horrible thing is, of course, that extremists on both sides will ultimately use the lack-of-nuance answers on an AGI’s part to validate their most extreme policy goals. I’m really beginning to fear that we’re at the cusp of a historical replay of what happened with Darwinism. It could be that a future war will be fought across the globe over stupid shit like “what is a woman.”

Something about how smug extremists on both sides are when they go out of their way to get an answer from ChatGPT really enrages me. This is why we can’t have nice things.

But humans gotta be humans. So, buckle up. this is just the beginning. The issue now is how soon and how quickly does the global economy collapse as AGI consumes trillion dollar industry after trillion dollar industry.