Thoughts on AI

 Here's my issue with AI. 

We developed the internet, which was fine, but we expected too much of it. We thought it would expand our consciousness - and turn us into better versions of ourselves. But it didn't; it just let us look further into our hearts. Look at what's on display now, the angry, bitter, venal behaviour that floods social media. The internet wasn't a gateway; it was a mirror. It's showing us, US. And we're not great. 

But that would have been fine - if we'd learned. It doesn't particularly seem to me that we have.

And now - there's AI. We took all of that machine learning and let computers loose, with the expectation that they'd create something wonderful - or that they'd replace mundane employment, freeing human beings to enjoy lives of unfulfilled promise.

Except that's not happening either. We gave AI everything we know, and expected it to be able to replace us, but it's just another version of us. Instead of a person idly scrolling on the internet, flicking through Instagram, wasting their life with something petty. AI gives us a program, idly reforming images (based on inputs we've given it), flicking through those images as they endlessly morph and grow into further iterations of minor inputs we've supplied. AI isn't going anywhere new, it's going to places w'eve told it to go. It's the logical progression to the internet as a mirror. That internet mirror showed us all the dark places, the faults and the foibles of our existence. Then, AI turned around and started to just pinball around through the fractal chaos of all that information, defining and redefining the strange neural journeys our minds can take. But we know the steps on those journeys; they're nothing new.

Instead of AI, we need a way to expand ourselves, not have a program crawl through the myriad pathways of the houses our minds already reside in. We need to escape the paradigm completely. AI represents something that's still inside us. It will reproduce and grow but can never escape that boundary. 

The next step for us is to identify what's on the other side of that boundary.