Large Fierce Mammal

“The ‘real world’, as it turns out, is not where most people live, nor are they required to as it is just as possible to live an entire apparently fulfilled life absent any attempts at objectivity or even half-hearted use of critical thinking as it is to work for years with someone whose name you can’t remember without ever once giving the game away.

“Your own ‘real world’ may be a self-made, and workable within your own context, version of an agreed upon statement of facts. Right now, most of what has come to be called ‘content’ offered up to be eagerly gobbled down by the masses comes from sources tailored to validate this propensity which is innately human with genesis far before the current century, and well before Phineas Taylor Barnum is credited with audibly observing, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

“To indulge in it doesn’t make you a sucker although it can render the unwary vulnerable to being one. Even repeatedly.

“And from this comes the combined promise and threat of Artificial Intelligence which will be the topic of our next gathering.” ~ An Agreed Upon Statement of Facts

This, it would seem, is the next gathering as aforesaid.

On 26 September 2012, as part of my Worldly Wisdom Wednesday series, I published an article here on the subject of Tools in which I set forth a list of fundamental defining characteristics. Read this and keep it in mind as we delve into the forging of this new “tool”:

“A real Tool then must be a True force multiplier – thus a True Tool, and to be that it must fit into one or more vital categories including, but not limited to, making a heretofore impossible job possible, a hard job easier, a risky job safer. In addition, it must conform to the following absolutes, each of which is so important that the order of their presentation is of no consequence –

• It must be maintainable.
• Its durability and longevity must not constitute a built-in guarantee of waste.
• Life with it must be superior to life without it.
• Neither its use, nor the job it was devised to perform, shall represent the creation of an equal or greater problem while solving another.
• It must not represent the lesser of two or more evils.
• For any given task, it must provide a dividend in the form of time expended, materials used, and/or energy required.
• It must exist to do a job that is necessary within the context of sound ecological and ergonomic practice.

“In short, it must serve within the balanced Economy of Nature, and not the wasteful ‘economy’ of dollars and cents in which the soothing buzzword ‘sustainable’ really describes business practices that will permit continued rates of growth and consumption – business as usual – with a smaller discernible impact. For any organism, getting through a day requires expenditure of energy and resources for the purpose of acquiring more energy and resources. Simply living in place requires at least a ‘break even’ on that balance, but a higher return is required if the organism must hunt and catch its prey, for reproduction, the rearing of young, migration, overwintering, or hibernation. Everything in Nature is about efficiency and balance, which is why life is, first and foremost, an exercise in energy management. For example, the Way of the Wild demands of each parent that their offspring be made self-sufficient as quickly and efficiently as possible. A tool need not be a physical artifact – rest assured that skilled parenting is a Tool – but to be True it must help, not hinder, such processes, and must never represent a brilliant answer to a question that was never asked. Let’s look at a few modern examples that have gone that way, but didn’t have to.” ~ Worldly Wisdom Wednesday — Tools

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 21st Century understanding of the term is a suite of technologies harmonized to collect and curate information so that the output may present an amazingly credible simulacrum of human creativity, sexuality, and mendacity. Contrary to the way it has been presented, the reality of AI is neither new nor mature, so most of what is seen, or unseen but implied, in the wild today falls into four primary classifications:

1. AI — Threat or menace?
2. AI the saviour — We’re saved!
3. AI — Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
4. AI in the shadows — Child of secret research, both private and public sector, outcomes cloaked behind a mixture of laws falling under national security, intellectual property, and a host of others designed to keep the cards close to the vest, if not up a sleeve.

The Truth is more nuanced than that but in general those are the high points one sees expressed in headlines, many of which may have been created, at least in part, employing AI technology.

It has long been known that people will believe what they want to believe, so the key to control is to feed the want. With that in mind, let us look today at an example of AI at work presented by Floyd Bishop. Next time we convene, we’ll be digging ever deeper!