It's Not About Killer Robots - The Other Side of the Story

bydeelilah

1.3K followers

12 months ago

Wake Up, Truth Seekers!

Several days ago, I read several arresting pieces by one of our revered and favorite friends here at Wealthy Affiliate, TheCatherine.

"The Steering Wheel Came Off In My Hands"

"There Has Never been A Better time to join Wealthy Affiliate and become Financially Independent". 

My post today relates in one way, or another, to both of Catherine's blog posts-- and to an earlier, yet to be finished series of mine, in which I wrote about Alan Turing and the "Turing Test".

Alan Turing (1912-1954) was one of the earliest venturers into AI. The mix of mathematicians, logicians, cryptographers, inventors, investors, scientists, computer geeks, politicians, etc., etc., who forged the convoluted path, which brings us to the present, is filled with interesting and genius personalities.

Untangling the names, the technologies, and the timelines surrounding the "Internet" has been, still is, a little like solving a "Whodunit Mystery". Without Turing, we may have found ourselves in a totally different world today.

Thanks goes to another of our good friends, Frank, who encouraged me to research this man, whom some refer as the father of AI. Hold those thoughts.

"The earliest substantial work in the field of artificial intelligence was done in the mid-20th century by the British logician and computer pioneer Alan Mathison Turing. In 1935 Turing described an abstract computing machine consisting of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols. The actions of the scanner are dictated by a program of instructions that also is stored in the memory in the form of symbols. This is Turing’s stored-program concept, and implicit in it is the possibility of the machine operating on, and so modifying or improving, its own program. Turing’s conception is now known simply as the universal Turing machine. All modern computers are in essence universal Turing machines."

Where Am I Going With This?

Some of us have been studying, watching, playing around in-- assorted AI assisted language models, researching tools, and writing programs. There has been an explosion of articles here in Wealthy Affiliate, and every other network known to man, accompanied by an array of comments ranging from "It's an exciting time to be living," to "It's the end of the world."

Wow! And a few days ago, Google gave us BARD which, according to "Somebody", Google was not ready to release, but did so to keep up with, you know who, Microsoft.

There Is Another Side To The Story.

I have pointed out in a previous article how BOT outright lied to me and made me feel almost like he enjoyed doing it. He expressed that condescending arrogant tone that makes me shudder to think about. Some of you get it and others are chuckling.

Well, obviously (or is it?), he is expressing the tone of his programmers. He has not passed the Turing Test yet. Has he, Frank? No he has not.

But, I am questioning the programmers' motives...

Back To The Beginning

In Catherine's article about the steering wheel (a reprint of a former great post), she described the following: First she wrote an in depth review of George Orwell's 1984, comparing it to some of our current world problems. She entered that into ChatGPT.

Then she entered her story about the steering wheel.

Then she asked ChatGPT to correlate the two stories to affiliate marketing. BOT wrote a beautiful piece and connected it nicely to her personal story. He had nothing to say about the Orwell novel, 1984. Nada!

It's a little more complicated than that-- and I urge you to go read both of the articles I linked to above.

The following is a short conversation between me and Catherine regarding that post:

Me: Hi there, Catherine. This is a very interesting experiment. I wonder why "Bot" didn't choose to include any points based on the first half of your article, those speaking about George Orwell and his novel, "1984". You implied that you gave him the whole article. Is that correct?

Like 1Reply 3TheCatherineTop 504 days ago

@deelilah

Catherine: No I asked him to correlate the two experiences. In a separate prompt I asked him to draw it in but it didn't work

Like Reply deelilahTop 504 days ago

@TheCatherine

Me: I'm not surprised. He is particular and he lies too. I asked him once to write a poem about Donald Trump and he said he was not programmed to do that. Then I asked him to write a poem about Joe Biden and he proceeded to write a 12-stanza, 4-line poem in perfect aabb form. I wrote about it in one of my last two articles, a two-part one on a petition to halt AI training for six months. Don't worry, that's not to halt anything up to and through ChatGPT4, but any future.

I Changed My Mind

I don't want the government injecting their controls over anything, including halting AI's future.

This diagram is from the second of Catherine's posts (referenced above), which was a clever piece involving the stars lining up around meaningful societal events, the state of the world today, and this curve. You must read her article.

Napier's Curve Describing a Logarithmic Decline

We are the world. The question is where are we on this graph? Does the question make more than a few of us feel uneasy?

Here Is The Other Side Of The Story

I don't feel uneasy about AI taking over the world on its own. I never was. It does not have a mind of its own. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't.

Right now AI has the mind of its creators. And that should give you pause. But there are more immediate reasons to fear. Government/s must not be allowed to put AI technology to Orwellian uses.

I recommend everyone read or reread that novel, "1984" by George Orwell. It is a chillingly fun read (There is a chillingly fun oxymoron.) It is prophesy coming true.

It was about this time, 1984, when the big, clunky handsets appeared. With these, you could walk several hundred feet away from your hardwired phone, which decorated a wall nicely or sat on your desk. Many of us were around to watch Big Brother's encroachment. We didn't care. I had an uncle who warned us to not do that, because someone out in the ether could, should they want to, listen to or record our conversations.

It was true then and it's truer now. With leaky airwaves, greedy ears, and lying lips, security is one of the names of the games.

What about companies whose whole business revolves around collecting and selling personal data?

China's citizens live in an Orwellian world now. The government has complete control over its citizens through the use of various technologies. And AI is helping them (the government) do it with great efficiency. China is a surveillance state in almost every way. Based on the data it receives, China uses this information to make predictive scores of people's loyalty (to the government). And they award privileges based on one's score. A privilege could be being allowed to leave one's house. Ring any bells?

There is a government church in China. That is it. The others are persecuted, fined, driven underground, imprisoned, or killed. This is not what we want.

Is that where we are headed? According to some reports, we may be.

I am quoting from the Epoch News, San Francisco, April 28-May 2 (2023) Page A6, Nation.

". . .barred Catholic priests from ministering to service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Just before Easter, Walter Reed issued a cease- and-desist letter to the Holy Name College Friary, stating they must stop providing religious services at Walter Reed. Instead the contract for "pastoral care" was granted to Mack Global LLC, a defense contractor that provides janitorial supplies and industrial machinery, among other things."

If that isn't the height of disrespect coming from our government, I don't know what is. You can feel how demeaning that is no matter what your faith.

My government has shown me nothing to keep my trust. So I worry if they get their hands on anything they can use to increase their power and my dependency, including AI, blockchain, etc. It makes me nervous to say that out loud but Big Brother knows more than that about me.

Global banking has a lot of power over all of us too, but that was in a previous post and is another story for another day.

Here Is The Answer

As it stands, ChatGPT cannot pass the "Turing Test". In simple terms, a computer put through a series of tests must be able to fool a human into believing that between it and another human, it has provided the human answer.

This is also a story I intend to continue. Stay tuned. Thank you for reading.

Yours, Donna (aka Deelilah)