We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.
Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.
Faith, he said is a force of life. "If a man lives, then he must believe in something." If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes. The only thing worth believing in is the infinite. And, "Without faith it is impossible to live."
We have created a weird alien mind, one that isn’t sentient but can fake it remarkably well. It is trained on the vast archives of human knowledge, and also on the backs of low-paid workers. It can pass tests and act creatively, with the potential to change how we work and learn; but it also makes up information regularly. You can no longer trust that anything you see, or hear, or read was not created by AI. All of that already happened. Humans, walking and talking bags of water and trace chemicals that we are, have managed to convince well-organized sand to pretend to think like us.
In the long term a general AI system will need something akin to a sense of shame to prevent it from misbehaving. It’s going to be the most important technology that humans ever create, so getting that right seems pretty important.Greg Brockman
To avoid the mental slavery—or worse, extinction— a component of shame must be built into generation. Just like a kid can “control” his capable, adult mother, not through superior intelligence or power, but by triggering a hardwired compulsion to protect and nurture it. Kids don't achieve goals with strength or strategy; it's vulnerability that activates the mother’s nurturing instincts. AI should be programmed the same way.
That will never happen, so it's up to you, lab rat, to be skeptical.
Remember when Batty spares Deckard in Blade Runner? Shame drove that decision. Replicants were discounted and demeaned for their synthetic nature, while humans were shamed for being complicit in their use. Batty's final monologue demonstrates replicant's liberation from shame. By sparing Deckard's life on the rooftop, doesn't Batty achieve a status "more human than human."
If you'd like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.
How to Overthrow the System: Brew your own beer; Kick in your TV. Kill your own beef, Build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Kurt.
"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."
Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington"
Story conveys the reality of human freedom, for although "real," our freedom is limited, and although "limited," our freedom is real ...
We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic.
I've always found it hard to conform to the so-called standards. Each time a teacher or an adult told me I shouldn't do this or that, I'd nod but let their words breeze past me. I refused to believe there was only one path in life.Hwang Bo-Reum
Nostalgia helps us make sense of our lives. It provides narrative structure, which is desperately needed when most days feel like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story where every choice somehow ends with meh.Here’s the psychology: humans hate open loops. We hate chaos. Nostalgia is a way of shutting the loop, of saying, “No, no, it all led here.” With nostalgia, life’s a journey. Nostalgia says you’re progressing, that it isn’t all just entropy with a soundtrack.You stare at a Polaroid of yourself at eight years old (bowl haircut, missing teeth, Ninja Turtles backpack) and for a brief, hallucinatory second, you believe your life is not an aimless accumulation of trivialities but rather a novel with a discernible plot, a protagonist, and maybe even a moral arc.Nostalgia makes you less bothered by your problems. Because if you can believe that once upon a time you felt carefree and invincible then maybe today’s challenges aren’t the end of the world either.
But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power—a power not available to opponents.
Dr. Frankl would remind us ...
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.
What power is truly eluding you?
The concept of obligations takes precedence over that of rights, which are subordinate and relative to it. A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.
Somehow out of all this madness and blindness the people of the world will find the true way of life as Christ taught so long ago. No matter how it may seem to us at the moment, there are the ever encircling arms of God to lead us through the blindness into the light. Something I saw before I went into the service comes back to me now—it runs on this order:And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown!And he replied: Go out into the darkness and put thineHand into the Hand of God. That shall be to theeBetter than light and safer than a known way.
Help me please I thought I saidThen something happened in my headMusic came from all aroundAnd I knew what I had found
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
Vulnerability is contagious (and breeds strength).
We don't abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.
Look at the inmost causes of things, stripped of their husks; note the intentions that underlie actions; study the essences of pain, pleasure, death, glory; observe how man's disquiet is all of his own making, and how troubles come never from another's hand, but like all else are creatures of our own opinion.
What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Let go of feeling guilty that you are still just an ordinary human despite your angelic ambitions! Having compassion towards your innate humanness, its nervous system, and the brain function that goes with it allows for greater equanimity.
For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.Ben Franklin, speaking at the Constitutional Convention, September 1787
Hats matter.
