AI, AGI, and our society of spectacle
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(Below is the transcript for the episode but edited for readability) We've reached this moment in time where technology has become sublime. We are advancing so fast that we do not understand the mechanisms and workings of the things we use every day. While it's not necessarily a negative thing, there is a lack of understanding even among those who are developing, innovating, and maintaining these technologies. This means they may not fully comprehend the implications of their work. This is why the emerging technologies around AI, AGI, and ChatGPT have my attention. I do not fear some apocalypse-like event that films like The Terminator or The Matrix depict, where AI-based machines take us over and control everything because, in those films, the underlying assumption is that in order for an AI to control you, they must operate against you physically, but this misses something fundamentally about how we are controlled, as all you must do to integrate and influence our drives, desires, and forms of communication-you simply need to control our apparatus of illusions. Yuval Harari, the bestselling author of the book Sapiens, talks about how AI gaining the mastery of human language, allows AI to have all it needs in order to cocoon us in a matrix-like world of illusions. We operated in a world of illusions before AI. However, AI is developing the ability to experiment with these illusions in the background of our human operating system and society. And this is why I've been refocussing on cybernetics, as it examines these systems of communication we utilize and then attempts to understand how said systems create systems of control. These systems are always emerging as well. They are changing, adapting, and evolving. Understanding the systems of control that we use in society and how they are always changing is why AI's relationship with these systems is so fascinating. We are talking about an emerging technology that has the ability to utilize our language, have an infinite drive and focus when provided a task, the ability to explore that goal with curiosity, thus adapt at an exponential rate; and then we've already provided that system access to the ultimate data backlog-the internet. Oh, oh, and on top of this, we operate in a system that pressures people to be motivated by profit. And we now have the corporations and people that are most psychotically driven by profit taking part in an arms race to develop a product based around AI that drives further profit. So, what must a company do in order to profit from something like this? Well, it has to do at least one of two things, either consume your time by keeping your attention or it must drive you to make some purchase, both of these things further integrate a consumer into a system. And the most successful companies typically succeed at doing both of those things. Now, hand a corporation a technology that can emerge, develop, and play around with those two goals in the background, with endless money being thrown at its development, can you imagine the consequences? AI will seamlessly integrate into our society. We will be using AI tools to make an attempt at understanding the potential dangers of the future. The technology of AI itself will become the subject that tells us what the future is, leading us to have an inability to imagine it. AI doesn't need human consciousness to destroy us, it simply needs to utilize our desire and need to imagine the world around us. We communicate to the world and hope that the world reciprocates and mirrors our expression back to us, that is all AI needs to do-act as a mirror, fueling our own egos and desire for comfort. Our seemingly inherent need for comfort, combined with our lack of self-awareness, creates the perfect breeding ground for our undoing. And it's our lack of self-awareness that becomes the noose we are tying around our own necks. Our new Gods will be the artificial intelligence, yet our own blind arrogance will hav
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