Compounding Cultural Interest (3%)

Ok, this past week, the NYT morning synopsis gave me these two gems about AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) uses its imagination, 3-27% of the time.
How long then, will it take for AI to fill up the internet with its Grand Imaginary?

And by contrast, what is the rate of new (valid) human contribution to the internet (real or imaginary, but not fraudulent). And how will the growth of AI inventing information outperform/outspeed our own contribution?

NYT November 6, 2023

And if, the military is thinking about using AI to improve its ‘performance’ for whom? against whom?

And if a bot (endowed with all its algorithmic wisdom) directs a kill, are war-crimes against humanity called off, bc who can indict a bot?

I know i’m going a bit off the rails here, but What Would Orwell Do (WWOD)?

What is Inflation, actually?

• We are all experiencing Inflation

• the NYT also reported that a year ago bacon was 20% less expensive. it is now (I think) $7.49/lb (I didn’t screenshot that ‘fact’).

So what might ‘cultural inflation’ look like. With our own distortions for facts, or with the aid of AI bot invention?

What is our GOAL good people? What are we trying to Win? Build? Convene?

Have we lost the true sensuality of the incredible biological duo of perception-linked-to-conception as our bodies receive information and our brains attempt to reflexively process it.

Or have we given up on democracy entirely —on the hard-shared-discussions— and the one that masters the rational bot, is the one that masters the most equitable decisions? What is the promise of these bots, really? Is it really so bad to have ‘blank page’ syndrome - where you can’t ‘write’ that thing you want to write, so you ask the bot to get you started down a path, any path?

Or have we given up on our humanity - that to live inevitably is to incur wrongs. And we can do wrong, and reflect on that, and then attend to our wrongs as one individual in a community.

Not to be all romantic about our ability to think, bc the actual news reported some Juicy ones.

For CONTEXT of how humans are doing with their own rationalities, the following 2 news items are reported as real human news about real human thoughts and actions on November 6 in the same NYT email.

Of course this was reported and not imagined - November 6, 2023

And this was also reported on November 6.

Don’t get me wrong; I am a profound advocate for imagination.

And

• clearly humans have a hard time using words with each other, let alone sharing space.

• there is a big difference between making stuff up, and acting on it.

• there is a big difference between having a context of relative corporal safety for ones imagination to thrive, and living in a war zone and the-whatever-one-has-to-do-to-keep-it-together-imagination.

And perhaps the way the next generation will tend for my generation will be with Bots running on Algorithms, maximizing my well-being with some metric based on 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10000 diagnostic variables.

And perhaps bots will negotiate a rational peace treaty between Palestine and Isreal.

And perhaps bots will Integrate religion and science and construct a geometry of equitably shared space for happy, healthy plural societies.

I truly believe in story-telling. But I think we need to think about WHY we tell stories. And for WHOM are we telling them. And then vigorously ask ourself what is our MOTIVE. Because we are clearly a creature who Absorbs the stories we are told.