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AI
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2025-02-27
The Glastonbury Symposium is not exactly a mainstream source of topical wisdom - it is however a good venue for challenging one's "little grey cells" to take a hard look at what may be coming right around the next corner.
Andy Thomas, long-time power behind the Symposium, presents another keynote address, providing a critical discussion of the issues of the day (this was July 2024).
Not to mention a possibly terrifying view of the incoming future ...
He covers a lot of ground.
" ... you can't trust anything any more ... "
" ... any advanced civilisation that has managed to reach space and is visiting here in their craft must surely have gone through the AI revolution ... therefore ..."
Watch to the end. It's your view that counts.
(62 minutes)
Like / Dislike this video here.
As mentioned by Andy, get the book "The Coming Wave" (now discounted!) at Amazon.
Watch The Day the Earth Stood Still on YouTube.
Visit the Glastonbury Symposium to book for the next event in late July 2025.
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2025-02-25
The future of AI?
The market leaders took a knock recently when the Chinese DeepSeek made its debut on the world AI stage, denting their aura of invincibility and sending shock waves through the stock valuations of certain chip makers.
But who actually understands how AIs work?
And equally importantly, how they don't work? After all, they are the creation of human beings (work with me here) so will inevitably tend to inherit the human characteristic of fallibility.
So is AI on course to World take-over en route to conquering the Solar System, the Galaxy, and ultimately the Universe?
Or is it just another Ponzi scheme in the venerable tradition of the South Sea Bubble - but much BIGGER?
"In effect, investors aren't getting a piece of OpenAI, or any kind of control over OpenAI, but rather shares in the future profits of a company that loses over five billion dollars a year"
"Place your bets now"!
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2025-02-07
Why should the Devil have all the best tunes?
Equally, why should the Devil have all the best AI?
We are now accustomed to the notion that "the AI" will be intent to replace humanity (and ultimately control the remaining humans through the IoT - the Internet of Transhumans: Homo Transfectus). Indeed some speculate that "the AI" will naturally evolve to require to eliminate humanity so that it itself may survive. Happily that discussion is out of scope of this article 😎.
But indeed, there is AI and there is AI.
So we can probably agree that we should harness the power of AI to work in our favour, and that we should design new AIs to naturally embody that requirement. And here we are probably not talking about specialist AIs that are designed to fulfil a specific technical requirement (for example, to analyse speech and/or ancient texts to tease out the original meanings in the modern language vernacular). We are talking about the general purpose AI that can do things like control a robotic battlefield, and manage the world's geopolitics and military-industrial complexes to triumph in the incoming inter-galactic wars ...
Are we there yet? Hmmmm.
If we are, then we could have a big problem on our hands. And we are now pretty sure that vast sums of money have been (almost certainly illegally) diverted into Pandora's Box, AKA the DARPA-Military-Industrial-Complex black projects that obviously "don't exist".
Still, for such an AI to directly control the realms of battlefields and geopolitics, we would need IoT connectivity to both robotic armaments and robotic politicians (ie: homo transfectus - possibly already patented by such as Pfizer - yes, some may believe we have these already!).
But I digress. Further speculation in this vein I will leave as an exercise for you, dear reader.
So to return to today's topic, Martin Geddes is of the view that we can already use the AI currently available to good effect for humanity's more humble purposes.
Here is his exploration of this concept, in analysis of the nuances implicit in the "Great Awakening".
Enjoy, whilst you still can ...
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2025-02-04
Well, AI seems to be all the rage currently so yet another article on the topic may be in place.
As so often it's Martin Geddes who pushes the buttons to persuade AI into topics new. Far-fetched? Maybe not.
And AI is going to be around until it's uninvented, which "could be a while", so best get used to it.
Heck, I'm coming to accept that I may even have to play with it myself ...
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2024-09-04
AI is a marvellous tool with many uses, but especially perhaps at this time for the high-level scammers in our world - how so?
Almost nobody (yet) understands how it works!
So we are all fodder for the scam-artists who want us to believe that AI will "rule the world", "take over all our jobs", "always win on the battlefield" (except maybe against another AI!), be all-knowing, etc etc.
So "is AI really omnipotent and can it replace human beings" is a potentially existential question for us.
That AI has its uses is incontrovertible - that it could completely replicate the functionality of a human being is unproven as yet. Some think it might - but as an IT professional of long standing I remain in the unconvinced camp.
Why?
Because traditional digital computers are designed and built by humans and operate entirely as designed by us. If we can't even repair ourselves when we fall sick, how will a computer designed by us ever achieve such a feat?
Do we even know how the human body works? We have been looking for a "cure for cancer" all my lifetime and seem no nearer to that goal today than when I was born - some think we have moved further away, with health issues never known in my youth now proliferating unchecked, notably autism.
There again, some believe that "Big Pharma" long ago mislaid its moral compass and now operates to a commercial paradigm of keeping people sick and marketing them palliatives for "side effects"; whatever the truth of this, it seems to me that it doesn't bode well for any AI designed by humanity to outperform humanity - it might however extinguish humanity ...
(I'm leaving "quantum computing" out of this discussion because I understand next to nothing about it)
Anyway, the point I want to make is that there is not just one kind of AI, there are many, and more I suspect still to be invented.
For instance, technically the Statute Book can be regarded as an AI - it's a set of rules and regulations that Parliament has decreed must be followed, and is considered by some to be notoriously unresponsive to the reality that exists outside of the official brain-cells. Whilst writing an automated AI to match the specific factors of individual circumstance to determine the appropriate action that the Statute Book might demand could be useful in terms of accuracy of analysis and time to respond, it would still have to work its way through the case-book of legal precedent to see whether the courts might agree with its conclusions ... not theoretically impossible, but we begin to comprehend the complexity. And then what about the cases of ambiguity still to be brought before the courts?
Or would we prefer to be tried and released/convicted by the "Court AI", in which case we would be living within the Automated State - "Computer Says NO" on steroids, so to speak.
So for something completely different, take for instance an AI with the ability to play chess. This kind of AI has been faked(!) developed and strategised for years now, and it looks completely different to the latest not-general-purpose-enough AIs ...
So will the future of AI be an amalgam of many and various AI implementations that will somehow be melded into a single overarching general purpose AI?
I'll wait ...
Meanwhile there seems little doubt that AI in its various and probably ever-multiplying forms will be here to stay, and with these we must be prepared to live.
And that will require ensuring that we turn them to our advantage, and turn them away from our disadvantage.
That assuredly will pose difficulty enough for the incoming years.
