What does it mean to fully understand reality? With out finite little brain computers we can only know so much, each person unable to solve all the problems. No one has all the answers. Can information technology set mankind free into a brighter future?
I have been reading about artificial intelligence for a few years now & doing so gave me great pause to consider my own intellectual framework.
What does it mean "to know" something?
What is thinking made of ?
What is reasoning ?
Your brain takes in sensory data throughout your life, performing magical cognition to make sense of "experiences" of all kinds.
We automatically self assemble from genetic information given to each person by their parents, each person genetically unique, with unique biochemistry from their genome that makes single compound one size fits all drugs seem ignorant as an approach to medicine.
We automatically learn language & then are deliberately sent to school to instill organized learnings, accumulated throughout time, across time and space, between minds that write & those that read. We share powerful ideas with each other in first person, with speech, action, in the written word, music, lyrics, videos & movies & stories.
Its amazing to watch a young child'd mind develop, something that has strongly fascinated me since I was a teenager. I even thought of pursuing a career in childhood psychological development during my early exploratory phases of cognitive development in college, a fascination that gave way to my interest in information technology because computers allowed me access to information about almost anything I could think of to look up.
Today I play with an "ok Google" NLP controlled phone, an Amazon Echo Dot with Alex, and use speech to perform searches for information that the computers often fail to understand because the lack Artificial General Intelligence. You can ask Alexa about the computational framework of her operations and she will give you one of several replies indicating that she does not understand or know the answer to the question. I understand that Amazon's computational infrastructure & the code base of Alex in terms of functional architecture is proprietary non-easily obtainable information.
Probing people in first person with ontological questions about the nature of life & knowledge, all the problems that still exist in society, and why, despite our ability for amazing intelligence as people, do we continue senselessly hurting one another with negativity, toxic words, crime, lies, war and other mechanism that hinder our civilization from achieving greater mastery over matter & energy.
Atomic weapons are an example of mankind shared insanity, and I believe that defining sanity remains outside the scope of science. I even have this sense that each person is crazy in their own unique and special sort of way.
Special snowflake, by your unique genome, each of us is biochemically unique. We also all have a lot in common. No person is better than anyone else, though people like to behave or think as though being arrogant & narcissistic was appropriate.
Rude, cruel, judgmental, harsh, mean, people are capable of being really toxic to one another. Emerging research shows how mean words actually physical harm people that hear them by causing chemical signaling changes across at least 6 distinct biochemical communication pathways between the brain and body. Healthy mind (brain) equates to a healthier body.
Your human body is a remarkably complicated system of systems, that self assembled using genetic information, using food, air & water as the building blocks for energy and structure. Human energy is a very interesting, that which drives people to do "anything human". Looked at from structural overview, the actions of people at the individual levels might seems totally pointless. You might ask a depressing question like "Why does anyone do anything?" in a state of feeling "pointless" : after considering that you are going to die at some point anyway.
When my father died, my love for him caused great systemic changes to the way that I think about everything. I started to think more about life in general terms, my role as a human element in a world of billions of people. Constantly being born & dying off, mankind is change, the changes are everywhere constantly.
Such a small difference can make such a huge difference, the spark that starts a forest fire, the idea that starts a revolution. To unlock a persons potential requires only tiny philosophical changes in their intellectual framework. What does it mean to become fully self actualized? Is anyone every fully awake?
Think of the way our brain processes sight to create the experience of vision! The magic happening between our eyes in the cortex of the brain is a modern marvel of sublime beauty, the complexity of simplicity in 3lbs of wet brain organ. The information processing in the human brain accomplishes something like 10 petaflops of performance while the brain organ generates about 30watts of electricity, from food energy, and the oxidation of carbon in our fuel cell lung gas exchange enzyme food digestion bioreactor human gut energy food fuel system.
The lasted Diagnostic Statistic Manual of mental analysis extends upon a great history of psychological information development. The pioneers of psychology were so bold as to deliberately ingest things like LSD just to warm the perspective to see how tiny difference of just 100 micrograms could radically alter consciousness, thinking and reasoning.
Impulse control, music, sex & drugs. What drives people to consume needlessly, to engage in risky behaviors that spread STD's, to betray one another, to steal, to ruin with pollution, to cheat with interest fees, to hurt each other senselessly ?
Presuming the evolution caused mankind 50 million years to develop, are we simply burning a candle like Sun, without direction as a people, infighting between nations senselessly, despot jerks as leaders instead of benevolent people... why ? Our sun will eventually exhaust its fusion sequence, consume all its fuel, and extinguish life in this solar system if we do not invent ways to find another earth and move mankind to that new work before this one is consumed by our local star sequence.
Today genomic science is unlocking the mysteries of DNA as life science takes on a whole new era in medicine with custom made drugs that have few if any side effects, vastly improved performance, and costs that will come down over time as innovation pulls on the lever of riches.
Information & those who control it will control all aspects of civilization in the future. Information can sway people to believe different things, to change the mind of mankind, affecting everything relevant in human life. People can be bought * sold with ideas, powerful ideas that shape the minds of people, influencing the ways they interact with other people, with energy, money and stuff.
Trashing the world is giving way to intelligent recycling, reflecting of the chemical cycling we see in natural system in our world & through telescopes in space. The cellular chemistry of our gut is paving the way to greater understandings about how we turn foods into diseases. The ideas from toxicology are already pervasive in an emergent cultural shift towards organic food, free from chemical ignorance from the 1960's thinking of American chemical companies the persists today with braindead products like Roundup from Monsanto. It sad to see Monsanto degenerate into such a horrid state, it was once a bastion of scientific research * technological innovations spanning many disciplines, like their creation of LED technology, and insulin producing GMO bacteria.
Greed is a toxic ideology causing erosive declines in society where it is embraced as a goal, method of success or solution. Next quarters earnings cannot endlessly increase without a substantial introduction of game changing innovations that unlock more cheaper energy, more information * greater understanding, ideas that can be marketed to increasingly sophisticated people who are about to multiply cognition with brain computer interface artificial intelligence multiplication.
I am not a wild eye dreaming saying that singularity is next year. Rather I believe that super human machine intelligence is nothing more than a reflection in the material world of the magic happening inside the minds of thinking people today. Today people like Elon Musk warn that A.I. could become really dangerous if some despot get to singularity first and then uses it to subjugate the entire world. Sounds like a dystopian science fiction plot, one originating from paranoid thinking. Are the light bulbs talking to you too?
In reality computer aided engineering is helping computer engineers invent better computers, that increate the scope of computer aided engineering, in a positive feedback loop so powerful that it allows companies like Boeing to simultaneously leverage the power of hundreds of thousands of minds, across time & space, with IT networking, communication and a corporate structure emblematic of government institutions in terms of scope, power and size. Look at Amazon & how it leverages information through IT hardware and machine learning to dominate E-commerze alongside Ebay and Alibaba, Google learning the charge towards understanding consciousness itself by studying the data created by people on every web page, every search, ideas, understanding with data analytics. As the largest marketing company in the world, Google is leveraging the power of controlling the ways that people access information with its remarkably powerful search engine bot crawlers & Google search engine user interface! "Ok Google" "when will sunny weather return?
" "Set a timer for 30min from now". "Alexa, flash update", "Siri, do I need a raincoat today".
No one can say when the Technological Singularity will be achieved, but as scientist of all kinds toil to expand knowledge, eventually we will get there. For now feel special as a unique human of natural genetics, with natural general intelligence. The future is going become really strange, exciting, amazing and very un-natural once making unlocks information with machine super intelligence. We will gain mastery of matter & energy with technological singularity and turn the universe into our cultural oyster. The future will not be enjoyable for the faint of heart, those who do not join the effort will be left behind. United as one we will become stronger as a species, breaking down borders with english as the common shared language. We will stop fighting wars, start working together, and make impossible things like Age Reversal become commercially feasible!
The reality we find ourselves in today, the present, still the olden days of mostly natural intelligence. The technological seeds have already been planted that will grow into future emergent super intelligence and the resulting explosions of information about everything that will grant mankind ever increasing mastery over matter & energy! Think of how industrialization has transformed all aspects of human civilization, including extensive impacts of many kinds on the biosphere of Earth.
Today people are afraid of climate change, with better information technology governing energy technology humans in the future will terraform planets & solar systems to build many new worlds that are habitable to people. Genetic engineering will enable future people to live in temperature regimes that are impossible for natural humans. Radiation damage from space exploration will be eliminated by genetic engineering and nyanomachine repair advanced cybernetic tissue technology.
People talk each other out of exceptional potential. We are capable for example of exerting amazing kindness to those that we love, while turning a cold blind eye to the suffering of people we could never know. You can't help everyone even if your tried, there are vastly too many people. The speed limits of your body and brain restrict what you are able to do. We help those speed limits to remain in place by teaching each other broken stupid ideas that hinder & hurt people. Stupidity is the enemy of super intelligence. Ignorance is the enemy of education. We need to shut down bullies, idiots, naysayers, pessimist, negative people, and any dysfunction hindering ideas. We need to encourage one another with edifying words of intelligence, to illuminate our minds for super intelligent thoughts about compassion, understanding, kindness, the pursuit of knowledge * the deliberate execution of adaptive wisdom.
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