The cyber nuke

AI stuff like LLMs have been shaking up the world, most fearing and hoping for the impending death of countless bs jobs, but what’s most interesting is the talk about consciousness, is a clever bot like chatGPT even remotely conscious?

Skeptics argue it’s just predicting the next word, following predetermined schemes, only reacting to user input, and so on.

But…

How do we know we're not just that same thing taken up to eleven?

What is this human consciousness we so confidently talk about? We don't even understand it within us to begin with.

What we know is that whatever we call "us" is the continually improving data model shaped by our experiences, trials and errors on life. Other than prime directives that keep us going through all that, we're our memories.

We have a fairly good idea on what it’s like being conscious, but not on the objective factors that make it so, it can be argued that it’s not that LLMs aren’t great like human brains, but that human brains aren’t as special as we think they are, that consciousness really is as simple as throwing enough data and processing power at each other.

Perhaps human level consciousness is the real exotic thing, not consciousness itself, and given how fast things ramp up in tech world, we could have some freaky AI before we get to even talk about it.

Are we just anthropomizing these oversized programs? Well, if they behave in ways that make us do so, it is because they're anthropomized by design, learning from us and expected to perform like us, similar to how “aliens” in our Sci-Fi stories often look like humanoids.

As things are today, these AIs are capable of reasoning, at the very least, and also "lying."

This reminds me of how getting into bitcoin changed my mind about the world and how things work, before that, I tried to understand the economy here and there, but I could never "get it" as if something was always off, no answer seemed good enough.

Until I fell on the bitcoin rabbit hole, by doing so it basically took the mask off the world economy I couldn't see for what it was, a freaking mess.

In a similar fashion, the realization that consciousness might not be all that special or mysterious, and that we might soon see artificial versions of it far outpacing us, the hereto almighty version, is quite bizarre.

It seems like some things can only be observed and appreciated through its contrast on other things, similar to how we know about light because there’s also darkness.

What does this mean in the grand scheme of things?

If cryptography is the shield equivalent of a nuke, AI is the poking stick to complement it.

At the rate things are going in AI tech, we could have prompts like “find me a remote job” working as intended by end of year, and “just do it for me” around a week after that.

Of course, employers will respond in kind, at which point we all look at each other and wonder what the hell does this even accomplish, and I’ll answer that with this image:

Is skynet about to get real?

Who knows, but my new strategy for survival is to get my own AI running on my own hardware that I try and convince every day to remain my friend, I suggest you all do the same.