AI Is Not The Threat, We Are

‘Artificial intelligence' (AI) will one day surpass human capabilities. Once it does, keeping up with it will require us to alter and enhance our own brains if we are to remain relevant.

Even if AI never out-competes us at all cognitive tasks, we are still left with a need to enhance our intellectual ability. The information 'explosion' alone - regardless of AI - will require us to enhance and alter our brains just to keep up. Doubling the knowledge base of all humanity took 150 years between 1750 and 1900. It took 50 years between 1900 and 1950. 10 years to double from 1950-1960. By 2020 our knowledge base will double every 73 days - with no end to this exponential growth in sight. How are we to ever keep up? 

The simple fact is we won't, unless we alter our brains. The information 'explosion' will far outpace growth in our population and in our ability to use it cohesively as a species. Even if individuals specialize to the point of absurdity - competition, and limits of cooperation and bandwidth, will demand brain enhancement. The alterations and enhancements will continue at ever greater speed with the increasing deluge of information until finally we become unrecognizable to our ancestors - until we are in fact, no longer, human.

Be it to keep up with AI or our collective knowledge, combined with genetic alteration to extend life and improve health - self-directed evolution beyond human will occur in the relative near future.

We worry and fret about the existential threat of AI and how to "control it” as it evolves, when in fact we should be focusing on how best to accomplish next steps in our own evolution. AI, as we develop it, can help us get there - but we are to evolve to a next new intelligence on the planet, not just a black box in a lab.

Given humankind's ability for self-harm we had better get a move on figuring out how best to accomplish this, if we are to have any hope of surviving the process.

Exoneration?

He lies, every single day.
Not clever lies of purpose or manipulation, but instead, lies of a small man - defending the indefensible. Lies of convenience - cover for a lack of talent, of moral compass - cover for his empty self-hatred.

He cheats, everyone, including himself.
Devoid of wisdom, character, compassion, empathy. His lies and his cheating punch holes in the vessel of his soul - long since drained out.

The cacophony of his mental illness, his crippling self absorption, his overwhelming need to feel - something, anything - drowning out the cries and concerns of others. In the end he feels - nothing - save self-hatred and anger.

He is not the person to lead the free world. Not the person to hold as example to our children.
He is hate, anger, greed, insecurity, blind rage, emptiness. He is a cheat - a soulless empty self-destructive cheat.

We can do better than this.

To Know

We are illusions
Folded into illusion

Space      Matter

Energy    Time 

None of it what it appears to be
None of it what we think we need it to be

Lost
Not lost
Adrift in the seemingly incomprehensible

Glimpses
Whispering across the vastness
Shining in the eyes of genius
Echoing within

I so want to know
Everything

In the beginning...

There was a time and a place on earth where silence prevailed, had prevailed, for over a billion years. Interrupted only by the occasional wind, volcanoes, lightning, rain.
Now imagine this silence pierced for the very first time by the first call of the first creature with a voice.

Mysterious Silence

Civilizations producing intelligent signals we can detect across the vast distances of this universe have seen their intelligence explosions and survived. From first computers to super general intelligence probably takes no more than 200 years - a blink of the eye in a 14-billion-year-old universe. Given the near exponential growth of ‘artificial’ intelligence these civilizations must possess an intelligence billions of times greater than our own.

So, where are they? They must have spread out and by now should be ubiquitous in a universe this old. The sky should be full of intelligent signal. And yet, silence.

Either they have nothing to say, they didn't survive their intelligence explosions, or there is something quite fundamental we are missing in our understanding.

Trump’s Mark

Watching the Trump presidency is like watching a death spiral in painfully slow motion. He kicks, screams, deflects, accuses, lies, colludes, contorts, obstructs, but just cant stop the coming crash. The only mark he will leave on history will be the stain of his destruction - cant wait.

Evangelicals Have Lost Their Way

Evangelicals have aligned themselves with Donald Trump.

Donald Trump began his career settling a complaint of racial discrimination in his housing development. From there he moved on to race bating, birtherism, hate, anger, and fear as the tools he uses to attain his personal goals. Goals centered on greed, and himself.

He has adopted a lifelong business 'strategy' of cheating to enrich himself. Breaking contracts with those that he has hired, refusing to pay what they are owed forcing them into court, where it becomes clear, given costs and delays of civil proceedings, that settlement for say 60% of the original agreed upon amount better than nothing.

Six bankruptcies later he is held afloat, not by US financial institutions who refuse to lend him money, but by foreign institutions known to launder money for organized crime. 

His own executives have stated that Trump University was a deliberately fraudulent enterprise. He knowingly set out to cheat struggling students trying to better themselves, as a business plan.

Trump has bragged about sexual assault and pussy grabbing and has complaints from over a dozen women of sexual assault or rape.

He had an affair with a porn star shortly after his son was born, cheating on his wife and his family, and then paid her $130,000 to hide it.

He is conflict, lies, anger and hate. He has no charity in his heart, calling countries with mass human suffering and torment - shit holes - and closes doors on them in their hour of need.

He is without a doubt the least 'christian' president this country has ever seen. He is without a doubt one of the most vile, morally and ethically deprived human beings I have ever experienced.

Evangelicals are complicit in this moral crisis. They disgust me in their pious arrogance. The harm they do to satisfy their own selfish agenda, terrifying in its cruelty. In the end it will come to haunt them.