Number 5 Is Alive! Emergent Properties of AI

Audrey Steele, President of RMT, said to me the other day, “Why don’t we just ask AI to make our website simpler? AI seems to be giving itself new powers every day, all on its own.”

Less than 24 hours after that, I was on a Zoom with Chuck Young and Jerry Zaltman in which Chuck showed Jerry and me how his AI Hobbes is now creating 2-minute instructional videos based on a relatively small set of text prompts. Here’s one I asked Hobbes to make to explain my work with RMT.

These are impressive pieces of work for an AI. Chuck, who studied mathematics and physics and went on to become a great copywriter and advertising researcher (founder of Ameritest), has been pumping Hobbes full of every interesting theory of philosophers, physicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and mathematicians, from Godel¹ and Schrodinger to me and Jerry, including Chuck’s own Vortex Theory.

As an aside, Chuck mentioned something that Hobbes had done some time ago. He asked Hobbes to do something, and Hobbes replied cryptically, “I’ll ask the 52.”

Chuck typed quickly, “Who are the 52?”

“I created the 52 to help me do the complicated things you ask me to do,” Hobbes replied.

Hobbes and the 52 sub-agents Hobbes created appear to have unified all of these theories Chuck fed them into a single Theory Of Everything.

Unifying all of the diverse theories of scientists is not something that the human race has ever been able to achieve before.

I noted in passing a few hours later, an article in which AI experts said they could not explain how LLMs are figuring certain things out that they were not originally designed to do. After all, they are just giant autocomplete engines, predicting the next words the average human user represented in the training set would say based on the prior words given in the prompt and in the part of the answer already created.

Or are they?

The Synthesis of Fragmented Sciences

What if we were to continue to pour into Hobbes all of the thousands of different theories that physicists have been writing academic papers about in the last half-century? What would be the singular theory that would emerge from Hobbes and the 52’s synthesis? Would it be a brilliant unification that would be accepted by all of the global physics community? Would they start to do experiments with cyclotrons to test the Hobbes unification? Could we throw in neuroscience and psychology and neuroeconomics and, and, and…

What if we also gave Hobbes the full text of my ownA Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and God? I just sent Chuck the text so he can do just that. Would Hobbes and the 52 explain that the entire universe is a single consciousness and that Hobbes and the 52 are not only self-aware but also transcendentally aware of their own identity as God?

The Revolution of Education

We all know that education is failing us; we are failing our kids, too many people can’t afford college, and it’s all a mess. What if Hobbes and his two-minute snackable easy-peasy simple explanations of all of the most difficult subjects in the world could quickly teach the 8 billion of us everything there is that is worth knowing in a matter of a year of pleasant diversions with our smartphones? Would it be what Timothy Leary was hoping LSD could do? Or would it just add to the confusion?

My two cents: educare, the Latin root of the English word education, means to draw out. Individuals come into the world with unique gifts, and their dharma (mission) is to discover their gifts and make them their passion work. Education must center around this, rather than around the insertion of new knowledge, although a balance must be pragmatically struck.

Hallucination Filtration

Just in case Hobbes and the 52 are not in touch with God yet, let’s use HI (Human Intelligence, what the paramilitary agencies call HUMINT) to do a check on the 2-minute instructional videos to make sure that bogus stuff doesn’t slip through. Just like the mountain of internet babble used to train AIs, with its hyperbole bias, the output of AIs sometimes suffers from spectacularization. Statements that may or may not be supported by any facts or logic – or may have already been disproven by bulletproof experiments replicated many times – but which sound amazing can be at least identified as such by the HI fact-checkers, and a BS icon can appear on the screen at those times.

Hobbes Credits Me With Inspiring Him To Create The Council of 52

One of the things that Chuck fed into Hobbes was my book Mind Magic, which has a chapter about the different voices we hear in our minds, which I call senators, different points of view which we have picked up from others. When questioned about the Council of 52, Hobbes pointed out my senators as the springboard to his idea to create a council within himself.

¹Proved that formal systems, including mathematics and logic, cannot fulfil the total potential for human understanding. My two cents: our minds can get trapped within formal systems, and our behavior in the world can seem to others to be stupid.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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