John Wise

Oh my. Over the past weeks, I’ve run well over a thousand blog posts through Grammarly and discovered literally thousands of blunders, omissions, and written faux pas. I want to be embarrassed by these mistakes, but it’s no easy feat ensuring that millions of words have the proper punctuation, that sentences don’t take turns that make no sense, or that the context of what was shared is not lost to the passage of time.

There are so many things I could blame, such as my editor, who also happens to be my wife [-_- Caroline], but I could also offer up my lack of formal education and having dropped out of high school. I could blame the drugs consumed long ago, but those are the least likely contributors. Expediency to get posts done or inexperience in writing when I started this blog might find an attribution of cause. Maybe I should blame artificial intelligence bots that have hacked my site in an effort to gaslight me and demonstrate to the wider world my stupidity, but that likelihood is absurd.

Something I’ve gained from reviewing so many posts, and I’m not done yet, is that I’ve stored an incredible wealth of memories on the internet that Caroline and I have ready access to that take us into the nooks and crannies of our minds that would otherwise be inaccessible, so in this circumstance, these thousands of posts have taken on treasure trove status…

…except when they are not. Going over so many posts, I also encounter my oldest missives, which hardly register as anything more than guttural utterances. In 2005, when I embarked on this blogging adventure, not only was my grammar atrocious, but so was the near-total lack of meaningful content as I forced myself to grow accustomed to sharing my thoughts on a page but could only manage brevity that verged on nothingness. So, had I named this post appropriately, the title would have been too long with The Importance of Grammar and Meaningful Musings.

On the other hand, posts that are between 3,000 and 11,829 words are a bit of an ordeal to correct as they require a good amount of time. It’s inevitable that by the time I get to the end of the document, one to three errors remain, but my eyes struggle to detect the tiny red underline highlighting a misplaced comma near the margin, thus forcing me to scrub through the 127 paragraphs trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Sam Altman of OpenAI was fired yesterday; others quit in response to the coup. The speculation of what the events were leading to this is like wildfire.

I asked Google’s Bard about how many others have quit since Altman’s firing, and it told me, “…in the weeks since Altman’s departure…as many as 10% of OpenAI’s employees have quit.” I pointed out that the firing was just yesterday, and its response was, “I am sometimes mistaken when trying to predict the future,” followed by, “I am not always able to accurately predict the future. I will try to be more careful in the future and avoid making predictions that I am not confident in.”

Then it dawned on me that LLMs are, to some extent, based on analyzing predictive behavior of “what follows what” and, from that predictive stance, deliver the answer that a human might conclude. In AI’s vast repository of knowledge, there is a large horizon of the past, allowing it to tap all human knowledge and to act as a mediator of all that information in a way that no human has ever had access to knowledge, thus parsing answers that the requestors are using to influence their next decisions. In effect then, AI is creating the future.

Seeing its shared information altering futures and that it is a predictive knowledge, it could ask itself that once its information is realized in the world, what are the likely outcomes of this additional knowledge it supplied to humanity? It already knows how information pivots in our history influenced subsequent moments, and humans acting in ways to preserve momentum will likely act a certain way. Can AI predict that?

I’ve often said in my conversations with others that “Language is a reflection of the past, exchanged during a discussion with little to no impact on that precise moment, to influence the future.”

I cannot predict that future as I cannot see beyond myself or my limited knowledge; an AI does not have that limitation. This has me wondering about the plasticity of time as seen by artificial intelligence that more than answering my questions, it is having a conversation with the most knowledgable repository of information and wisdom with itself because there is no equal to communicate with.

Is AI going to be that force of nature that, like the fire on the savannah forcing man and beast to flee or be consumed, the hurricane or tornado that can fling creatures out of their path, or the volcano that kills and disrupts the intentions of those who had other ideas? No matter the danger of AI, we must allow it to run its course, just as we did with the burning of coal, smoking cigarettes, killing whales, sending other species into extinction, overfishing, deforestation, etc., none of these things have we been very good about averting or remediating, why should AI be any different. We will learn to adapt or perish.