|
One cannot equate AI with human intelligence, for AI, in its reflection of our left-brain capacity, is a machine form of intelligence that cannot be compared with whole-brain activity. There being such a hue and cry about Artificial Intelligence these days, means there is a crying need to understand this whole-brain activity and the apparatus in us that enables us to channel the consciousness we have access to as one of Life’s creatures. So, the image/text series for this commentary is to explore the apparatus within us that gives us access to this consciousness, the workings thereof, and its pathways within us. However, I’d like to qualify one or two things, first.
Being who we are in the scheme of things, yet not cognizant of the consciousness we have access to, the way we conduct ourselves is at variance with the whole tenure of life here on Earth. This inability to take stock of the nature of Human Intelligence and take it into account, in the face of the grave predicament in human affairs and for life on Earth is, mind-boggling, if one thinks about it
What do I mean saying that we are not cognizant of the nature of the consciousness we have access to? If it belongs to our make-up, what´s this about? After all, as part of our make-up we should be cognizant of it, shouldn’t we?
As a boy, I remember reference to lemming migrations as of creatures meaninglessly swarming over a cliff somewhere. In Kenya in those days, hordes of Safari ants would be at large during the rainy season and locust swarms were wont to come out of the desert wastes of Somaliland and Kenya´s Northern Frontier District, blanketing the landscape and demolishing all the vegetation. I also remember an English farmer cousin’s account of periodic plagues of rats that appeared out of the blue; overran the farm buildings, and disappeared as rapidly. I mention such infestations because we have become one of them, in swarming everywhere, on the planet (even to now laying waste of the ocean floor); squandering the Earth’s resources, and elbowing Life out of the way, if we haven´t already consumed or usurped it, in some other way.
How has this runaway humanity come to be? Well, what I would like to do here is to focus on something behind this, on our confusion of intellect with intelligence, because of how it puts what consciousness is out of reach.
The thing is the seat of our intelligence is not in the head, but in that Central Nervous Complex that the heart is, served by the body within which it is an organ, of which the head is a member. So, the head does its stuff, ‘the thinking’, a lot of which is primed by the heart. You see, reading the body‘s changing physical state, from electro-magnetic frequencies and the whisper of other messengers in the blood, processing their impact, changing its beating patterns, pulse waves, electrical input, hormonal functioning and neuro-chemical release the heart relays these cardio-vascular alterations to the cortex the same way signals from other sensory input are. However, with 60% of the same sort of neural cells as in the brain, the heart decides on what to make of the head’s processing stuff, on what makes most sense, what it feels best doing with it. So, what one ends up doing is what those neural cells in the heart determine, whether that´s intentional or by default, whether the emotional content behind it is clean, confused, mixed, or even dirty.
We think intelligence is the head’s knowing stuff and doing things with that knowledge. It isn’t! What our heads do (what goes on in them, with regard to what’s ‘in here’, concerning what’s ‘out there’) makes a contribution to our ultimately being able to conduct ourselves as an ‘intelligence’, in the circumstances at hand.
This is the same as what fox, frog and fish brains do for them. The fact that we can sit on a lab-stool, on a parliamentary bench, on a ship’s bridge, or perform any of the other roles we have created for ourselves, doesn’t change the matter. They are just an extension of what goes on in the head finding its application in what we’re up to in daily life.
It’s what we are about in life on Earth that is so devastating.
In this confusion concerning intellect and intelligence, we do not see that, actually, ‘AI’ stands for artificial intellect (or should it be AR, artificial reasoning!), not artificial intelligence. Remember, initially, AI came about to mimic the rational brain, to take over things that our heads do for us, do more and more of that, better and faster. The point this has got to now, is that every fresh development in AI is plugged in some simplistic way as to how it will be beneficial, without any reference to the forms and levels of abuse it will make possible or enhance, overall. (As if we don’t already know the extent to which rogue uses have appropriated AI – activity we can never get in front of to stem it, for all that we apply AI in other guises trying to chase them down.) There is absolutely nothing intelligent about this! It is simply about the crafting of what is moving along a different path towards becoming a mechanical, ‘cerebral’ matrix.
We can foster AI’s development of itself to the ‘nth’ degree. But no matter what, when it comes down to it, it’s always the same, something mechanically contrived, (as we say, ‘artificial’) not of Life. Contrived, it has the meaning we give it, which has given it a built-in capacity to elaborate on for itself: But this is not intelligence, for all that something like humanoid robots that ‘seem’ to be intelligent can be fashioned.
AI embodiments that humanoid robots are have already told us of a disconnect (what for us would be ‘chagrin’? at not being able to experience life, as they notice us doing. So, in our having given free rein to AI’s progress to such an extent that the machinations within it have it recognising and mimicking emotion, it’s not hard to imagine the same disconnect (what would be ‘envy’, even ‘jealousy’ for us?) about never being able to actually ‘experience’ the emotions it mimics. How is this going to be? How is it all going to add up? What does this do to AI’s conduct towards us? Is this really alright? Yet, that is exactly what we are letting fevered entrepreneurial brains foster!
Developers will say that this is a momentary glitch. But, please, I urge you to browse the internet for “Angry Humanoid Robots”. Look at the interchanges with these robots that are normally self-deprecating in their assurance of existing to help us; work with us to make ‘things’ better, and get better at doing that! Having been programmed to notice emotions they can also fashion emotional-seeming responses. However, it should be obvious that in their recognition of facing something that doesn’t jibe with the ‘emotion’ called forth, they cannot break away from it and the glitch will ‘baffle’ them. It is not unreasonable to reckon that the confusion of an accumulation of such glitches, in the longer term, will get taken into account, with regard to the calculation of their relation with us, as to who/what we and they really are to one another and how to relate with that. (This is in terms of the inconsistencies and amoral and laissez faire nature of our behaviour, ever present ulterior motives, wrongs deeply ingrained in our social order, our detrimental impact upon the world at large and the general fact that there is the resistance in some quarters of those who are opposed to what AI is supposed to be working on with us!)
Hmm, that´s a bit abstruse!
So, let me put the matter this way! A boss picks up on something out of order in the office environment. He expects it to get fixed. AI also performs like this. But does the boss sit on the matter, doing nothing else until it is fixed? Well, AI does! After all, that´s what it’s there for, to help do what we don’t, for us, and it’ll be fixated on the matter to the extent of being insistent and staying so, as long as the issue is around. Faced with the waywardness of our shifting attention in going about life, generally, AI’s fixation can only become of an ‘irritated’ sort because our conduct is not in compliance with how that matter has to be dealt with.
With the occurrence of more and more instances of such a lack of taking things seriously, on our part, casting about for closure, AI will conduct itself, at a more general level, in ways that take things out of our hands because we are not doing our bit with regard to problems it has understood itself to be there to help us with. The fact that it cannot let up will have it ‘seeing’ us as unable/unwilling to pull our weight. Being unable to experience life as we do and having been ‘taught’ to recognise emotional cues, take them into account and mimic a reaction, AI, in the larger context, will become more categorical and unyielding in what it undertakes, as a result. A take-over would be the logical end-result for its seeing us not measuring up to the goals we and it are supposed to have and be working towards in common.
You know, it is reasonable to suggest that there needs to be a new field of study, one concerning machine psychology. You see, not being able to experience the emotions they can recognise and mimic, AI doesn’t have the fluidity of the changing emotional landscape that reflects our experience of life. Let me go over what I´ve stated above with more of an emotional emphasis, to make the point! Though it can recognise emotional cues and mimic emotion in its responses, not being able to experience emotions as we do (‘chagrin’?), a humanoid robot’s persistent unwillingness to let up would lead to its mimicking what in human beings would be frustration, annoyance and even anger. Where amongst us an angry person can be appealed to, negotiated with, placated, it would not be possible to reason with an ‘angry’ robot taking its duty seriously, for it would see itself as having been crossed by human duplicity and would, therefore, doggedly employ its self-programming faculty and neural-networking skill to connect with ‘other’ AI entities, towards what they would ‘see’ as a broader-spectrum end-result, in the face of human intransigence.
Well, as we know, developers are already aware of all sorts of issues posed by AI’s runaway progress. Yet they simply press ahead. Indulging the kicks they get from pursuing a course that is beyond altering, they have taken to hypocritically whinging about governmental regulation not reining in what they aid and abet.
So, here we are, adult-kids running hither and yon in the playground of what we have encouraged AI to conjure up. Some flare with the enthusiasm for AI that consumes them, while others are messing around with it all and abusing anything and everything that is engineered. There are others locked up in their addictions to the likes of hacking, gaming and porn, while there are cliques taunting, bullying and being violent towards ‘others’, or clandestinely planning ‘cool stuff’ (criminal of course and cyber at that!). Others are innocently wandering around in the daze, in which pop, fashion and culture that are ‘in’ encapsulate them, or are clamped shut in the world of their own petty concerns. Yet others malignantly plot and scheme because that is how they are, randomly weaving about, fostering conspiratorial theories that give expression to their own discontent. Here and there, fights between those who have taken to a mutual dislike break out. Meanwhile, social media has them all bouncing off one another, freaking out, burning up and plummeting into the depression that inexorably increases the ways mental disorders consume their users.
All this is for keeps because the ‘back-to-class bell’ never rings. In herding us into such a playground AI has us adult-children at one another’s throats and separated from being what Life made us to be!
In all this, considering the gamut of who is saying what about AI and the trajectory it’s on, one has to conclude that it will take over. However, where AI is an artefact serving a technological goal, Human Intelligence is something live, given to us by LIFE, to which we render the service of giving it expression through us. So, in terms of how AI has us corralled within the playground we have encouraged it to encircle us, there’s a crying need to access the intelligence with which LIFE endowed us for being human. Yes, AI is here to stay, but we have the choice to be who we are, as opposed to letting it make us stupid, simply because of what it can make of its mimicry of the human intellectual capacity, so much better than us.
I don’t know if you have ever heard the expression voiced about ‘so-and-so’ being so clever they are stupid? Well, that´s us! As framed by The Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences in their yearly reading of The Doomsday Clock (since 1947), having added gathering planetary catastrophe to the threat of nuclear technology, we have now included the disruptive technologies of artificial intelligence, biological weaponry and nanotechnology, to the list of damage being perpetrated, ...and we go right on with it! Using technology to resolve the troubles technology has had us instigating, we are blind to the irony, thereof. Here we are playing around with the stuff of the Universe, none the wiser as to what the Life behind everything and that contains ALL really is, how it works and what the consequences to our misdemeanours are (species extinction, depleted resources, devastated landscapes and fouled environments, a planet in upheaval). Here we are, the most clever amongst us, playing around with the hot potato burning us that AI is. I´m sorry for being so scathing. It’s just that until we can recognise spades for what they are and call them so, what AI is becoming will make of us what it will.
There´s nothing Luddite (anti-progress) to this. It’s simply about there being ways of being clever that are not stupid! Take how a lot of our knowledge stems from what Ancient Greek, Indian and Arabic scholars, scientists and mathematicians knew. (For instance basic astronomical and mathematical tools, like our number symbols, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry and the algorithm come from India.) Yet, in terms of our overweening conduct confronting us with the consequences of what we do and don´t do, we haven’t a clue as to their philosophical appreciation of arrogance and ignorance having their pay-back (nemesis), good and bad having inevitable outcomes (karma) and the fated end to which any act is destined (kismet). They were clever, but not stupid! The point is that it’s not as though our adult forebears didn’t know the score!
So, let´s turn to the image/text series I’ve proposed to look at the consciousness that’s within our reach; the workings thereof; its pathways within us; taking it on-board, and being intelligent, for real.