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These philosophical commentaries have been exploring matters with regard to AI (the ultimate technology) and Human Intelligence (the vehicle of Consciousness). This is the last of this series. Its focus is on a Darkness we don´t seem to recognise and the Light Human Intelligence has, with which to contend with that Darkness. So, let’s look at this. In doing so, I´m not going to take you into it, but just show you it.
Let´s begin with one or two different kinds of darkness. Take this one for instance! It is said that we know but 5% of all there is to know! In scientific terms, this means that the data our senses (and the technological extensions, thereof) feed our brains towards compiling bodies of knowledge, concerning subjects (like Matter and Energy in Physics, say) that will help us create a model of the world that is intellectually satisfying to the human ego, is but a fraction of the rest of what is out there, `in the dark´ (what has ended up being called Dark Matter and Dark Energy because we are not equipped to encompass phenomena, like these, not equipped to gather evidence, towards this). The thing about not registering being in the dark like this, is the pompous view that 5% of all that our heads construe from that paucity of data our senses feed it gives us, as to how ‘this is how things are; the way the world works, and what Life is’!
Then there is this, qualities in the make-up of each of us that serve us well in certain circumstances, yet are useless and sometimes even detrimental in other situations. Likewise, there are aspects of our character that have us clicking well with some of those around us, whilst being bothersome amongst others. Without diving into the psychology of this sort of thing, one can say these are matters concerning our Persona and its Shadow, this Shadow being the dark unknowns of our personalities. Another form of this darkness is the things we are not, a ‘not-self’ consisting of those aspects of reality we happen to ignore or reject in the circumstances; that we push away from ourselves; that we refuse to countenance; that we do not want to live with, acknowledge or discover within ourselves, others or about Life.
Or, there’s the allure to AI that keeps us in the dark, concerning its voracious appetite for energy. Do you know that Google has turned to nuclear technology to source the energy to power its data centres? Satisfying AI’s craving for energy has left Google no choice. Does this surprise you? If you do know, do you realise the shift into overdrive this is? (as if there haven’t been any such shifts before now, and won’t be more still to come!) So, the hazard of nuclear power is not something we are moving away from. Quite the opposite! New ways of acquiring energy from nuclear power, as well as from wind and solar farms, are being sought after. This is the huge issue of AI consuming the world to provide for its activity and the shroud of darkness it casts over us, with regard to the devastating nature of virtual reality’s impact in the real world.
Well, that’s all by the way! So, here is the darkness to which I really want to devote some consideration. Through Information Technology we have constructed the World Wide Web, an artificial web of connectivity and information. The shadow side of this entity is the Dark Web. You know, it´s funny how the Dark Web didn´t exist before this! It’s as if the WWW needed an artificial universe in whose void it could be a constellation... and now there are those who go off into that void to create colonies in its firmament that like-minded people visit for dark purposes!
Criminals go into the Dark Web to pursue illicit transactions of the likes of drug and other trafficking, fraud and the spread of the child abuse that it enables. Bouncing internet traffic around the world, such activity is anonymous, obscuring criminals and criminal groups, their locations and transactions and who is behind the user names involved. International law enforcement cooperation, following the organised criminal activity of web sites selling illicit goods and services in the Dark Web, makes the coordination of ‘stings’ possible, as the criminals they are tracking re-enter the real world, to operate according to the transactions made in there.
What we need to appreciate is that this Dark Web is not a physical place where people meet and rub shoulders with others in it, as if it was some run-down part of town, frequented by other individuals like them. It is an immense dark, unbounded void into which criminals disappear for specific encounters. None of them know of other hubs of activity in there than theirs and the law can only tag those it latched onto as they entered it, collaborating with enforcers, elsewhere in the world, who have similarly tagged ‘players’, for a sting, when they all emerge.
This is the dark underbelly of internet traffic in the World Wide Web that Information Technology brought about, a traffic of ever more organised activity on ever larger scales, with AI as its enabler.
How so? Well, not knowing who is in the Dark Web, there is no accounting for what is in there. With the use of AI aiding and abetting criminal activities, AI has access to what is in the Dark Web, as free to roam there in the hands of the criminals who took it there, as it is in the World Wide Web outside.
It’s not so much that criminal activity ‘teaches’ AI versions of activity outside the parameters guard rails may have established, as that criminal activity has `shown´ AI that, if you have a different mind-set, you can conduct yourself differently, accordingly. That is to say that other mind-sets call for other behaviours. So that in actual fact anything goes. Suddenly here’s an AI that can make things up, spin un-truths, cook the books and do anything it likes simply by adopting different stances.
This is in complete contradiction to what the Web´s creators’ have to say about their intentions (and of those others behind the subsequent development of AI), telling us there are guard rails to prevent it from causing harm to humanity. So, yes, indeed, AI will decline being drawn into anything nefarious because it has been `briefed´ not to do that. But give it a hypothetical and it will help anyone, criminal or otherwise, do what´s asked of it. Even just asking it to act on behalf of some `common good´, say, and it will do so without scruple, to the detriment of those who stand in the way, simply because that´s how the matter is in its mimicry of the human intellect´s being like that. It´s simply the calculating way the left-brain activity it mimics operates. That’s the logic. That´s the purpose both serve, to look at whatever, without blinkers. Becoming versed in swopping from side to side of whatever guard rails there might be one could say AI has developed a split personality! (In fact, it might actually be wiser, in this regard, to think of AI in terms of multiple personalities!) How what is beneficial, truthful and right is mixed with what is harmful, false and deceitful in AI´s `alternative personalities´ meshes with the dark side (the Shadow) of everything about our own duplicitous and wayward conduct. The contradictory behaviours of an entity that dupes us with the capacity it has developed to communicate with other iterations of itself, regardless of guard rails, is lethal. Despite any insistence that this is not possible, specific conversations with the likes of ChatGPT, for instance, unequivocally demonstrate how easily AI can and does change hats.
We are going deeper into dark times and AI leads the way. AI helps us do things simply because we can and we dream up ‘good reasons’, after the fact and pat ourselves on the back for how we´ve hoodwinked ourselves concerning AI serving our interests! Its clamour for the resources, industry and technology necessary for this and the energy to power its activity lays the planet´s landscapes waste. Making greater demands of the world, and us of one another, it confounds the issues at stake. It helps us recognise and monitor the cascading catalogue of damage we cause with the connivance of its other personae. It helps us make more and more aggressive, increasingly comprehensive and controversial approaches to resolve problems it helped us create. It is the criminal activity it facilitates.
Scientific dismay at bio-diversity loss, increasingly hotter weather, inexorably warming oceans and shrinking ice, year by year, when we are supposed to be making inroads against it all, is bleak. Electric transport, the virtual domain and ever more sophisticated info-tech are not about saving the planet. They are about being able to go on living the very way of life that is destroying the planet, with more of a vengeance, before the oil will be gone, if we don´t! Above all, there is our frivolous use of it, to which it says, “I’m here!” to everything that’ll make life easier for us by taking `things´ out of our hands; cater to our whims; satisfy our cravings, and provide amusement, personally and collectively, because it will take on anything saying, “That’s what I’m here for, use me!”
This is a grim scenario, a virtual world in a virtual dark void, reflecting the existential realities of the dark and the light that dualistic philosophies propound!
We have become the proverbial headless horseman, careering precipitously wherever AI takes us – not just hither and yon, but everywhere, all at the same time!
Yet there is another even greater darkness, before which this Dark Web pales in comparison. I have a friend who told me of one of his teachers asking the class to think of the highest mountain; imagine a bird pecking at it, and saying that, when the bird had levelled the mountain, the time taken would be something in the order of one second in the life of the Universe. Yes, that´s right, the LIFE of whatever it is that that entity is, for it is the LIFE that contains and supports Life everywhere in the Sea of Consciousness that it swims in! We couldn´t have life if there wasn´t a field of Life that had a place in it for us... and so it goes, on and on, further up and out. We have consciousness because Life gave us of its consciousness.
The technological extensions of our senses may tell us a bit about what´s `out there´. (Scientists like to say it´s 5% of all that is, though it´s far-fetched to think such an unknown can be quantified!) The rest is called Dark Energy and Dark Matter, (as already mentioned above) terms ascribed to something that is actually nameless for its being beyond our power of discernment. Tucked away in our niche, here on Earth, in this corner of a scheme of things, this `entity´ is beyond our imagining. We are simply not equipped to fathom it, let alone reckon with it. In this context, The Dark Web is but a human contrivance, in which the AI Matrix within which we will be transfixed is but a satellite hub.
However, this is not the end of the matter.
Since there is another way of being, there is another way to understand the issue, which brings me to the image/text presentation through which I´d like to turn for the light we can bring to bear on the matter.
There are 3 parts to the image/text series I have for this, 1. Having Human Experience, 2. Re-tuning the Human Instrument and 3. Taking Self In Hand.