Loose Leaf Notes

1. Some people assume that thinking about death means your worrying about death. I think about death like I think about space, the stars and the universe.

2. The Upside Down of Playing Around flashback HERE.

3. Lifeboats: There are only a few / I reveal myself to / I let carry me / to places of honesty / I break down or float / without destination / and trust the winding route / to a shared soft landing

4. The last thing my friend 95-year-old friend Alwyn said to me before she died was, “I’m waiting to see how it ends.”

5. My bother Dan’s last words were: “I’m alright.”

6. “ChatGPT = that student who didn’t do the reading but wrote the paper anyway.” Paul Weinfield

7. “What GPT systems spit out is language … channeled into its flattest possible version so as to be useful to those who mainly use language as liability control.” -Leif Weatherby, Jacobin Magazine

8. Geoffrey Hinton,  considered the “Godfather of AI” quit Google to warn about the dangers of the technology “…Obviously, many of the organizations developing this technology are defense departments. And defense departments don’t necessarily want to build in, be nice to people, as the first rule. Some defense departments would like to build in, kill people of a particular kind. So we can’t expect them all to have good intentions towards all people… because it’s much smarter than us, and because it’s trained from everything people ever do this — it’s read every novel that ever was, it’s read Machiavelli, it knows a lot about how to manipulate people — there’s the worry that it might start manipulating us into giving it more power, and we might not have a clue what’s going on… It’s as if aliens have landed, but we didn’t really take it in because they speak good English… I think it’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.” PBS Newshour

9. “When a book of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named “Racter,” it was hard to know what to make of it. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed was a fever vision of weirdness. One critic insisted that Racter’s inscrutable ingenuity revealed not a literary maverick but a “coffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.” With its bright-red cover, the volume attracted a cult following. Copies soon became scarce, which only added to Racter’s mystique. That mystique wasn’t at all harmed by the fact that Racter didn’t exist…

10. “…The entity responsible for insights like “When my electrons and neutrons war, that is my thinking” was actually a piece of code. Racter (short for raconteur) had been hatched on an early desktop computer programmed with the rules of English grammar… It led avant-garde poet Christian Bök to wonder if humans were needed to produce literature at all. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, he argued, was an “obit for classic poets.” Awaiting us was an era of “robopoetics.” – More HERE. 

11. These initiatives have now been dwarfed by Racter’s newest descendant. Released in 2020 by OpenAI, a San Francisco startup, GPT-3 is an AI tool that was force-fed a vast portion of the internet. (The entirety of English-language Wikipedia adds up to only a fraction of the billions of words ingested.) Endowed with algorithms that help it make sense of all that data—“neural” algorithms modelled after the circuitry of the human brain—GPT-3 can produce, from a simple prompt, astoundingly human-like writing of any kind: recipes, actuarial reports, film scripts, real-estate descriptions, technical manuals.

12. With an estimated billion dollars in backing, GPT-3 isn’t a better Racter; it’s a godlike Racter. Forbes named it the AI “Person” of the Year. Anyone who believed AI to be “nothing like intelligence,” said one expert, “has to have had their faith shaken to see how far it has come.”

13. The above is enough to turn me off from my love of Science Fiction.

______________Thirteen Thursday