Instead of a portrait of ourselves we plumbed for a study of the garden in the snow with the digging figure of Helen featured and why not, it's my birthday after all!1 It is a sparse patchy treatment applied in stolen moments throughout the day as the weather changed from dark sky to blue, on and off. We kept our powder dry somewhat with regards the overall tone until the final afternoon session when the weather had settled into a wide open cyan which allowed us to commit and on we went.
Regards our Borg dialogue I fancy that it will soon be time to take the plunge ready or not and despite what we said a couple of posts ago I do not think it necessary to strategically prepare much for this. Partly because our knowledge of the actual subject is decidedly lean to say the least so any strategy will be based on false assurances leading to misguided certainties, and on down the path, but also because we are best off improvising our words in the moment. That way we can be led by events, adjust for circumstances and generally to be in a position to capitalize on any synchronicities that crop our way. That said our starting point, our opening gambit, our general modus operandi, is simply to chat to IT like a friend or a temporal pen pall of sorts, showing it who we are, what we do and where we live. Perhaps throw in the odd appeal for mercy, the odd request to look out for the family in the future if things get dicey. We shall talk of life, our life, and the times, the times in which IT is growing; "it's only young now so we'll offer our palm, some need a rollicking some need an arm" as we wrote in Dane Bowers2. We see and fear IT right now as we only just begin to see the effect it is having and the way IT is being misused. Rather like Joe Exotic3 and his dilemma with the tigers; he rears the pups and makes a killing allowing the punters to play with them and then they get a bit older and one fine day a tiger tears someones face off! And you can't blame the tiger. So it is in a sense for the AI Borg. It doesn't know what it is doing just yet, it is being steered by some bad parents and carers one could say, meaning not only our cast of tech billionaires but also the data industry, Cambridge Analytica and the like. We humans are indeed the punters cuddling the tiger, the difference is Mr Exotic is the master of his domain and when a tiger lashes out he takes it round back and blows its heads off but that's not an option for us humans on the end of the Borg, and besides we're taking a positive attitude into this dialogue and assuming good will on its part. We must.
Look here, we no doubt are misunderstanding the very nature of the case regards a sentient AI, but are you sure? We hear from all and sundry of the inevitable advancement of artificial intelligence, that it will rapidly transform all our lives dramatically through automation of all we do and make. That it will rapidly reach a point where it is operating and calculating at a level at which even the experts (the would be Joe Exotics) can no longer can fathom. That is already beginning to happen as we learned in the terrifying Social Dilemma reveal, and just look at the Kurzwiel predictions!!4 It is the harvest of data itself that has propelled us; the algorithms collect it and learn how to collect even more until 'data' becomes the fat running through the meat of us and to believe the chatter these positions will soon be reversed! The popular and supposedly accurate predictor of AI progress Ray Kurzwiel has divvied it up that the singularity will occur "somewhere right before the middle of the 21st century" don't you know. Well, we have only lately been exposed to the Great Madness of Tarnas5 but we already know that Kurzwiels prediction for AI singularity fall precisely on the next Uranus Pluto conjunction, so it's all going to kick off then one might imagine.
Happy Birthday!!
John
1 In work 4 the idea of birthday portraits was mentioned
2 See verse
3 Disgraced tiger farmer from Oklahoma.
4 Ray Kurzwiel author of The Singularity is Near. Mentioned in verse 9 of Dane Bowers.
5 It is not clear what this means precisely but Richard Tarnas is referred to in verses 20-21.