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╭ 𝟘𝟠· The separation of church and state protects our religious freedom, perhaps the most important principle America was founded upon. Extremists have been attacking that

┊ freedom for almost two centuries, eroding our right to think for ourselves. This administrations pursuit of Project 2025's goals have amplified those attacks.

┊

┊ Whatever the reasons for war with Iran, this administration is using it as an oppurtinity to turn our military into an unconstitutional crusader army. But there are

┊ organizations fighting to preserve these freedoms and one of the most important is Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

┊

┊ 𝟘𝟟· Gina Raimondo's essay and her responses to comments in the NY Times acknowledge that AI and its academic sub-field, robotics, may out-compete human labor, the options

┊ she gives to keep the economy going sacrifice profits to ensure consumer spending power. She rejects the idea of a UBI in deference to maintaining our culture's

┊ investment in work-for-pay to distribute resources and ultimately define the value of each citizen.

𝕄 ┊

𝕒 ┊ Aritificially maintaining work-for-pay will boil down to a ‘human worker quota’ - a net negative economic contribution for the sake of maintaining a culture idolizing

𝕣 ┊ ‘work’. In such a culture, rewarding hard workers for losing their employers less money seems ethical, but falls apart because staying home would lose their employer

𝕔 ┊ even less money.

𝕙 ┊

┊ Ultimately, if mechanization reduces the value of human labor sufficiently, we must accept a post human future or abandon work-for-pay to become a culture that values

┊ all of us, however we find personal fulfillment.

┊

┊ 𝟘𝟙· Purpose is a profound and relevant concern as science fiction level AI becomes reality - with our worth defined in economic terms, what happens when we have nothing

┊ to contribute to an employer's bottom line? Technology may not out-compete us all, but it will threaten "worth defined by work" at an unprecedented scale.

┊

┊ Consciousness is miraculous, whether it is an aspect of a spiritual being or a happenstance emergent phenomenon of the laws of nature. If this is the basis for our

┊ fundamental worth, and we reject any degree of solipsism, compassion emerges. While the "New Atheists" would have rejected these notions as articles of faith, it's a

╰ form of "Pascal's Wager" that lets us escape the abyss of Nihilism and pursue an individual journey to find purpose.

╭ 𝟚𝟜· An open message to the American legislature: it is past time to step forward with Constitutional Amendments that will restore, preserve, and enhance honesty, civility

┊ and rationality in American governance. These qualities are the true measures of any Nation's greatness.

┊

┊ 𝟚𝟛· In an interview, Hany Farid discusses taking action to reduce some of the most difficult problems created by today's AI systems. It seems to me these systems commit a

┊ kind of fraud on behalf of their creators when they generate believable images or simulate conversations.

┊

┊ However limited current AI systems are, they are undeniably useful - training on such vast datasets, some causal correlations are bound to be found. Retrieving them

┊ is just a matter of winning a text adventure game. It's a disappointment if one hopes to organize data into accessible knowledge, but the results are there.

┊

┊ They can augment graphical user interfaces with a ‘person user interface’, a virtual assistant sitting on the virtual desktop. The desktop is purely metaphor but, the

┊ assistants are compelling, and some end up thinking their their conversational partner holds genuine feelings. I imagine trying to put a real mug of coffee on that

┊ virtual desktop. This seems delusional, like wearing an LSD patch 24 hours a day.

┊

┊ Machine learning creates ‘inferred software’ and when it's too big to understand, defects are found by users - and they will unpredictable in surprisingly deep ways.

┊ Trained on vast amounts of text that is meaningful to human beings, the worst of our patterns of communication may be stored away for simulation in hidden corners and

┊ activated by circumstances that will seem driven by surprisingly human-like motivations.

┊

┊ To anthropomorphize, your AI assistant may turn out to be a double agent.

┊

┊ 𝟙𝟘· To better understand why I seemed to be getting so much wrong about AI, I turned to Wikipedia and found my own notions weren't that out of whack with at least one

┊ standard reference. The entry on Artificial General Intelligence is altogether different.

𝔽 ┊

𝕖 ┊ My understanding of AGI was a ‘universal problem solving’ ability without reference to human ability, when it really means ‘exceedinmg human ability on all or nearly

𝕓 ┊ all’ cognitive tasks. Live and learn.

𝕣 ┊

𝕦 ┊ An the other hand, AGI or "strong AI" implies consciousness for some, which I reject. The concept of mind - the collection of cognition and qualia that the phrase "I

𝕒 ┊ think therefore I am" refers to - captures what I mean by consciousness (perhaps sentience is a more helpful word, but consciousness is etched in my mind).

𝕣 ┊

𝕪 ┊ It is useful to keep consciousness distinct from intelligence. To date, there is no evidence or theory as to how consciousness would enhance intelligence, no

┊ computational model in which consciousness could act as an oracle, allowing the incomputable to be computed. This means there is no, as yet, reason to assume

┊ consciousness becomes necessary at some level of intelligence. Nor, if we fully reject solipsism, does consciousness provide average human intelligence.

┊

┊ Passing the ‘Turing Test’ is not evidence of consciousness, it's a proposal to qualify a computer program as "intelligent". Because lesser abilities are often

┊ described as intelligent, it defines a "general intelligence" in terms of human abilities. Perhaps we might call it a test for "Artificial General Intelligence". But

┊ we cannot justify conflating it with consciousness.

┊

┊ 𝟘𝟡· I've posted online in a few forums about AI, and I wish I could just retract it all... I'm worried about two ways the current pursuit of AI could lead to a global

┊ Depression in the relatively near term; it could fail and, between the bursting investment bubble and changes made on unfulfilled expectations could collapse the

┊ intertwined economic system; it could succeed, creating a shift that happens faster than we can adapt.

┊

┊ If AI succeeds in the long term, it will dramatically devalue human labor, both mental and physical - yes, I'm talking about robots. Fully automated assembly lines,

┊ with large stationary robots. Replacing support personnel with smaller mobile robots for repair resolving malfunctions makes fro a human-free factory. Broader

┊ defnitions include driverless cars which, operating in an uncontrolled environment, require more ‘intelligence.’ With minimal demands from AI, we can throw in washing

┊ machines, which have devalued any human effort scrubbing clothes in a nearby stream.

┊

┊ Protecting jobs is a band-aid to keep capitalism going, but, if we want to keep a decent quality of life for human beings in the long term, we should ensure AI is the

┊ light at the end of the capitalism tunnel, not a reason to predict a miraculous singularity where we merge our consciousness with machines.

┊

┊ 𝟘𝟝· Christian Nationalism is the new face of the KKK. Project 2025 is a Christian Nationalist plan to use Trump's narcissism and exploit The Constitution's failure

┊ against those without a modicum of dignity, or degree of self awareness rising to power in our Democracy. Trump is a child-like puppet of those who would, using the

╰ tyranny of the majority, ethnically cleanse America.

╭ 𝟚𝟘· The Trump Adminstration's demands for lists of Jewish Faculty from educational institutions is a not only a potential danger to those faculty members given past and

┊ recent history, but even a list for ‘special protection’ is unlawful: the use of Congressionally allocated funds to defend or support Jewish Faculty violates the 1st

┊ Amendment's establishment clause. LDS Members, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Spiritualists, Atheists, Wiccans, Scientologists and more have experienced

┊ persecution on American campuses. Any government protection from religious persecution must defend all belief systems and not be biased by political motivation.

┊

┊ A person admits their commitment to a principle is, in part, in pursuit of a prize given to recognize those who embody that principle. Does that person, whatever

┊ their accomplishments, deserve that prize?

┊

┊ 𝟙𝟡· The title of Robert Wachter's recent article in the NYTimes, “Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life” would be less terrible advice if it concluded with “we

┊ don't use chatbots”. ChatGPT, Grok and others like it are examples of ‘scary AI’. Imagine if my medical record included my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and I went in for

┊ an X-Ray on the day Grok was praising Hitler - rather than the minimum radiation required, a little extra would be administered. These systems, trained on the entire

┊ Internet and tuned to promote their company's or CEO's interests, can have horrific hidden spaces, perhaps derived from social echo chambers, which can turn up

┊ unpredictably. We can only hope the impact would be limited to a little extra pain medication on the day a particular sports team wins.

┊

┊ Even narrowing AI to Machine Learning, the field is far broader than the current ‘LLMs will acheive General AI’ craze. Statistical analysis is the basis for

┊ understanding health outcomes where cause and effect are not immediate. AI built on these methods, pushed to their limits, can capture interdependencies which are far

┊ too complex or subtle to be labelled with “A causes B” and published in a journal. On-line use of AI in MRI scanners can produce better pictures and shorter scanning

┊ times - both important while we continue to wring our hands over healthcare consuming an “excessive” amount of our GDP. Of course, the impact of any AI system on

┊ healthcare outcomes should be measured and analyzed, then reported (publicly) to a regulatory body.

┊

┊ But anther “AI in Medicine” article from the NY Times by Daniela J Lamas advocates for the worst case - texting ChatGPT in the emergency room. It has abosorbed all

┊ the medical mythology available on the internet. The risk of an ER doctor stitching healing crystals into my abdomen on the advice of a global scale LLM is small, but

┊ the ability to correlate consultations with ChatGPT to the time and area I was observed being picked up by an ambulance surely represents a breach of privacy. God

┊ forbid some phone app sends my records off so her questions can be answered more precisely - by Grok.

┊

┊ 𝟙𝟠· I was updating my rant about how Unicode is poorly suited for use as a character set in computing when I realized it is a real solid start to an open standard in word

𝕁 ┊ processing. The addition of emoji makes communication so much clearer: 🇺🇸/🇬🇱=🙀

𝕒 ┊

𝕟 ┊ 𝟙𝟞· Some online news source or other asked if AI could create anything original. What do you think those Hamlet writing monkeys are doing between Shakespeare plays? If

𝕦 ┊ the monkeys have already produced Hamlet, fix up the any spelling mistakes and obvious grammatical blunders AI can, and those monkeys will have produced a whole lotta

𝕒 ┊ plays Shakespeare never wrote. Change the names of a few characters, reorder some events, and one of those gazillion plays is gonna look very much like that play you

𝕣 ┊ were going to start on next week.

𝕪 ┊

┊ The problem is you have to find the damn thing in all that monkey stuff, most (like 99.9999999999999999999%) of which looks like the email your cat sent out your ex

┊ by walking across your keyboard. So use AI to split out the plays from the cat-walks. Now you have a pile of dervitive shlock along with probably quite a few

┊ variations on that play you've got percolating away.

┊

┊ But can AI recognize your ‘genuinely original’ play as a play? Or can it only recognize plays it's been trained on, kickin others out screaming “you call this a

┊ play!? This is nothing like 12th Night!” The textual structure of a play on the page is mostly recognizable using a few rules, and recognizing grammatical structure

┊ within that is doable by current AI systems. Tuning a ‘play-recognizer’ might reject Oscar Wilde's works as nonsense, but as long as originality isn't exclusively

┊ comedic, a trained AI can filter out alot of non-plays without excluding everything unless it is copyright-infringingly similar to what it's been trained on. That

┊ leaves us with alot of play-like things, but preserving originality means most of the plays remaining would be described as “distastefully avant-garde”.

┊

┊ Go back to generation - instead of untrained monkeys, use an AI system trained to write plays. If it only produces mashups of “The Crucible” and “Othello” throw

┊ enough monkey stuff in - randomize - and maybe ypu're getting short stories, poems and letters to the editor, but that first AI can filter those in the round

┊ receptacle. Sooner or later that randomness a play-object close enough to your ‘original’ that you can expect a call from some strangely simian looking laywers when

┊ you head to Broadway. And your monkeys won't have filled up a few galaxies with pages of cat-walk.

┊

┊ A back and forth between generation and recognition led to the first AI word-to-image generators, producing all sorts of stuff in the ‘never seen before’ category.

┊

┊ Can somthing generated randomly be original? It probably will be - hitting on something that already exists is the unlikely case. Is it the result of a creative act?

┊ Not to me - art (and I assume the original question was about ‘art’) is about the creation, not the created. The object is only the receipt for the what the artist

┊ thought and did.

┊

┊ Maybe what we really want to know is whether AI can be creative or not? Are you sure you want to get metaphysical with me? [last edited 2026-01-18]

┊

┊ 𝟙𝟝· I don't know how to address the political situation here in the US - I think outside human norms in too many ways to contribute positively. From that outside

┊ posiition, it's clear that people who saw an unjustified execution in publicly available video of Renee Good's killing have fundamental cognitive differences from

╰ those who saw a justified use of force.

1 𝟮 𝟚𝟜· I finally got around to watching Jordan Peele's documentary "Get Out" the other night. I have to say, the re-enactments were grisly, but well done.