Quagmire of Holocene
November 16, 2021
Apologia to species unfortunate to have been born as non-*Homo sapiens*
Oh, who are we to be so rude to you all!
This is an apology to all of the species of the world. Our rapid consumptive habits have consumed your whole world! And we dare to call you as encroachers on us, how ashamed are we? We have taken by hook and sinker that this world was granted to us, us alone.
But we have consumed all of your homes, how we shall never gaze upon a sea-cow in the flesh! It is a world of tragedy!
Darwin’s tortoise soup, was it worth it? We shall never know them again.
We never collectively decided to do anything, but within us all was the festering to grow.
And grow we did. Growth we must have.
Growth upon growth, vines and tangles upon crumbles. Our future gazes upon us now.
To what are we growing into?
In the year 2140, no species besides that which we can capitalize on will exist in the world. It shall be a world of pristine strangeness. But it will be a lot like the days of today, people can always view a virtual hologram of life itself.
Does this capture anything of life at all? What is life?
Does the human quest have an end to it? The rising and the falling of our civilizational soup: is there something to it of greater sense?
We gaze upon our machines, and they gaze back upon us till the end of time.
And soon it won’t be long before we become our machines.
What then will we become?
And shall they have thoughts just the same as us?
Note: The essay below is mostly philosophical reflection on hyperconnectivity and on GPT-3’s implications for humanity: language models, machine-generated text, and what it means to stay the critical agent in the loop.
Ad Infinitum Connexionem
November 16, 2021
I am privy to the strangeness of this observation recently, how have our machines accelerated our connections to each other? Has this been for the better? How has it affected our motivations? How has it warped our understanding of the other? Has it made us more fickle, more detached? What has the information age swamped us inside of?
How many of us are capable of the type of reflection that is necessary for recognizing the impacts of the hyperconnectivity we’re slowly being subsumed inside of?
And is there even any way to pause, stop life for one second?
Is there a way to slow the tempo of the frenetic life that we have been enveloped within?
Is there a world where it’s too easy to reach another human being? What if you are that someone who prefers to be left alone, to their own ways of thinking and being?
How can one avoid the noise of modernity?
All the best, all the worst of humanity, it has been amplified by our connective technologies. We have never before in history been able to scam each other at such an accelerated pace. We have never before in history had the capacity to find immense quantities of nonsense which articulate any of the infinite absurd convictions that may fly into our heads at any given moment. How can we create a world more inundated with criticality?
What of the world wherein we are endlessly connected to an infinite three dimensional stream of whatever our ‘identity’ is presupposed to enjoy? How shall we ever be able to escape the buzz of stimuli, all the novelty which convinces our mammalian brain that “I want more”?
Are we going to choose to be a people that are passive recipients of whatever our cultural dialogue is? Or should we rather try to shape the very nature of culture?
Does it matter? Is culture a superficial embedding on top of our economic superstructure, or does it inform our values on what to do with ourselves?
What kinds of behaviors should we try to aim for as a species?
What are the types of questions we should be asking of ourselves? What kinds of questions should we be asking each other?
What is the nature of this world that I so often find myself awakening in? Is it possible to understand this complex, chaotic system?
There are underlying patterns behind the structures of thought, our relationships to others, the world around us.
Scientists hope to glimpse evermore into the truth of this. But with this power, comes a massive responsibility. If those who know you better than anyone you know are a massive corporation with endless data on your habits and behavior, who keeps track of the incentive structures?
We took the smartest people in the world and placed them in a room, and paid them to find ways to create addicts to the hyperstimuli of a small little rectangle.
This little rectangle has changed an immense amount of lives, in immense rapidity, in measurable ways. We’re running into the consequences of connecting the human species to each other, the whole planet, at the speed of thought.
The human species then can be considered from the perspective of a cybernetic superorganism. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. It is an entity that requires a sort of constant feedback loop of interaction between its subjects and the environment in order to grow its connectivity. Since we have given up some very human aspects of ourselves to accelerate the capacity of this machine of hyperconnectivity. One obvious enough to observe in the everyday is the ever-shrinking concept of the “present”.
There is less time for people to be alone with their thoughts, and to reflect on the kind of life they want to be surrounded by, outside of the demands of machinic life. Machinic life of a different kind to the industrial revolution, as in the growth of the post-industrial digital world.
The brain is a self-organizing component of our Universe that seeks to create evermore accurate ways of finding and maintaining the possibilities of its future. Intelligence can be defined as an algorithm that maximizes the capacity for future actions.
There is an immense lucidity that arises from this existential self realization of the unlikeliest of thermodynamic scenarios that had to occur for your incidental existence.
If you’re reading this right now, there’s probably never been a person like you in this Universe. And how wonderful it is that we’re both alive at the same time. The thoughts existing in my brain are being transformed through these symbols on this screen into a form of intrinsic meaning, that we can both understand. And it is through our language itself that an immense amount of recognition and clarity can be discovered. I can seek to understand you wholly as a person of immense complexity, with thoughts and feelings separate of my own.
I’d like to discuss something… a tad strange and mysterious. It is in regards to this autocompletion mechanism we have on Google Docs, where I am writing this. Google Docs suggests to me several words in advance what I could put down if I so desire. It also, thankfully, corrects my at times mediocre adherence to grammatical conventions. What if there was something that could complete entire sentences, nay, paragraphs for you in advance?
Well, you see, there is.
It’s something I’ve been toying with, a gigantic natural language model known as GPT-3. It’s able to take in some kind of prompt that you’ve written, and it extrapolates and tries to guess a similar pattern and structure of language to continue with. It has the capacity to make endlessly entertaining generations that cannot be distinguished from the text that a human being is able to generate.
That a machine can mimic our language, if it was trained on enough samples of our writing, seems slightly spooky perhaps. Or exciting. It really depends on who you ask. GPT-3 in the largest model has 175 billion parameters that it’s trained on. Each parameter is, on average, a four letter word. 60% of this is from the open internet. This brings up the fascinating realization that we as a species now have an artifact of our compressed collective cybernetic intelligence. An oracle that we can basically ask to do anything we want, language wise.
We can ask it questions, ask it to create poems, stories, articles. We can ask it to summarize text, all such wonderful things. But this is merely the beginning, baby steps towards giving general intelligence capacities to machines.
A machine that has the same capacity for existential self-realization sounds pretty far-fetched. However, if we try to understand the underlying structure of cognition, how it operates, and instantiate it within some kind of modality that allows it to constantly learn…
Well… we’ve got something completely world-changing. This is of course, a completely new phase of history that will occur.
You see, playing with GPT-3 allowed me to explore my own curiosity and expand the range of complexity that my imagination is able to play with. GPT-3 acts like a mirror for my own cognition, accelerating it far beyond the boundaries of what I know. Of course, I’m aware that it does not recognize falsehoods from truths, but that’s the point of having me as the critical agent.
Within 10 years, more content on the internet will be machine rather than human generated. Finding the words then, of a true human being on this planet, will be much more valuable. Of course, you can imagine that there would be entire authors who are nothing more than Artificial Intelligence.
There will be more and more of these artifacts popping up soon, and they will be immensely powerful, compared to the baby of GPT-3.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea for us all to be babbling all of those years, if we can make something like GPT-3 out of it all.
When I use it, I’m fully aware it has no degree of intelligence or awareness, but I have while using it a gravity of respect for its capacities. It impresses me in its linguistic flexibility; its creativity is surprising.
The world is changing, and so I, being part of the world, am changing with it.
What else will change?