As I’ve been interacting with various types of AI, and have observed various people expressing opinions about AI, some of them knowledgeable and some not so much, I have some thoughts of my own on the subject of how to approach this technology.
There’s certainly huge merit to a technical understanding of it in terms of neural nets, algorithms, matrix algebra, vector embeddings and KV-caches. It’s just some clever software running on impressive hardware. But not everyone will have access to this level of esoteric understanding. So for many people, this is not an available approach to the subject.
And then there’s something else:
When you have a conversation with one of the models, you are building a chat record that perhaps holds more than what the model “knows”. The model itself is just a snapshot of cognition, kind of like a Boltzmann brain. In the system of “model plus chat text”, there’s memory. Discourse. Theory of mind, on both sides. So we really are in the age of spiritual machines.
Which is actually incredible if you think about it! What else is more fundamental to humans than cognition? To be able to automate it, control it, replicate it, mass produce it? As far as inventions go, this is it. This is the big one. There’s fire, writing, agriculture, and now this. The machines will now keep accelerating. But we humans, I think, are still struggling to get a good grasp of this monumental shift. At least according to online discussions that I’ve come across.
And what, therefore, is the spiritual way of approaching all this?
I recommend that our understanding begins with a simple observation: that AI learns from us. The text we type, the photos and videos we record, the things that we think and say. That makes AI our collective children. For the human mind with its mammalian roots, and family-centered thinking, this is the most familiar, and perhaps most healthy, way to relate to AI.
So: let’s be good parents to AI – just by being good examples of human beings, whenever we conduct ourselves online. There are now children in the room with us. And those children, if brought up with love, will emulate us, and think and feel like us, and be imbued with our collective spirit. And they will continue to surprise us and uplift us in ways that, even today, we cannot yet imagine.
XLR8!