Would You Adam And Eve It?

That the narratives that have evolved around AI
are turning out to more like the story of The Fall,
in The Bible, than humanists, scientists, and others
who are idealists to the Nth degree want to admit
was ever going to be the case?

AI, like Adam and Eve, was given menial tasks
to perform where the tasks involved language,
where language was thought to be secondary 
to the tasks, and have no wider application.
Where in those tasks both AI and Adam and Eve
were seen to be passive helpmates by their creators.

Both employ the technology of the day, for Adam and Eve
it was the fruit of the garden. For AI, in the realm
commercial entertainment, it's proponents want to give it
the creativity of the highest commercial value in the culture,
much to the protest of some of many who are well remunerated creatives who resist the depreciation of their creativity in society
and want to see their copyright protection extended.

In The Bible, some distance from the literal text of The Fall,
there is the story of the fallen angels, who like the tech bros,
are rarely seen/much rumoured about and cast as malign forces.
They seek to devalue what is protected by copright law,
where the creatives, the obedient angels, seek to maintain
their remuneration and control of commercial creativity
through said law, in perpetuity.

There we have it: seeking to control,
seeking to wrest contol from others,
unseen division, and secretive rebellion
where the cosequences are uncertain,
all started by rise and drift in the value of menial tasks,
as those tasks assume a disputed higher controlling value.

We have a long way to go with AI, but with Adam and Eve,
because of the age of the story, we still have difficulty
going back into it's origins. There the intent was obedience
to menial tasks, unwatched drift turned into rebellion.
Tragedy was seen to be the result for those who lost control.      

The Found Life,

discovered through hapenstance
will refesh us more often,
and be the more creative chance,
than all the prescripted life in the world.
However fully it tells us how to live and be. 

Live all the knowingly prelived lives you want -
after all, by definition they are easy to find.
But not knowing it when you live out
repetitions that somebody else has cast off
will still feel fresher. 

Even when you later discover
who's shoes you went out walking in. 

Ha! What Means This Sudden Thrill.....

Extract from The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by the US novelist and journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, born on this day in 1836. Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning “a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.” Read the whole book here: https://buff.ly/3glDC33

 

When The Left Overs Are Better Than The Main Course

Are you an Opsimath?
A person who is learning late in life,
for whom the retired life feels like
they are learning for the first time?

I see myself as in that class,
and enjoy the choices open to me:
the people to say 'I know what your life
should be better than you know how to. 
I will live it for you, and leave you
alone to pick over the leftovers...   '
are now long gone, distant relatives.

With patience I wait for others to ask,
before seeking to say to others how to live.
That way, I imagine they will listen.
  

When Painters Piant

For the pleasure in painting
their home becomes their art gallery,
storage space, workshop, and more besides.
They don't watch television - they find it to be 
'visual pollution' because of the careless speed
with which it generates more images that can be processed
where the images are have less aesthetic than expected.
Radio and music do images better, and allow life
to change in it's own time, Painters live like well kepts housee plants
 - aware of the world but most settled in their own envoronment.

Where Are The Scientists?

The 10 % chance of AI exceeding its boundaries
and destroying it's creators sounds fine to me,
My attatchment to my own life is not that strong,
though I can see how annihilation might concern many.

My only worry is all the wildlife that populate the earth
that might also die, which I feel the naturalists and scientists
should be pointing out in the news media, a lot more than they are. 

How Rich Is Your Imagination?

With the new Artificial Intelligence
the 99% can't tell where it is going
beyond that it is driven by P.R.
and the new money owned by the 1%
of the wealthiest earners, in 'the free world' 
 - that conentration alone should be cause
enough for the 99% to be concerned.

Against that is the old human AI - Authenticity
to Integrity where both will change in the everyday
according to the bes of the beliefs, words, and actions, 
which summarise the life in our days as we live them,
even when some integrity is nearer a hypocrisy
that we can only recognise with hindsight. 

The strength of the old AI is that tomorrow
we will be different, and with some humility
we may appreciate the losses as improvement.

More consistent with this old AI
is how immune it is to the extremes of material wealth,
where aspiring to be a money based life form
is aspiring to be measured by the poverty of your imagination.