Skip to main content

Let's not ignore the Loxodonta in the room

 


When researching the leaders, CEOs and pioneers / advocates of AI there's something that should not be ignored. That is the number of them that hold, how should I say, fringe views. They may have Transhumanism tendencies, often outright support for this 'potential of augmenting humans with technology. It may be they have a faith in nanotechnologies to wire technologies directly into the human cortex. Or hold both views in the case of Ray Kurzweil as revealed in his interview with Fridman. I first came across the idea of Transhumanism after visiting a self proclaimed Transhumanist artist back in the late 1980's. I was, frankly horrified with the hubris of it all. 

These are far from the only views commonly held by what I call tech-evangelists who always, always anthropomorphise technologies, which somewhat gives the game away.

Another common idea is that the AI 'singularity', a term borrowed from physics, is inevitable, the singularity in this usage is the concept that superintelligence is the event horizon that we can't peer beyond, when according to some, we will have created a superhuman or, as some call it, a 'God'. 

Today I came across an excellent blog by Johannes Jäger that dives into this murky realm and who is, thankfully, not afraid to call out the elephant in the room of the Tech-evangelists. I encourage you to have a read, especially the post 'Machine Metaphysics and the Cult of Techno-Transcendentalism'.

I'm currently in my second week of blogging about AGI, and I know, I should have expected to come across the varied view points of tech-evangelists by this point. I'm still surprised though at the prelevance and the increasingly perverse worldviews held by those that wish to 'transform our lives.'



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Whispers in the Machine: Why Prompt Injection Remains a Persistent Threat to LLMs

 Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming how we interact with technology, offering incredible potential for tasks ranging from content creation to complex analysis. However, as these powerful tools become more integrated into our lives, so too do the novel security challenges they present. Among these, prompt injection attacks stand out as a particularly persistent and evolving threat. These attacks, as one recent paper (Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model Safety https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05206) highlights, involve subtly manipulating LLMs to deviate from their intended purpose, and the methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated. At its core, a prompt injection attack involves embedding a malicious instruction within an otherwise normal request, tricking the LLM into producing unintended – and potentially harmful – outputs. Think of it as slipping a secret, contradictory instruction into a seemingly harmless conversation. What makes prompt inj...
Post a Comment
Read more

Podcast Soon Notice

I've been invited to make a podcast around the themes and ideas presented in this blog. More details will be announced soon. This is also your opportunity to be involved in the debate. If you have a response to any of the blog posts posted here, or consider an important issue in the debate around AGI is not being discussed, then please get in touch via the comments.  I look forward to hearing from you.
Post a Comment
Read more

The tech utopia of endless leisure time is here: goodbye jobs

  'AI eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs in May' so it's reported by hallenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. Following on from reports by IBM et al that thousands of job cuts will occur due to AI replacement, there is no need to wait for the utopia of AI allowing humans more leisure time, as that's already here, in the form of redundancies, if we are to accept the reports findings. 'With the exception of Education, Government, Industrial Manufacturing, and Utilities, every industry has seen an increase in layoffs this year.' What's particularly notable is that it's the Tech sector that's the most affected from job cuts in the US economy: 'The Technology sector announced the most cuts in May with 22,887, for a total of 136,831 this year, up 2,939% from the 4,503 cuts announced in the same period last year. The Tech sector has now announced the most cuts for the sector since 2001, when 168,395 cuts were announced for the entire year. ' Another reason ...
Post a Comment
Read more