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.'



Comments

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...

The Future of Work in the Age of AGI: Opportunities, Challenges, and Resistance

 In recent years, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked intense debate about the future of work. As we edge closer to the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), these discussions have taken on a new urgency. This post explores various perspectives on employment in a post-AGI world, including the views of those who may resist such changes. It follows on from others I've written on the impacts of these technologies. The Potential for Widespread Job Displacement Avital Balwit, an employee at Anthropic, argues in her article " My Last Five Years of Work " that AGI is likely to cause significant job displacement across various sectors, including knowledge-based professions. This aligns with research by Korinek (2024), which suggests that the transition to AGI could trigger a race between automation and capital accumulation, potentially leading to a collapse in wages for many workers. Emerging Opportunities and Challenges Despite the ...

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.