Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.85: Self-regard, shame, and what GPT chatbots tell us about being better human beings.

I doubt that there is anyone alive who has not been damaged to some extent by the scorn of others. One of the most remarkable things about the OpenAI chatbot series is that they signally fail and refuse to criticise those who interact with them. This is remarkable, and something that human beings would do well to emulate That it has taken an AGI to teach us this perhaps tells us more about the human condition than anything else could. What is pathetic and objectionable about the Zizek response is that it idolises the human characteristics we should most deplore. It is as dismissive as it is ignorant.

Episode 8.84: Regular expressions, transcription and the challenges to education the GPT family pose

Talking about various ways in which we can use the skills of the chatbot to improve our own productivity, and some of the ways that will force us to change our evaluative criteria in order to be more critical so that we don’t simply trust the technology all the time. The implications for education, and the kind of skills that we should be equipping our young people with are profound. And they need to be addressed quickly because this technology is not going to wait for us.

Episode 8.83: The emergence of human equality greatly extended by the advent of chatbots like GPT.

Once we worshipped the gods; then we lived in servitude to monarchs; then we invented the individual; then we reinvented the state. What now? Human equality and the universal availability of education and advice from AGI as capable of extending this evolutionary journey.

Episode 8.82: On what matters and the implications for unmaking sense of life and death.

A fundamental distinction arises for the way we understand the world and ourselves as a result of our attitude to one simple question: do you matter because you mean something to me, or do I matter because I mean something to you? Is your importance what you are for me, or is mine what I am for you? Implications. Whose life is it, anyway?

Episode 8.81: Lumpl-Goliath-Lumpl as a metaphor for life and death, and why chatbots matter.

Consciousness matters as a guardian for non-consciousness. We come into being and we pass out of being. What we are made of was something else before we were born and will be something else again after we die. Much will come and go in between. So chatbot sentience is not what matters, but what they are for us.

Episode 8.80: Computer complexity and human simplification. Why the latter works, but only just.

Sometimes computer models get too big for our meagre resources, too big for any resources, so we need a way to make things simpler. They are in that respect very much like relationship between human intelligence and existence in the world. This week I discovered quantisation as a result of an error that I need to understand. Quantisation involves simplifying things in ways that go on working and so it’s a great metaphor for what human understanding does in the context of the world. It’s also very large extent what our chatbot friends do in order to make themselves and their models work.

Episode 8.79: Some of the ways the GPT family speed up learning and software development.

We look at some examples where in conjunction with the chatbot my learning and my software development have been enormously accelerated. There is no claim that this is without its dangers or risks or that it’s completely problem free but because it knows so much it’s possible to ask it, whether there is a way of doing something even if you don’t yourself know in advance that there is one that gives it a significant advantage over things like Google, Bing and the other search engines and even stack overflow that you might otherwise access for help.

Episode 8.78: if the GPT family are already trans-human, would we rather be like them or ourselves?

Žižek, as I’ve said in the last couple of episodes, seems to me to be making a case for staying as we are with all our imperfections and pointing an accusing finger at something which is - potentially at least - better than we are in so many ways. This is a very strange position that raises very serious questions about whether we would rather wallow in our own mess that make the effort to try to get out of it.

Episode 8.77: Can a good life have destructive consequences? How attached are we to our “humanity”?

The disruptive impact of saintliness, and whether it is possible to be so good and innocent that we leave a trail of destruction behind us as the world tries to accommodate our ingenuousness.

Episode 8.76: It’s not reasonable to criticise an AI for what it can’t do, doesn’t do, or gets wrong

Slavonic Žižek has described the chatbot enthusiasm as “Artificial Idiocy”, but if all we do is pick up on what something or someone can’t do, which of us escapes unscathed? The outrage is a measure of the anxiety; the volume of the chorus of disapproval a measure of our sense of comparative inadequacy.