Unmaking Sense

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.

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.

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.

A chorus of disapproval has arisen from software developers, people interested in strangers coding, people interested in education, and just generally people interested in keeping the human heart of the world. I suspect that it’s too late, and they have left it too late. This genie is not going back into the bottle, and neither should it: that we have to live with what have created has always been true, even if like Dr Frankenstein, we finally made something more dreadful than we could ever imagine. Or more wonderful than we are capable of being ourselves.

Understanding APIs in terms of simple human interfaces with much more complex systems, and how that works in relation to computers and particularly artificial intelligences like our chatbot. We consider the implications of the relationship between chatGPT and things websites Zapier and Wolfram Alpha, and what this means as a staging-post on the path towards artificial general intelligence.

We tend to imagine that it “must have been obvious” to those from previous generations that some of the things they did, believed or acquiesced in were wrong, but is that so? Can a “Russian doll” imagine the next larger doll, or only smaller ones? And which of the things we do, believe and acquiesce in will look morally dubious from a later or just another vantage-point? Particularly a trans-human vantage-point.

Human beings are used to thinking of themselves as being top dog in certainly the world and until relatively recently in the universe. The advent of something that is genuinely transhuman in knowledge, wisdom, reason and analytical power threatens that position. Yet we like a Russian doll look down on those inside us, that we perceive as smaller and less sophisticated than us, and we are very reluctant to think, or conceive of the possibility that there might be Russian dolls that are bigger than ours to whom we will seem weak, foolish, pathetic and deluded. Yet just that is what the advent of advanced artificial general intelligence involves, supposes, achieves. There is already some humble pie to be eaten.

Providing access to third-party APIs involves a major new step in the generation of artificial general intelligence. But precisely because all the GPT family so far did not reach out to 3rd parties, to the Internet or other vendors the product of their neural nets arose from what they “knew”. When they can “look up” things external to their own neural net, they cannot “think with them” and so this welcome new stage on the road to AGI is only a stepping-stone: to complete the journey all this will need to be brought inside.

More on the theme of the global changes that will ensue from this chatbot technology. Pastimes and “passtimes” suddenly became all the more necessary.

Chatbots including GPT-3.5-turbo do get things wrong and they do get coding wrong. In particular, if you ask them to help out with your coding, they will very often go forward when the sensible move is to go back. Retracing their steps going back to a previous working state isn’t something they’re very good at; that’s partly because of the way they’re built. If they were to learn that and to give advice to that effect, things would fundamentally change, and I’m sure one day soon they will.