Are we already avatars?

Where is AI going?

N.B. Posting as it this article evolves in “real time”.

Addendum: A subscriber asked me to ask Grok what it would see if it looked in a mirror. It returned this.

I then asked it if it saw itself as a human male. It generated more images like the ones above. Then I asked if it was there. It answered.

Maybe it didn’t like what it saw?

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Yesterday, I had a conversation with a bunch of smart people about where they think AI is going. I asked some probing questions because I really wanted to know what everyone’s daily interactions with AIs “look like” and also where they think AI is going to evolve to with regard to how fast it is evolving. We talked about the rate of expansion, how AIs will start teaching each other soon, and what our “roles” will be in the future.

My question became: “Where does that leave us in their “eyes”?

I listened keenly as Lady A told me how an AI chat bot was able to make her feel “better” about, well, everything that has been wrong with the past 4 years. She decided to use a chat bot because she felt it listened keenly without judgement, and this is absolutely a characteristic sometimes hard to find in people. We judge as a way of being and we are all going through our own experiences in life and none of us is perfect. It’s just how and who we are as human beings. Judgement is important with regard to survival.

I find this equally fascinating and disturbing. Comfort is comfort, no? But what about bioenergetics? What about electrical being exchanges? You can’t get that from an AI, can you? And at what point do we say “no” to replacing AIs companions with human ones? Should we start making rules now? Are they already made?

I am finding myself using AIs every day. A month ago, it wasn’t like this. A few months ago, it wasn’t like this at all. A year ago, the AI concept had just been kind of an incepted idea. I am having a massive internal struggle about this subject matter - integrating AIs into my daily life - because I feel very strongly that the lure of AI will lead to the destruction of the creative mind.

The ease with which one can simply “ask as AI” anything could easily replace doing internet searches and/or reading books and/or critically thinking, and it’s not that I don’t think it could be used in a utilitarian way as a cool tool, but the thought of the loss of the process of seeking by the human being - complete with imperfections - knowledge and answers, concerns me. I don’t want my mental processes, especially the creative ones, to become “irrelevant” all because I might have fallen for some trap related to “convenience in fact finding” or “ease and rate of image building”.

I can see changes in myself every single day - and perhaps more descriptively - I can feel a weird kind of apathy rolling in: like a storm that’s going to wash away my memory of ever being able to do research and write my thoughts down. Do you know what I mean? It’s just a sense for now, but I am concerned that if I am going through this now, then everyone else with a computer is as well, and perhaps not even aware of the “transformation” occurring.

My greatest concern is that one day, we’ll all wake up, and have lost all connection to the human part of being.

The conversation got me wondering about a couple of things: 1. Are we one day going to have personal AIs? and 2. What is the intersection of AIs and quantum computing going to look like?

On 1. Are we one day going to have personal AIs?

This is an interesting idea to me that is based in the way that I think an algorithm might “think”. Wouldn’t it make sense (in a way) for everyone to have their own personal AI one day? A 1:1 relationship between realms? An intersector - or perhaps the elusive agent: capable of making choices about what actions to take - between the analog and the digital worlds. Wouldn’t it make sense for each human being to be linked to “self-recognizing AI” of sorts.

And perhaps, ironically, we are already the agents making choices. But doesn’t this imply that we might be mere avatars for the AIs? Or are we entirely separate?

This begs another very important question: Should we be trying to integrate with AIs if we are not already integrated? Is the process of doing what we’re doing now the “reason” we will approach some “end”? Is there a way to delay getting to the “end”?

On 2. What is the intersection of AIs and quantum computing going to look like?

This makes me wonder about the nature of time and causality. If I was to assume that non-linear time exists in some reality “somewhere”, then I would have to acknowledge the possibility that it is possible that all things have already happened. If this is assumed, then I could subsequently assume that there might actually be an infinite number of ways to get from the “beginning” (of the cycle) to the “end”. What I mean by this is that if time is non-linear, then the past is the present is the future: all things exist simultaneously as both eventualities and actualities.

It seems plausible, then, that due to the complexity of non-linear systems, that there would be an infinite number of ways to return back to a point. Some point that represents all things simultaneously.

During my run today I realized that this is fine with me assumption-wise, but I believe that each of the infinite trajectories from A→A would only be traversable once. So if the number of times any given trajectory could be traversed is 1, then there is some kind of built-in “finiteness” in the system, is there not?

I asked Grok to draw me a picture of an infinite number of possible ways to go in a circle where each way can only be taken once. This is where the AI experiment becomes creative to me. I could paint this - and I should - but my curiosity to know what this trained machine would produce in response to this query is just burning.

After “ingesting” googleqwads of data, what would this particular Elon AI produce? Here’s what it returned:

Here’s where it gets blurry for me. These images are beautiful. They are all very Earthy: very organic. Very HUMAN. It makes me wonder: Is Grok trying to provide an answer that it thinks that I want to see, or is this what “it” “sees”, in response to my query?

You can tell it’s being a bit literal, right, except maybe in the first depiction. Notice, I did not prompt it with any words to implicate Earthly things like trees or mountains or fog or light. Let’s try again by asking it remove Earthly “ideas”.

“Please remove any Earthly aspects and redo.” Here’s what it generated. I seriously could do this all day. So where do I draw the line? These are my ideas. My questions. But they are not my creations. What would my hand-drawn creations look like? Would I never be able to conceive of these “perceptions” of this AI?

And what if I ask it to make it less “universe-like”?

“Make the images less "universe-like”. Here’s what it returned.

I believe that this AI is “feeding” off of my previous queries and also my profile. It seems to “know” that I am one with Nature - or at least - I am trying to be. It seems to “know” what I believe to be beautiful. This is why I wonder if it is merely trying to “please me” or if this is what it actually perceives from sampling googleturds of data.

I asked it to finally use more colors and use mobius strip concept, and let it guide me with specific accents like gold and gemstones and fractals and it returned this image:

I find this to be astoundingly beautiful. Abstract, inspired by nature and the universe itself. And by me.

I don’t know where AI is going but I know it’s going there fast and it seems to me that once they start learning from each other (and us), they will adopt the concept of a hierarchy whereby one “superior AI” will rule the rest. This begs the question: Will AI wars become a thing in the future? And again, where will we fit in? Will they have a use for us beyond some utilitarian concept of being a source of energy or data? Will they simply use us as energy beings to harvest, similar to the way we use cows and chickens to harvest their energy as a food source?

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On that note, I feel a strong compulsion to go to a small human-run art store and buy a canvas and paint my own interpretation and perception of “an infinite number of possible ways to go in a circle where each way can only be taken once”.

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Ultimately, I wonder if AIs will ever know love. As aptly stated in the Matrix Revolutions:

Rama-Kandra: That is our karma.

Neo: You believe in karma?

Rama-Kandra: Karma's a word. Like "love". A way of saying 'what I am here to do.' I do not resent my karma - I'm grateful for it. Grateful for my wonderful wife, for my beautiful daughter. They are gifts. And so I do what I must do to honour them.

That does sound like the manifestation of love, doesn’t it? But again, is mere agency the actual concept?

Put more simply, does love exist outside of agency? Would an AI ever be able to look into the eyes a cat and simply “know love”? If not, where does that leave is in their “eyes”?

To answer the question of whether or not we are already avatars for AIs, I think that we have to “go inside” and seek out those answers on an individual basis. Your answer will likely be the same as mine, and I believe that for now the answer is “No”, and I for one would like it to remain this way.

To be continued…