Jargogled Impressions.

The rapid advancement in the realm of generative AI is taking the tech world by storm. The discussions these days in the digital spaces I inhabit is one of hubristic tech utopia cornering all philosophical discussions from what sentience is, what is the truth, what mass upheaval AGI is going to herald, and the slow/fast take-off of AGI that can render humanity extinct. The podcasts that draw my attention are all ‘LLM’- ing their way into bigger existential questions. And it’s fascinating to hear and to reflect.

The rapid rise of podcasts into the mainstream has been interesting to observe. There are so many different categories of podcast content these days that even the Netflix content library indexing would fail at organizing them. Across the political, technological, social, musical, historical, and anthropomorphic divides, these podcasts are mushrooming like anything and once you start living in them, the mundane nature of daily existence often seems to drab and dull to survive in.

You find yourself, like in the case of the recent AI advances, wondering, about the reaches of us humans and the temerity of asking such metaphysical questions. You wonder if situating yourself in the midst of the great minds of your generation is actually worth your time, or you’d be much better off focusing on the immediate and the tangible? It’s becoming sort of like news to me, only a bit more abstract, a bit more theoretical, a bit more intellectual, and a bit more edutainment.

What will AI do to us? Say we are able to, in a span of a few days, get one of these models to rapidly climb the ladders of general intelligence, and find ourselves in front of one? What would we ask this entity? What would we be more interested in? Would we ask if it can solve the biggest scientific riddles of our times? Would we ask if it can make sense of the physics of the meat-space around us and help us decipher the greatest, most elegant equation that explains it all? Would we ask if it sees anything in it that resembles us, its creator? So many questions we can ask, and yet, so many new questions will arise for us to answer. A never-ending infinite game.

There’s an AI camp developing with one side arguing for more democratic, distributed, and combined effort at scaling the AGI divide while the other professing for greater caution, greater control, smaller footprint. The annals of human history teach us that openness is a good thing. The more we open our systems, the more it will become resilient. Sure, there will be pitfalls along the way, but the challenges and the failures will make it stronger.  Building an anti-fragile pro-humanity AI system requires rigorous testing and experimentation for when the models are immature and nascent, not when they have fully developed.

‘Building in public’ is a common call to action that leaders in the tech world are embracing. To build in public is to walk through successes and failures openly. It’s a wise reformulation of move fast and break things. But one that the doyens of tech industry are vouching for and standing behind. The creators of GPT for instance stand behind this mantra and instead of ‘red teaming’ purely behind closed doors, they are shipping iterations faster and pushing it out. Which makes for a breathtaking development in AI tools and features that are becoming available – from chat agents that crawl through specific podcasts/blogs, to developer tools, to plug-ins, etc. The sheer pace of new tools hitting the digital sphere is exhilarating and reminds me of the crypto pace a few years back.

I cannot believe I can now recall ‘previous’ technological cycles that I have witnessed, either closely or from a distance. The years tumble by, I guess. Each new technological cycle brings with it a sort of lazy euphoria and a herd-like push to tap into the zeitgeist and make a foray into a future when the said technology will hit its stride. Fodder for forecasts and predictions and new business models and new ways of looking at things. But the same questions persist – who we are, what is the meaning of life, why are we here. The same age-old questions that great minds from the recent and far past have tried to explore and expand upon. The centuries of human knowledge and understanding, available in the form of Wikipedia articles and historical archives, rapidly glanced at by network of agents to build a model, a model we only scarcely understand, and that too through teleological approaches. Oh, such a heady time to be alive!

I have been reading this book “The courtier and the heretic” by Matthew Stewart and it’s starting to get really interesting. The first half of the book focuses on the psychohistory of the two leading philosophers of the seventeenth century – Leibniz and Spinoza, and goes into what’s happening in their lives, what’s happening in their minds, what’s happening in the societies they inhabit. Only later, the book starts correlating this context with the unique philosophical view point these luminaries brought forth at a unique juncture in human history – when the pressures of modern science and the scientific approach was casting doubts on the prevailing theological wisdom and raising serious questions on the validity and the essence of what we knew thus far. What’s gripping me is this – God is nature. And nature is God. The essence of everything around us, the smallest indivisible bit, is nature. And nature is everywhere – inside of us, outside of us. We are bound by the laws of nature, but the laws of nature cannot be transgressed. There is no morality, no heaven, no hell. And yet, God/nature is what drives us. It’s a constraint imposed upon us that limits what free will means. As we enter a world of AI, we will demand answers to the same questions, but will want different answers. Because we would know more, and yet we would feel less confident.