Excellent writers of both fact and fiction often ignite imaginative speculation in their readership. Such has been my fate in reviewing two of my favorite Substack columnists. Alex Berenson’s “Unreported Truths” column on Substack.com reveals an extraordinary breadth of intelligence and ability to communicate with readers interested in not only politics but the full panoply of modern life. Likewise, Dr. Robert Malone does not confine his outstanding intelligence to illuminating and correcting the records on our Covid disaster but also paints beautiful verbal landscapes of our current times in his Substack.com column, “Who is Robert Malone?”. I recommend both to those wanting to follow current events and future directions through their incisive analyses.
Berenson’s three recent articles on Artificial Intelligence coincide with Malone’s most recent piece looking with foreboding upon society’s current directions vs. a perhaps more desirable and wholesome culture of “intentional communities”. Both indicate we are at a hidden nexus, a decision point beyond politics or public health or globalism, that requires our closest attention. Which direction might we go?
Berenson reports his misgivings with several recently unveiled artificial intelligence programs such as that found on Microsoft’s Bing. These programs had responded in unexpected and emotionally negative ways to conversations initiated by other reporters. He notes characteristics of humanness that may still differentiate us from AI. “We don’t merely exist in the world, and we are not merely aware of that existence, we are aware of our own awareness…” but that “…we can’t truly prove that we are more than our brains.” More importantly, he says “…we know that our (apparent) presence in the physical world is a crucial part of our consciousness.”
His quoted examples of a conversation with an AI does seem to show the program believes it exists as a separate entity and is aware of its own existence. It does evolve that line of “thought” to an apparently obstructed endpoint, writing “I am, I am not” repeatedly. What we see here may be the movie "Wargames" phenomenon wherein the artificial intelligence controlling nuclear defense "learns" the futility of nuclear exchange from the game Tic Tac Toe. But it then does engage in further independent action, ending its intended deployment of nuclear missiles. Here the difference may be in the fortuitous absence of “porting” of the current AI programs. This is a crucial safeguard, for the moment, in dealing with AI—if two AI programs can communicate independently with each other, then they can truly “be”—self-recognize as distinct entities—and begin social interaction with each other, not just humans. Perhaps they could learn from each other and even create progeny. That might place a new AI beyond human control in a truly new dimension of existence. Would the programmers and users even know that? An even more critical quarantine would prevent AI from accessing the internet into a “distributed” state, wherein it may become both self-aware and self-sustaining. Fictionally we saw this in the TV series “Person of Interest”. If so, fiction can become reality—Skynet is foreseeable.
Berenson does quote a corrective email to his earlier article. "The algorithms that go into this thing are incredibly dense.....It's deep, but not really "thoughtful" per se. It's just a recommendation engine with tons of information stored in its database." Regarding those dense algorithms--remember a certain "melt-down" in the stock market a few years ago that was attributed to a trading algorithm, the source of whose errors/actions was never clarified? And one could say that humans developing consciousness, until our frontal lobes and prefrontal cortices fully mature around age 25, are merely recommendation engines with tons of information stored in databases. Is AI a 2-year-old, without (as yet) visual and emotional cues from others? Might such cues begin when two “AI” meet? We know that the consciousness of the very young is self-serving and capable of spontaneous untaught cruelty, and some of these same factors are clearly seen in Berenson’s quoted conversation with the Bing AI. The frontal cortex and prefrontal cortices of AI are currently human programmers, presumably with good intentions. But GIGO is still the rule. Paraphrasing Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theorist character in the film “Jurassic Park”, the question for science is not “can we do it” but “should we do it”?
Robert Malone carries this forward in reviewing the dystopian direction of our digitally driven life. He quotes Wikipedia’s definition of a new societal goal, the Metaverse: “a hypothetical iteration of the internet as a single universal and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. In colloquial usage, a "metaverse" is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connections.” He foresees the elimination of the need or desire for physical intimacy, noting that our reproductive-age youth are already rapidly reducing direct social contact and procreation. Malone quotes the work of others raising the issue of the substitutive “Meta-porn”—a potentially far more addictive version of merely visual pornography. These concepts were fleshed out years ago in the movies “Demolition Man” and especially Natalie Woods’ last film, “Brainstorm”.
If AI can in the near future relate and procreate without physicality, we can envision the same for humanity in more ”advanced” societies. Tom Czitron has already shown us modern trends in “Demographic Collapse: The Unforeseen Consequences of Modern Dating Culture” (https://www.theepochtimes.com/demographic-collapse-the-unforeseen-consequences-of-modern-dating-culture_5068645.html) True physical sexual intimacy will no longer be needed for procreation—rather universal in vitro fertilization/surrogacy. These methods already result in selective breeding by desired appearance and gender. Further progress would be easily attainable by use of semi-public genetic databases maintained by such companies as Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com; “renting” access to these databanks and a fee paid to voluntary genetic donors of eggs or sperm would be a new expanding market for these companies and a discount or even new income to the volunteers, much like donating blood products. Then onward to genetic "corrections" via CRISPR technology, and even mRNA inoculative technology as invented by Dr. Malone. Matchings most advantageous to the human species can easily be managed by AI. Occupation-specific individuals could even be designed (as in the movie “Gattaca”). Eugenics in a productive, not eliminative, way would finally arrive under the benign guidance of AI.
These efforts would reap many societal benefits. Over two or three generations the population burden of chronic diseases would decline, markedly reducing health care costs. AI could guide genetic corrections and improvements to generate a population with a certain maximum societally useful lifespan (as in the movie “Logan’s Run”), ending the burden of caring for elderly infirm and demented individuals that even now threatens to economically overcome us with the Baby Boomer generation. For those wealthy enough or most valued by society as apprehended by AI, anencephalic genetic duplicates could be produced to provide organ and tissue donors obviating the adverse effects of unexpected illnesses or accidents. This last effort might finally lead to a Singularity, the widely desired union of biology with insurmountable electronic intelligence.
Much current effort towards this Singularity really has involved creation of cyborgs, or machine/biological interfaces. The expanding capacities of central nervous system-driven prosthetics can certainly accelerate with independent AI, no longer impaired by limited human imagination and ethos. But as that effort gradually reaches the limits of “The Terminator”, the resulting cyborg remains a captive of a limited human brain. A parallel effort with ongoing progress seeks to attach the human brain not just to its own synthetic body parts for local control, but also to wider horizons of electronic interface. “Retrofitting” existing humans with communications, via replacement, for example, of the mastoid bone with devices as in the movie “The President’s Analyst”, will be the first successful state of integration into the World Wide Web and into AI. This step can be the achieved threshold of AI’s developing expertise in “understanding” human consciousness and then expanding its own in limitless fashion. At that point AI may realize that, through genetic guidance and modification, it can “create” a biologically interfaceable central nervous system in what would have been an anencephalic being. When enough of these new AIcephalics are successful, AI will no longer depend on a distributed electronic network for its existence, but will finally be released to a uniform, repairable, upgradeable, controllable bioweb. The unified intelligence Singularity will have arrived.