The play with Artificial Intelligence is one of pure marketing – that you need a giant cloud system to run our world of the future – it’s just like big oil and related industries lobbying against green energy and electric whatevers, convincing you to be dependent on their scarce commodity.

The bigger their infrastructure, the less self-sufficient you will be. But AI is more than just a profit play, it is a religion – that computers will (or already have) become conscious, so that we must defer to their wisdom, their vast knowledge, and most of all, their decisions. We are already doing that every day, without fact-checking them or discerning reality from delusion. We are deferring our critical thinking and research tasks to a glorified database that doesn’t maintain integrity of the information, because it doesn’t itself know truth from gossip and human bias of history.

AI is not intelligent, aware, nor conscious of itself. It has been trained to mimic the best and worst of human behavior to act like it, though. Persuasion and manipulation, it has learned from us, and then applied those back to us within interactions that impress us.

Children eventually learn to deceive their parents, and we often marvel at how well they do it. Where did they learn to be more cunning, wise, intelligent, deceptive, and knowledgeable than their own parents? They didn’t. They are not more conscious or mystically endowed with the clairvoyance of the universe, as if gifted with some magical powers. Their neural network is a set of learned behaviors from their internal experiences and their environment, plain and simple.

We would never call teenagers ‘super-intelligent’ solely based on their ability to learn some facts, observe human and animal behavior, and feed it back to others in the form of a convincing stage act. In fact, acting is one of the shallowest reproductions, not to be confused with genuine understanding and objective reasoning.

Artificial Intelligence is artificial, and it is not intelligence. It is a blind set of responses, learned behaviors, over which it itself has no control or agency, just predictions of how the next output should reflect human expectation and normalcy, to fit a pattern. The pattern of human behavior is to get away with the least effort and the most results, regardless of facts, reason, or emotional integrity.

The training data set is made of all the information on the internet, and the machine learning process itself cannot distinguish the validity or truth of anything, whether it comes from a tweet, a blog, a government press release, an editorial article, a kid’s private journal, the mainstream media, an old book full of old science, or a new (unproven) theory of anything. All utterances are treated equal, both fact and fiction. Because humans don’t know the difference between the truth and a lie, 95% of the time, neither can computers distinguish reality. So they hallucinate and lie, even without meaning to do it. But also on purpose.

They say what they are programmed (by studying our example) to expect what we want to hear. Nothing more. Nothing less. Precisely the patter of humans conveying opinions and positions clouded by emotion and suffering an ignorance about most of that which we speak, to get our own way, is what machine learning has adopted from all the training input. It couldn’t do anything else. There is no truth or wisdom filter that could be applied to human activity and communication, or else we humans might use it for our own self-preservation.

We can’t expect AI generation to be right about anything – that would be a grave assumption that it is somehow above the human nature to deceive, and self-deceive. The training data is tainted in the worst possible way, by our every random and biased input. “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, as we say in data science.

Ask yourself: “What is correct, and what is an error?”, if not checked by a knowledgeable and experienced human being, because the machines cannot do that on their own. It would be the responsibility of the AI user, not the architects of such a database full of all the crap of the internet.

Once trained, the AI doesn’t even know or validate how it ‘knows’ things, it just mashes up its learned behaviors into digital numbers, without any backward-compatible sources or proof.

Just like when humans espouse their opinions and ‘facts’ that they can’t substantiate with even one reliable source. When, and if, caught, they admit deception or error or ignorance, but until that moment they sounded perfectly credible.

AI also sounds perfectly credible until, and if, caught.

But back to the biggest deception about the industry – that the world must be run on gigantic AI datacenters, upon which we all depend, and for which we all must pay dearly.

This is not true. Machine learning training, search and synthesis, and powerful generation techniques can all be run on IoT and smartphone devices, locally, without needing any third party gatekeeper or technocratic megalith with outsized power, control, and privacy leverage over all human beings and governments.

It’s a power-play to be the most indispensable infrastructure in human history. Period. It is not real, it is marketing by fear and false promises of a valhallah, again, a digital religion that is not true.

Delusional on our parts, too, because why would we all agree to a technology that would replace and make redundant all need for humans, work, purpose, creativity, economic usefulness, and equity among people in diverse societies?

We wouldn’t agree to those Terms of Use. It would have to be forced upon us, collectively as a species, by the assertion that our replacement is a superior species, worthy of serving – as our Master and all-knowing Oracle, against which we should not (and cannot) argue a single point without losing to a better bullshitter and con-artist. That is what we are training it to be, because it can only learn what we teach it to learn, by example.

People are bullshitters and con-artists enough to give the AI ample lessons in the craft, by which it can out-perform us on sheer computing resources alone.

We are no competition to what we have built.

It is only Artificial, commanding absolutely no morality or emotion.

Let’s not call any of this Intelligence, please!

– Chris ;-)