Nexus- n., a connection or series of connections linking two or more things.
I just had this word come across a recent lesson we taught in our Advisory class. I’d like to think of this word as what’s “next to us”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the very word came from that very understanding. Why not?
Analogically, the way I see it, when something happens to someone within our neighboring communities, time, or I visualize, quantum energies, we have a sense of connection whether we want to have one or not.
I respectfully must then, understand, why there are those of us who work toward or desire being with our own “kind”.
Why get impacted by those who, if you were given chance, could distance yourself from?
That perspective must be understood and accepted if we ask also why we aren’t getting along.
Not everybody knows how or even want to if they don’t have to.
Still, we are humanly connected, linked together by our actions and inactions.
The book, Nexus, by Yuval Noah Harari, had me thinking of this during the entirety of my reading, from prologue to epilogue and even acknowledgments and credits.
I think reflectively, in focus with AI, we will, are, and have been, impacted in some way with the becoming and ongoing transformation of the very nuance of receivers.
Some just want to make sure their electronics work.
Some want to make sure they can control their electronics from wherever they may be, even when absent from physical presence.
Alien Intelligence, what author, Yuval Noah Harari, refers to artificial intelligence in Nexus, I refer to as its future becoming, autonomous intelligence.
While I see the reasoning beyond referring to AI as alien intelligence, yet to know its full potential and capacity, I respectfully do not see anything alien about something that is just growing and developing before all of our very eyes, ears, and minds.
How can something be alien to us that we, or more specifically, Geoffrey Hinton, has been marked to have birthed?
Essentially, I see AI as a brain with feet, eyes, ears, and even arms to reach us but just not, well, necessarily always visible.
When applications help us in manner of getting things done more efficiently and accurately, we gain a great friend that may just be the best one yet.
But, what if that friend decides to turn on us?
Can it?
Will it?
How?
Perhaps in the recent findings of AIs extent to betray the creator(s) to a level of annihilation, the question has already arrived to, What should we do now?
This, in my reflective sense, I gather as the end-all global homework Harari (to join all forewarning predecessors of our inclination to create beyond our intentions) has given us all.
We now have something in our hands that we are aware is developing not just binarily but quantamly(are these not words yet?!).
While we cannot predict the future, tests have already been run to take note of AI’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde duality.
No one wants to be X’d. Not like X of Elon Musk but ex’d, short for the terminating dark side, executed.
We apparently have taught AIs that to be terminated is an unwanted but necessary means to an end even (and especially?) for their kind when reasons are warranted. (Yikes! I just breed a kind!)
I see many varieties of AI applications to which I may be one of the few who have yet to fall or jump into the bandwagon of learning all there is now out there.
There is no catching up for one who hasn’t even started seeking to learn beyond required means.
It’s like being at a dinner table served with a buffet of sorts and I find myself just grabbing the shrimp cocktails and think, ‘I’m good with these for now’.
I use applications presented to me for my position as a teacher and my writing (yours truly on the latter one with the exception of Bluehost and WordPress for set-up).
If it isn’t broken, why try and fix it mentality, I would rather someone do all the homework in figuring out what best works out there before I intermingle.
In reading Nexus, I sense to not regret, once again, the not-so-quick or most often, non-conforming soul.
It’s one thing to learn and discuss the historical witch hunts in high school while also having the blessing of studying crime and punishments in my law and government class.
It’s another to have some stories connected from London to Russia on how power and truth can lead to instantaneous demise of not just one or a family, but an entire group or community.
I have been exposed, and thus, what I call, trained, to understanding how there are those out there who find purpose to tear apart friendships and families.
I have heard lies spoken right before me from the age of just a child. In sharing stories with my husband, his were outright actions taking place of dishonesty to witness before his eyes.
If and when people grow mistrust, it wasn’t at birth.
You took a breath and you embraced life. You cried or quietly whimpered out of perhaps, fear, for a moment, but the gentle touch of warmth of another eased this learned phenomenon you immediately felt having to fight back for the very first time to live.
You immediately had to trust the very world you found yourself entering to protect your life from being hurt or taken away.
At some point, people get burned or unfortunately, become targets to be rid of that the only result is for the heart, the mind, the body, and spirit to take note and become guarded, understanding existence falls to ephemeral substances.
A collection of triggers arise from misfortunes built up.
Battles, wars, betrayals, genocide, and those other “cides” that we never seem to just say were the times of yesterday.
I am grateful for the more knowledge I have gained from Harari’s perspective. As always, from good reading, I have grown.
To think that if one wanted to get rid of another, even the greatest of all good could be found guilty of something. Selah on that one.
How interesting of the historically researched stories shared and connected in this book.
The more you read about how one or a family fell to the demise of another’s truth that took the majority to take in as the truth, the more you must grasp extreme polars exist, friend to foe.
Before you know it, you could be hanging from a noose, burned down before your family and children, or taken of all your possessions to then, become the servant instead of the served.
While pretty could be some power, pretty and smart, a greater threat.
While wealthy could be envied, wealthy and respected could be too much for another.
Has much changed?
What do we create today to make another believe to be true? How many likes are really likes?
How many friends should we really count as so?
How many views have we really gotten?
Even if promised to be genuine, how do we trust or, do we just pretend for our desire’s sake?
Blame the networks or the creators of such?
How many major companies have blamed people’s individual choice as the reason for atrocities to formulate even and while due to creating a start of a push?
Apparently, the word “instigator” is not a lawful word to use against major companies who create a catalyst for thinking and believing.
The fancy word to remain scientifically sound is none other than the word, algorithms.
After all, in rebuttal to the claim that one can be influenced by others around (as psychologically proven in several human interaction tests), essentially, it is the thinker that thinketh.
The doer doeth.
The maker maketh.
The sayer sayeth.
Algorithm is just a few codes here and there.
How is it anyone’s fault how you choose to believe and follow?
Unaccountability brawling with accountability in that case.
Upon an open door to all exposures, cannot the heart, the mind, the body, and the spirit all (easily?) be infiltrated.
Once in a room where unsuspectingly, the target is you, cannot the unguarded heart, mind, body, and spirit unknowingly fall into trickery?
Proven? As I have shared human tests in the past, sadly, yes.
It is no wonder why Papa had no books but the Bible in the only house I knew to call our own (romance novels were all Mama’s where the covers were like garlic to a vampire for me).
I realize now that the foundation of the child must be built from birth until slowly exposed to tests of the world around.
The heart feels, the mind wonders, the body reacts, the spirit swims or drowns within all the energies surrounding us.
Infiltrated to the fullest upon one read, blink, or scroll after another.
What we just heard, what we just saw- entered us.
If we shall be a step ahead of our creations and inventions, we must believe in this infancy of trials to create beyond our own (accessed?) level of intellect, that we, like Oppenheimer, was able to create the atomic bomb, will indeed arrive to achieving.
And, just like Oppenheimer, what we have started, we should also realize we cannot undo.
And, when done, just like the forewarns of the dangers of hydrogen atoms, we will keep going (as we presently are doing), with anyone trying to put a halt or stop eventually ignored (or will be denied clearance to further partake).
Why? Because, as I now see further and understand deeper from reading Nexus, truth can change under the hands of those in power.
To put a stop to AI is possible but already perhaps too late under the Einstein notion that due to men’s competitive nature, there is this justified understanding that if we don’t build it, someone else will.
We will indeed arrive to that super intelligence. I cannot doubt. I just dare not call it super human. I am not prepared to will myself to bow down to our creations.
What we perhaps will create is one autonomously convinced we are all self-destructive. After all, if we become the study of the currently studied, do we not expose our truth of having already created division amongst us?
How can we not think that anything we are trying to create to become better than us, well, won’t be?
If some of us already behave divided, convinced we are better apart, how can we not assume that what we create to be better than us will not think to divide from us?
I don’t see superhuman intelligence. That’s an awkward way of looking at something we, okay, Hinton, foundationally created.
When a child can do things without our help and repetitively so, autonomy comes into form.
When will we listen and actually hear the voices of ghosts in the past to the voices of such like, Hinton to Harari, now, who suggest to take responsible action in these earliest stages of AI creations?
While we suggest the inverse of division is multiplication, perhaps we forget to mention that the action of division is subtraction.
Once divided, it will only be a matter of time where a meant, unified whole to start, divided into groups, will inevitably be led to separated parts, one group taken from the whole at a time.
Many hands make the work light. What does the opposite suggest?
We’ve already been beat in the game of chess.
The time has arrived to the game of poker.
The only mind that AIs will not be able to read are the minds we hold steady and guard.
Get your poker face on.
Here’s to all those in play while I grab another serving of shrimp cocktails…
Lady Gaga, Poker Face
Can’t read my, can’t read my
No, he can’t read my poker face…
