white crystal twinkles
on the night before Christmas
walking in the air

Jim Adams asks Friday Faithfuls to write about anything related to AI. This is going to be stream of consciousness.

The first thing coming to mind is a movie I watched recently, “Eddington,” where one major conflict between the sheriff of the town and the mayor who is running for re-election is the proposed data center for the dying community of Eddington. The mayor is in cahoots with corporate money people, and the sheriff thinks human needs should take precedence over the energy-sucking behemoth they want to animate in the desert.

The next thing is when I use search engines, at the top are a litany of AI-generated questions and answers. I have to scroll down further and further and get to non-AI options. I’ve been told I can turn this feature off, and I’m sure I have on a browser, but not on this browser. This is a reminder to myself to do it. I have to ask the question, will there come a time when the only option will be to take an AI’s generated response? I feel certain, if the AI trajectory is not interrupted, that the answer will be yes.

Reading Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s book, “Nobody’s Girl,” it kind of surprised me that so many of the men Maxwell and Roberts trafficked her to were scientists. As much money as these two traffickers and suspected blackmailers had, and the knowledge that the areas where the sexual encounters with minors were being videotaped, it isn’t too far of a stretch to see that if they hadn’t been stopped, they could have controlled technologies that controlled the planet. Things like Deep Mind AI. I also learned that the two facilitators of the trafficking and blackmailing enterprise were not isolated from their network of world power players. Virginia described these players coming to Epstein to get guidance. He wasn’t just a sex addict that needed to abuse minors three times a day. He was a hub of information. How many of these names will be redacted from the millions of records (each record can contain varying numbers of pages)? Can we hope to see an unredacted, full release? Question: with so many records on file, going back twenty or more years, why were the fed, state, and local governments sitting on them? Why did it take victims stepping out of the shadows and speaking up to to the media get them moving on it? Why were their cries for help ignored for so long?

I can’t help but observe and wonder why humans are devoting so much time and energy into making machines that are better at being logical, or “machine-like” in their thinking. As we become more under the control of machines, it is humans that will be expected to adapt to the way of the machine thinking, not machines adapting to ours. As our cognitive output becomes more machine-like, will we become less human? What is it that makes us human? It’s an important question. We need to figure it out sooner rather than later, as we need to value those things and find ways to shield them from AI as it continues to encroach on our humanity.

Thanks, Jim, for the prompt. These things have been rolling around in my head; your prompt gave me a chance to try and articulate them.

If anyone’s wondering what the poem at the top is about, it was written in response to a prompt on substack of “snowman.” It was not written by AI.  The top image, however, is a screen shot from a game almost certainly AI-assisted.

Hope everyone’s having a good day after Christmas.