Wap, Bam, Boom!

The singularity will not be on the television . . . but it just might be on your smart phone or whatever device you use!

Well, hullo, and welcome to what could be the last post from Kyle’s sub stack! Maybe it will be reborn and come back as something new or it might just sink into oblivion along with a whole lot of other stuff!

I’m not sure if it’s the subject matter, the way I present it, or just a general malaise. Either way it makes little difference. What matters is outcome, and survival.

This post will finish the discussion and use of artificial intelligence and how it is affecting, and effecting society. As usual I am using artificial intelligence to write this post. The questions I ask artificial intelligence are however my own questions and so I take full responsibility for them! The answers are not exactly what I was taught at university, but they resemble what I was taught in many respects. There are some valid criticisms of artificial intelligence and what it can do. I do not seek to reject those points of view; I am merely working with the artificial intelligence to come up with a ‘imitation game’ which breaks the ‘enigma’ code. Whether or not it works is up for dispute. As is almost everything in life.

As a child I remember watching a film in the school library and in this film, there is a man with an axe who chops wood. He is very good at chopping wood. One day another man comes along with a new invention called a chainsaw. He chop’s wood very fast. It is decided that there will be a competition to see who can cut the most wood the quickest. At the end of the day of the competition the two piles of wood are measured and the man with the chainsaw qins by a small margin.

The point of the story is that no matter that there is very little difference in the total output the new technology is better.

Recently I saw an interview in which Jim Rickards an economist talked about a book he is writing about artificial intelligence and how someone asked artificial intelligence to write an essay on the causes of the war between the Ukraine and Russia. They also asked a third-year university student or maybe a graduate to write an essay on the same subject. Then they gave the 2 essays to people and asked them if they could tell the difference. Jim Rickards claims that all artificial intelligence does is scroll the internet and scrape the surface of all the data to come up with a cliche type of response. I am paraphrasing what he said so don’t quote me here.

I was curious what would artificial intelligence say about the causes of war, so I did some research. I will present the results here. First let us define what is artificial intelligence?

There are basically 5 different areas in which artificial intelligence is utilized. They are computer vision, natural language processing, virtual assistants, robotic process automation, and advanced machine learning. I do not claim to be an expert in any of these areas. The artificial intelligence that I use is on the Bing app and it is called co-pilot. It is free and that is why I use it. You may get superior results using open AI.

Something like 35% of companies will utilize all of these artificial intelligence types and the majority (65%) will utilize one or two or three or four of these.

By transformative technology, I gather it is similar to the adoption of farm machinery to replace human labor, the mechanized loom to replace human labor, the book which replaced human dialogue (talking and memorizing things orally), the railway track and the steam engine, the telephone, the internet, the use of guns and explosives, radio, television, newspapers, the shipping container, making fertilizer out of natural gas, creating neon from left over components of the steel making process etc. etc.

In some ways artificial intelligence has sparked a financial revolution. It tends to favor the bigger companies though.

Quite where it will take us, we do not yet know. The full implications of its development are yet to be understood. As with all things, time will tell.

So now I will look at the causes of the war between the Ukraine and Russia.

First there is the legacy of the Soviet Union. In many ways this goes back to the second world war and the allies versus the axis forces. The creation of a buffer zone was seen as important as this was perhaps the third time in history that the Russian empire had been attacked. Before Hitler, Napoleon tried, before that Genghis Khan had a go to, I think. This led me to wonder, what are the causes of war, in general?

So far so good. Onwards then.

It seems to be some sort of combination of ideas and technology and finance and economy.

This led me to wonder about all the different conflicts that have happened in my lifetime and before I was born.

So, I looked at the causes of the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Korean war and so on.

So, I am running out of room for this post to fit into an email. Suffice to say that I think it is not necessarily the content of the artificial intelligence that is overwhelming. It is the speed at which it can operate. It might only be marginally better than humans at the output of information and analysis and so on but at the end of the day all that matters is it gets the job done. It frees up time for humans to concentrate on other stuff like going to the gym and going on social media endlessly scrolling and searching for the meaning of life and the answer to everything!