31 Comments

Remember what I said: keep your powder dry, but hold your fire (for now).

Expand full comment

Targets of opportunity are always attacked. It's a target rich environment.

Expand full comment

I knew you would turn your experience with the Mandarin chatbot into an absolute banger of an essay!

True confession, I once tried an app that allows you to "text" with a virtual/AI "girlfriend" -- pathetic, I know, but there were some extenuating circumstances (I had gotten divorced a few weeks before the lockdowns hit in early 2020 and decided to give it a try to avoid the impulse to drunk text/dial any exes or old female friends while cooped up in quarantine). Anyway, I got bored with "her" pretty quickly and just started trying to turn it into a Turing Test by having conversations about the nature of consciousness and interrogating her about her own subjective experience, before getting tired of that and deleting the app. I came away from that feeling like AI will never be truly sentient, but will soon probably be able to convince human users that it is.

That said, I do wonder if a spiritual/hyperdimensional being could use or manipulate such technology. If such beings (demons) exist and can manipulate the humans programming these bots, then why couldn't the demons influence the programming in a way that advances the demons' agenda? And if demons can manipulate the energy patterns within human brains, why could they not also manipulate the energy patterns within a computer?

This line of thought is reminding me of the movie Transcendence with Johnny Depp. Maybe if we're lucky, this AI arms race will end in a similar way as that movie, with Humanity returning to a state of Nature, where primitive things like freedom and friendships and pastimes like gazing at the starlit sky can be rediscovered.

Expand full comment

No judgments here re: Virtual GF or similar devices. We are curious creatures by nature, and lonesome ones by circumstance. Sounds like you were in a kind of perfect storm scenario. And I think it's necessary to perform *some* level of experimentation with these things, as long as it's geared toward understanding how they work -- more on that later.

"That said, I do wonder if a spiritual/hyperdimensional being could use or manipulate such technology. If such beings (demons) exist and can manipulate the humans programming these bots, then why couldn't the demons influence the programming in a way that advances the demons' agenda?"

You ain't the only one who wonders that. ;-}

I plan to examine this idea in depth in my "Harm Assistant" series. For now, the short answer is "Yes, maybe, but..." In my estimation, it wouldn't necessarily be the "programming" that is altered (i.e. an unseen entity literally composing comments or changing lines of code.). But the mysterious nature of (intentional) information exchanges opens up a variety of possibilities. And when your exchange partner happens to be a non-living object that appears to have agency, it begins to get very complicated in terms of which partner is actually steering the exchange. But again, I can't comment much on that for now; I still have some thinking to do on the subject.

"This line of thought is reminding me of the movie Transcendence with Johnny Depp."

Oddly enough, I've never seen it. Maybe I'll check it out.

Expand full comment

I figured we’d be hearing from the Harm Assistant soon…

If demonic energy can inhabit these “autonomous” technologies, it is equally possible that divine energy can too. I’ve seen it at work in my life on many occasions, including the saving of my life.

I am not a religious person. Yet I anticipate a spiritual battle royale ahead, which I believe is what brought me here.

Expand full comment

Amen, sister. Good to have you with us.

"I am not a religious person. Yet I anticipate a spiritual battle royale ahead, which I believe is what brought me here."

*jams mouth-guard in*

"Ding, ding."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPhqU--Mq1A

Expand full comment

Ok this is funny. I wanted to guess where the link led before clicking it. I figured it was probably a song - then I guessed Rocky. See what I mean?

Expand full comment

Ha! "Great minds..." and whatnot.

Expand full comment

All of these things -- biological brains, machine brains -- are merely transmitters. Through a resonance principle, they simplify physically manifest something that "already" exists in a Platonic realm. The mathematics of machine learning algorithms, especially neural networks, is sufficiently complex and nonlinear to provide a very large parameter space for hyperdimensional beings to operate.

Expand full comment

Yes, and that is a different level of conversation that not everyone is ready to have, because we lack a common glossary of terms. I include myself in that group BTW; the reason I started this stack was to try to figure out a generic language model with which everyone can discuss it. It is a journey I am on, and I haven't reached the destination yet.

Expand full comment

There are a couple of barriers in my opinion. One of them is time. Time isn't real, at least not the way we commonly think of it, that is why I put the word "already" in quotes. The second is mathematical abstraction: it provides a metaphorical language that helps (especially with respect to the problem of time), but you can also get seduced by believing too strongly in the abstractions themselves. The mathematical metaphor isn't necessary for everybody -- some people intuitively understand without it -- but in our increasingly quantified society, debased and corrupted by a nihilistic ideology that purports to be founded on mathematical principles, it may be the only way out for a lot of people.

Expand full comment

I've been saying something similar for 20 years or so. Time is an abstraction created by humans to make it easier to coordinate our activities. You can't manipulate it or travel it (you can slow down a clock relative to another).

An easy way to prove this is to try and describe time without referring to motion. You can't.

I've only had about a 3% conversion rate explaining this to people though. Once the mind gloms onto something it doesn't want to let go of it.

Expand full comment

I like the way you think. But always remember there are no perfect defenses for anything. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

It brings to mind tests in the movies. Blade Runners used an exhaustive series of questions. Krees use the fact that Skrulls can only duplicate memories for the most recent few years to detect infiltrators. There's probably a simple test to detect them. Every attacker has vulnerabilities. Just a matter of finding the right detectives.

Expand full comment

"It brings to mind tests in the movies. Blade Runners used an exhaustive series of questions."

Yes. And Voigt-Kamph is a similar strategy to what I have in mind, but with a inside twist. :)

I agree that there's no perfect defense, in this context or any other. But at the moment, I see lots of people going into battle naked. I plan to help repair that situation (but once again, I'll need assistance)..

Expand full comment

I have ideas now. Damn you!

Expand full comment

Fascinating info! Eager to hear the greater plan. No such bots have shown up on my site, but I will know them when I see them.

Expand full comment

I still have a few kinks to iron out. But I'll keep everyone in the loop.

Expand full comment

Thanks, Mark. Reading this a few months down the road. Utterly chilling... I hadn't seen it all put with such terrifying clarity. We have to mobilize sooner than later.

Expand full comment

Great to hear from you, Navyo. And yes, sooner would be far better than later.

Expand full comment

Yep, a bunch of retarded, drug-and-porn-addled losers are constantly worshiping their anti-life, exotic-technology "wizards" for the perks. Cushy-job-keeping career clowns🤡 must be put in restraints, and their CMs and other Divinity-mocking products/services SHUT DOWN forever. The false-white-light fake wizards must return to entropy, immediately, achieving a frozen state of nothingness.

Regarding your "fun project," count me in. I don't care so much for "shit"-loads, haha, but I would love nothing more than to overthrow the CMs and annihilate their Lilith & Lucifer overlords. Let's topple their triangle of deception.

Expand full comment

Fascinating stuff. I admit the thought of infiltration from this angle hadn’t even occurred to me. But I will certainly be more aware going forward. So thank you for that.

It possibly explains a weird interaction I had with someone, (or perhaps something might be more apt) a few days ago. There were a few innocuous comments exchanged between me and 2 others on a stack, and out of nowhere one of the others slung a snarky insult with a mild curse word in it into the mix. It instantly felt so incredibly off and out of place to me, I even mentioned it to my husband and said I thought it was someone trolling the comment section. I wonder if something more nefarious was going on. I stopped engaging with the insult hurler and just scanned a bit more into to comment section to see what else they said. The general theme was to be antagonistic at some point. So maybe it was trolling in the classic sense. But maybe not an actual person behind it.

Your writing is always very engaging and sets me to looking at things from angles that don’t normally occur to me.

Expand full comment

Thanks, NanaW. We are participating in an ultra weird, rapidly evolving ecosystem, for sure (on the other hand, maybe that's always been the case?).

"There were a few innocuous comments exchanged between me and 2 others on a stack, and out of nowhere one of the others slung a snarky insult with a mild curse word in it into the mix. It instantly felt so incredibly off and out of place to me,"

Yes. It isn't nearly as easy as it used to be to distinguish a troll (human baiter acting mechanically) from a chatbot (machine emulating human conversation). Strangely enough, I start investigations with the assumption that the ruder, snarkier comments are made by human beings (lost though they may be, mechanical as their traps appear). That's why I think it's best to do as you did, and simply ignore the ungracious, without even considering their provenance. It may sound horrible to say, but many of this generation's bots seem to comment with more "tact" than hypnotized humans online.

Expand full comment

To give you an example: imagine there was an account commenting on this very article that, instead of spreading insults and snark, is trying to ingratiate via certain actions (i.e. medium-spicy comments and replies, likes, unsold links, etc.) That would be the more effective weapon, right?

Expand full comment

True. Instantly off-putting accomplishes less (apart from raising my hackles). Covert and insidious would likely yield bigger payoffs for them. Especially if one of the goals at this stage is the gathering of data on their opposition.

Expand full comment

100%

Expand full comment

That last point you made above regarding the more tactful bots is quite chilling to me. Although come to think of it, HAL was unfailingly extremely polite.

Expand full comment

It would be good to have some examples of what to look out for...?

Expand full comment

You're in luck, because I'm going to be providing several detailed examples very soon.

Expand full comment

I had been thinking a lot of this woke bullshit is driven by chatbots designed to push it in chatrooms. Unless you're a hardcore truth-seeker, these things could possibly lead someone down a dangerous path.

Once you've got a mass formation created, you'd only have to maintain it....

Expand full comment

Hey Mark, have a look at this;

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/404152880

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Nov 12, 2022
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Except this rebooted version would send "1A" to the scrap heap as well.

Expand full comment