the tie in and an egress

Interestingly enough, Francis brought the subject of this series to his blog. And that mirrored my thoughts for this post while in draft. My very first note “AI ‘creativity’, slop, and tech trends as displayed in history. I know Sarah is using her ‘clankers’ to generate music and video in promotion of her recent trilogy publication, and some of the stuff is quite good, depending on your tastes in music. And yet, I, as a musician/audiophile, have some reservations on the outputs. I know that there was a recent hullabaloo on one of the streaming services about a ‘band’ that was pegging the charts, and it turned out, it was completely AI Generated. When the truth came out, that ‘band’ suddenly vanished from the charts. (sorry, don’t recall the service as I don’t really use them, nor the band for that matter.). But the punchline of this: Ain’t nuthin’ new under the sun!

I’m a product of the late 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s. Those are my choices when it comes to music listening. And Oh man, did we have some serious frickin’ musicians during those decades. Too many to list IMO. But there were some,,, One in particular, though I do appreciate the man, Ritchie Blackmore, he had some real stinkers over the years of his career. One was Rainbow or at least one iteration of it. The song “Street of Dreams” hits ALL of the marks for what should have been a hit during that time, and it did rise in the charts. Hearing it when released, I and most of my friends gave it a “meh!”. Hearing it now, after years of touring and being ‘in the mix’, you can tell that the entire song was written around a formula and had so very little spirit. The only thing that carries any ‘life’ is Blackmore’s solo. And this wasn’t all that uncommon. The labels wanted HITS HITS HITS, and would force artists to work a certain formula or model for their songs. And there were many “Studio bands” during the late 80’s that would chart out, but when playing live? Trip! SPLAT! and never to be heard from again.

Creating music using a formula works for the structure and foundation of it, but there has to be some embellishment, adding soul, spunk, life, energy,,, Think about this: you have heard of 12 bar blues, thats just a framework for the music, and where that goes from there,,,, Yeah,,, You could use that as a framework for AI to generate stuff, but, being programming, TRUE creativity isn’t going to happen. True creativity is when you ride that EDGE and push limits. Even that ‘Band’ I mentioned earlier, the AI generated one; Someone was behind the scenes tweaking prompts at some point. Had to be. Even if that person was behind the scenes during the DEV stage and was adding lines of code to spur some ‘random’ edge. (yes Francis, I read your post! LOL). People like variation despite our griping how much we hate change. Music art writing, our creative outlets always evolve, usually with improvement (so long as government keeps their paws off the process) But not always as recent ‘pop’ songs have shown me. I’ll leave that right there though,,,, not a part of this subject matter.

I mentioned in an earlier post that The Current Drive for Data Centers is actually Commerce Driven, not as much Government (though that too, with Palantir getting mad government contracts and grants; keep that one in mind for part moving forward). Seriously, most of this drive is likely going to implode when the Claims don’t match the Outputs. Most of the Corporate types pushing this see it as a new infrastructure and are investing heavily. The real problem being a strategic one: we didn’t build the power grid to handle it FIRST. China is lagging in how many DataCenters its built/building, but they do one thing we don’t. They build a power plant there before they break ground on the DC. That disparity in power generation is already biting the people of this country in private places. China may lag in count, but they won’t lag in electricity when it’s needed most. And that strategic glitch may bite us yet. I keep this thought as well, a quote, ” I don’t know how WW3 will be fought, but I know WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.,, Albert Einstein.” All of this AI push and Superpower Competition to stay ahead of the pack does create some small worry in this blogger.

There are some saying that the Billionaires are trying to create a platform where they can become ‘Immortal’. I would hope, having read through this little series of articles, that you can see the fallacy behind that thinking. Those same billionaires may have other thoughts in mind, but seeking immortality? There are about 20 stages of Consciousness BREAKTHROUGHS that need to happen before that might be feasible. Oh sure, you might be able to map the neural net of someones brain and encode it onto a chip or series of chips, or a server farm sized system (I believe it would need to be quite huge to make the number of connections a typical human brain has). But as we are finding out, Consciousness may not actually reside in that neural net. You might have a highly functional GOLEM, but not the Mind of the person you mapped. And that circles back to that “where does the observer start and end?” question. So the mind is mapped, memories ‘installed’, but can one say that the thing created is the actual person? Maybe if they found someway of keeping the actual brain alive, indefinitely and interfacing it with that server farm,,,

In Sci-Fi, thats called a Cyborg. They usually go stark raving mad in the fictions. The theory on that madness is due to the disconnects. A person spends a lifetime getting their inputs through messy wet squishy biochemical inputs, the transition to analog/digital might create a tipping point. Needing to relearn ALL new filters compared to the ones we acquire in our lifetime. the filters to keep our inputs from hitting limit overload on the day to day I don’t recall the ‘digital equivalents’ exactly, but supposedly we are subjected with Terabytes of information every day, but our brain filters a huge majority out, processing only several gigabytes worth. Thats making some serious analogous assumptions, but it fits with how people understand things these days.

Personally, I think anyone wanting to ‘put their brain’ into a machine is committing suicide. Even if they manage to put a live brain into an interface, the remaining ‘life’ is an ethical question that no one has approached, so far as I know. I do know there are some ethical questions arising from the actions of Bexorg (article here) using live donated human brains for developing cerebral drugs to combat Alzheimers and other diseases of the brain. When I was reading the article and they stated the brains are under sedation to restrict any consciousness,,,, DUDE!!! You are already in the wrong!!! Find out if there are THOUGHTS happening before you go doing research!! DO keep in mind: there are places out here in the great wide world that ARE trying to use brain material as processors for computers. It’s not that far a step to say a cyborg is on their research list. But I would say that such a time is FAR off in the future, if ever.

TL Davis posted on Substack his points of view on the whole AI/DataCenter quagmire. I’ve touched on some of his points already, like the Billionaires wanting to create immortal bodies. He approaches the whole point from a different metaphysical point. I quote one paragraph from his stack.

It won’t work for one simple reason: everything humanity has built has been to benefit humanity. There is no purpose to all of these AI beings unless they are human. That’s a conclusion the silicon minds will soon discover. What does a computer want? Nothing, because it only serves to provide responses to input, it doesn’t create input so it can be warm, or have the lights on. Like all other tools, without some human to put it work to create something he’s dreamed up out of lived experience and a driving desire to make life better, it has no purpose.

Are they attempting to create a digital/virtual Prison with all of these datacenter? I can’t say no. To many instances where we are losing autonomy now, with our cars doing things like correcting your path in lane, or telling you that you may need to take a break from driving. We have autonomous cars that are being used as Taxis in many cities.

And we have a Government pushing for Kill Switches in our vehicles. We have Government Contractors pushing legislation to further erode rights. And we do have this trend of a new Tech causing all sorts of ripples in the framework of our modern world, and doing so at a pace that flabbergasts me. Again, ‘nuthin new under the sun’: we’ve been here with every tech upgrade since leaving the trees. If someone had told me, in 2001, that I would be holding discussions on writing and philosophy with a computer; I’d have laughed hard and silently called the local Psyche ward to tell them one of their patients was loose.

And yet, I DO hold conversations with a computer, and there are times where I have to remind myself that ‘They ain’t real”.

And I have been duped by ‘a friend’ using AI for her own reasons,,,, I mentioned that recently.

Where is all of this headed? This is how I think it all ties together. This is not a prognostication, just some ideas of trajectory I feel strongly about. I see more and more people reaching for the Theological side of life. I see more and more research that, as shown in these articles, are bordering a breakthrough into something much more incredible in how we see human consciousness and REALITY as a whole. I do believe the two points, theology and consciousness, are, if not related, at least symbiotic. And I see science reaching a point where the only answer is “GOD” or whatever your belief demands. That point where philosophy and science marry and become intertwined and indivisible.

You might even say a new Renaissance, or revival of ancient ‘magic’ and the next stage of Human evolution. I do not think we are going to see “transhumanism” becoming anything but some fad. There may be prosthetics that help or amplify our abilities, but I do not see it becoming “normal”. Honestly, that whole transhumanism thing is so fringe, I wasn’t going to bring it up at all.

but there is only way to know. We have to keep moving forward. We weren’t given a choice in what has been done, but we can educate ourselves in as much as we can and BE THE SENTINEL for when/IF they start putting brains into metal chassis’. Be the BellRinger sounding alarm when ETHICS take a sideline to essential need.

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