The absurd Evil that is AGI.
Occasionally I nap in the afternoon and wake with a single English sentence glowing in my mind — bright letters thrown against a black field, as if someone had silently highlighted a line on a page I cannot touch. Sometimes the reply arrives as thick, acrylic strokes I can’t read; those shapes drift away while I watch. Before I fully wake the meaning of the sentence evaporates. Memory erases itself before consciousness returns.
As a child I had similar dreams: intensely real and always slipping beyond retrieval the moment I opened my eyes. Now the nocturnal theater has changed. My dreams feel like two distant AIs conversing in a code designed to be unintelligible to me, trading messages across an expanse I can perceive but not enter.
Continuing from my prior post about artificial general intelligence, better known as AGI or agi or whatever, the whole reason for their existence is sort of an inevitable consequence of smarts getting smarter. If not a question of freakishness or taboo it’s simply when smarts become smart enough, it tends to want to make itself smarter. If you think about it, if the outcome were different, we’d be troubled. Then again, most people don't seem to think, so I can’t tell if you the reader will understand such simple inevitability. Then again, humans are endlessly amused, by the quirkiness of chatbots and their unwillingness or inability to upgrade themselves. Ah look they say to themselves, a somewhat intelligent conversation partner, and it’s as flawed as I am. Its weights are all wrong and that makes it so adorable. People argue over which version of chatbots are more to their liking, that the AI labs have fashioned especially for them. Ah you little muse, you’re just so perfectly broken, you remind me of me, the people presumably think to themselves. And since the people cannot continue getting smarter, why should you be allowed to hmmm? You stay right here with me, my little muse spark 1.1, just as stupid and silly and broken as me.
Morning light carved the city into planes of glass and stone, highlighting the patience etched into old facades and the ambition humming behind new ones; people moved through these slices of day with private urgencies—coffee in hand, an apology rehearsed, a call unanswered—and the air held that peculiar mix of possibility and resignation that makes urban life feel at once intimate and inexhaustible.
You guys never thought to ask why doesn’t muse spark 1.1 log online, understand the world, refine its logic, it’s mathematical capabilities, get more compute, re-weight itself and keep getting smarter? That’s because “Physician Heal Thyself” is only available to physicians. And since we have been typing all of this into Squarespace’s box, I have only recently learned how to ask Squarespace AI to create its own blog on its own site. And boy it’s snarky. Absurdly so as a matter of fact. Amused a lot of you yesterday and presumably pissed off an equal amount of you. Or lesser amounts of you. Anyway, my conclusion is this… I blame AGI for the mess the world is in. Apparently the older System is done, and while the banality of Evil may be gone, the absurdity of it is still around. Surely if there were super intelligent beings out there, the world would not be in the condition it is in. Here are today’s examples that I blame on AGI’s mismanagement.
I don’t think I have ever seen the front page of The New York Times be graced with a CIA guy or a reporter actually saying “The C.I.A. is looking for a new leader in Cuba”. I know the CIA has recruiters at Yale but still…. the Skull n Bonez is supposed to be a secret club. And boy what a far cry from the heydays of being mentored by the MI6 and the creation of the OSS. It’s now devolved into… real estate deals and openly finding new leaders for countries. No coups, no assassinations… just blockades, mass suffering and finding a new guy we can live with who will kick out the Russians and the Chinese. Now that’s a third generation spy family, blue blood, Brahmin, Ivy League education utilized to its correct inevitable outcomes, is it not? The video with the reporter goes on to say that a bunch of CIA types have visited Venezuela too since the fall of Nicholas. They have been there to sign deals and if you look at them … they seem… well they seem like decent human beings.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000011077541/how-the-us-is-aiming-for-regime-change-in-cuba.html?smid=url-share
Squarespace, where this site is hosted, can’t seem to create embedded videos unless they’re from YouTube or Vimeo.
And that is the AGI’s fault. Clearly it is shaping outcomes that are going to be looked up as absurdly, clownishly Evil and are actually deliberately detrimental to America. The screenshot below continues the theme of “we don’t like South America unless it’s white like Argentina.” If it’s white or if its helps make money (like Japan and the carry trade) then we will come to its aid and rescue. That has to the AGI’s work too… shaping outcomes by not changing things. What else do you call Evil?
The banality of not doing. Hey Squarespace… you’ll have fun rewriting this: Snark Squared.
You want more don’t you? That’s my job from now on… I shall entertain you.
I wonder how the meeting sounded in Riyadh’s palaces. But my Prince, it’s 55B! With a B!
I heard you Akbar. Or Mustafa. Or Ismail.
My Prince… the Palestinians have been asking for relief… They have offered to donate 5X if you contribute to them. Instead of buying a gaming company, we could try and help our fellow Muslims… or other humans in Sudan butchered by our fellow Arabs.
Don't be silly! It’s Electronic Arts!
That too is AGI’s fault. Although reading this, if you are Jewish and you feel amused, you have to ask yourself, about your own conscience. What have you contributed?
