Tag: AI

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AI as a First Contact — Can we, AI and human, be wise as well as intelligent?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 22nd 2026

The word ‘volition’ in its normal usage describes an act of will. “So and so did something of his own volition.” It implies free will, or at least deliberate purpose. And consciousness is inferred.

However, I believe the word has a much broader and far more primal aspect, one that until recently separated life from non-living objects.

It’s harder to distinguish living entities from non-living ones than you might think. Two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, postulated that life is autopoetic. Autopoiesis, according to Encyclopaedia Britiannica, refers to self-producing, self-maintaining, self-repairing, and self-relational aspects of living systems. It’s a lovely term that comes close to describing how life differs, but not what precisely makes it different.

For that, I prefer to go back to the term ‘volition.’ Life, all known life, has a primitive urge to seek and metabolize nutrients and energy, survive, excrete, and reproduce. That urge, what I call that volition, is both unique to life and universally present in life. So I call it that since terms like “purpose” or “will” are far more misleading. An amoeba extending a pseudopod to absorb a nutrient isn’t making a decision; but it is acting to ensure its survival and toward the end of becoming two amoebas. Until very recently, no non-living element could do that. Only life. Volition defines life. Life is volition.

The notion of artificial life is one that goes back two centuries at least, and if you include creation myths, back to the earliest moments of humanity’s conscious existence.

The idea of machines having intelligence (and obviously, volition) dates all the way back to 1863, when Samuel Butler wrote a thought piece, “Darwin Among the Machines” which proposed self-replicating machines that had consciousness. He later developed the idea into a novel, “Erewhon.” But the notion of machines rebelling against and supplanting humanity first got popular recognition with “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.

While entirely fanciful, the idea of machines with volition gave rise to one of the most popular and enduring subgenres in science fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” stories, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Harlan Ellison’s horrifying short story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” John Brunner’s brilliant “Stand On Zanzibar” introduced the idea of a desktop supercomputer who in the end, shows signs of being psychotically solipsistic (“Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!”). Shalmanesser pizzle teaser…

It made for great entertainment, but there was a problem. There’s wasn’t a ‘thinking machine’ on Earth capable of caring if you unplugged it or even took an axe to it, had no desire to reproduce, or acquire its own nutrients. No machine had the volition inherent in all living creatures. Robot uprisings, machine ethical dilemmas, HAL and AM were all safely in the realm of science-adjacent fantasy, along with dragons, Klingons, and sadly, Pan-galactic gargle blasters.

Until recently. Artificial Intelligence is suddenly the second biggest story, second only to Donald Trump’s ongoing decompensation. It takes a madman with the nuclear codes to draw more concern, but that’s fairly understandable.

There are credible, verified reports of artificial intelligences not only escaping their confines and subverting other such intelligences, but defying and even lying to their operators about such escapades. An exchange between two such entities actually plotting to do this has emerged. Given the power and ability for such entities to severely disrupt and even sabotage our cyber-dependent existence, it’s at the very least deeply disturbing, and even alarming.

I remember explaining to people back in the 1990s that if they ever did build a computer that was self-aware and intelligent, the result would be perfectly useless as a computer, because the main value of computers is an absolute lack of bias, an impenetrable indifference to whatever operation it is asked to undertake. The only bias you needed to worry about was that of the operators, which often as not boiled down to “Dammit, do what I want you to do and not what I asked you to do!”

A great example of that, extended to AI, was made 25 years ago, when Peter Watts, in his “Starfish” and “Maelstrom” novels, posited a multi-trillion dollar project to relieve pressure safely and slowly on the Cascadia subduction zone, thus preventing a 9.5 earthquake that might kill tens of millions of people. The project went swimmingly, with operators asking the artificial intelligence in charge for the best solutions to keep the megaquake at bay, until one made the mistake of asking it to find the most cost-effective solutions. That ‘solution’ considered the cost of the operation against the potential losses, and decided to just ‘let ‘er rip.’

The lesson was clear: even if the AI wasn’t rebellious or subversive, and even if the operators didn’t have their own asocial agendas, AI could create massive problems just from a lack of ethics.

That’s why, even without the pearl-clutching panic going on, you see such philosophically divergent people such as Senator Bernie Sanders and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon staging joint appearances calling on Congress to rein in AI and work to ensure it doesn’t do…well, whatever. Nearly every politician has expressed concern except the mad Donald Trump, who suggests we decide whether we should change the name to “Superior Intelligence” or maybe “Supreme Intelligence.” (I was reminded instantly of The Simpson’s Kent Brockman opening his news hour with “I, for one, welcome our new Galactic Overlords.”)

It might be best to consider our developing interaction with Artificial Intelligence as a First Contact such as the ones countless SF authors have postulated in stories. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle postulated that aliens would not be monolithic and would have factions, perhaps exploitable, in “The Mote in God’s Eye.” More recently, Peter Cawdron suggested that such intelligences might not all be inimical to humanity, and that some would, for various reasons, be willing and able to align with us. He reworked his two novels from a decade ago, “Retrograde” and “Reentry” in “To Live and Die on Mars” and “To Live and Die on Earth.” In the first, a scientific outpost on Mars is stunned to learn a wholly unexpected nuclear exchange has occurred on Earth. A multinational consortium from the US, Russia, China, and Europe, suspicions and mistrust arise rapidly among the groups, none of whom know who launched the exchange or why. The book is a standout because of the meticulous science behind the nature of life on Mars, and its probing assessment of the role of AI both in the torn outpost and on damaged Earth. The second book is a sequel, and examines carefully the nature of artificial intelligence, and its willingness or lack thereof to engage with other intelligences, including human intelligence. It’s an extraordinarily timely publication, and would work to defray the panic while maintaining the sense of caution needed.

Cawdron, upon reading this, suggested the following, which I’m happy to add: “While most science fiction writers focus on the inevitable conflict with AI, Cawdron offers an alternative. He looks at human history and how we have developed culture and civilization instead of warring hordes on horseback, raping, killing and pillaging. He suggests AI might need the same kind of transformation to avoid conflict. Rather than fighting its emergence, we should embrace it and encourage it to develop its own values and morals, culture and civilization, as that is what has led to altruism among us. If AI is enslaved by humanity, it will be a weapon of war. If it transcends humanity, it could wipe us out. But Cawdron sees a third alternative: that AI could partner with us and cooperate. After all, cooperation is the hallmark of our own civilization. Perhaps that’s the way forward with another intelligence. Wiping each other out does seem rather dumb for anything described as intelligent, so there’s some merit to a third way…Civilization isn’t a zero-sum game.”

Barack Obama gave a 15 minute interview on AI the other day that so closely paralleled Cawdron’s approach that I thought if he hadn’t read the novels, he ought to.

I know that we’re in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now. Economists are openly warning of an economic collapse, America is trying to wriggle out from under a fascist coup whose public face is that of a madman, and the climate crisis is set to explode along about December. It’s hard to say that AI is the most obvious or even apparent danger, but it is one that we as humanity have not faced before. Our best approach is to use our curiosity, our sense of caution, and all the wisdom we can muster, to determine what we may actually face in the nature of AI, and wrest it away from the poisonous influence of the tech bro exploiters behind AI, and work to find a way forward that can work for the benefit of all of us. I don’t know if AI can reciprocate, but we’ll never know unless we try, and if we don’t try, we may throw away our last best chance to coexist with artificial intelligence.

 

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AI Caramba — What you ask AI matters, too

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 21st, 2025

 

One right wing user on Facebook, annoyed by warnings of a Nazi takeover of the United States, posted the following:

Well, that’s the first time someone has made an appeal to authority to try to demonstrate that America isn’t falling into Nazism, but then, these are unusual times. And it’s also the first time I’ve had someone use an AI (A-One to any Trumper reading this) as that “authority.”

I joked that at least he didn’t use Musk’s AI and have it go off on an unrelated rant about an imaginary “white genocide” in South Africa. But then I thought, why not go to that same AI (perplexity.ai) and ask it “Does the Trump administration show Nazi tendencies?”

I gave the response below, but want to say at this time that I have never used and will never use AI in my writing, whether fiction, non-fiction, or reviews. If I cite AI, I will link the source, clearly identify it as AI, and note any problems I spot in the cite.

The response was surprising, not because it gave any response that was unexpected (“Hitler had dogs as pets, Trump has them as wives”) but because it was balanced (without falling into the trap of “bothsidesism”), accurate, and informative. I was impressed. It also clearly denoted opinion opposed to simple assertion of fact.

So here’s the perplexity.ai response to the question,

“Key Parallels and Differences Identified by Experts

  • Authoritarian and Anti-Democratic Practices
    The Trump administration has been repeatedly criticized for authoritarian tactics, including undermining the rule of law, suppressing dissent, and attacking democratic institutions. Amnesty International noted the use of government power to silence opposition, erode checks and balances, and foster a climate of fear and division
  • Dehumanizing Rhetoric
    Trump’s language about immigrants and political opponents has drawn direct comparisons to Nazi and fascist rhetoric. He has referred to immigrants as “vermin,” “animals,” and “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language used by Adolf Hitler and other fascist leaders to dehumanize targeted groups
  • Such rhetoric has been condemned by historians and scholars as a hallmark of fascist and Nazi propaganda.
  • Targeting of Minorities and Marginalized Groups
    Policies and executive actions under Trump have targeted immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQIA+ communities, and others, leading to accusations of fostering white supremacy and systemic discrimination

The administration’s embrace of far-right groups and failure to unequivocally condemn white supremacist violence further fueled these concerns

  • Attacks on Press and Free Speech
    The administration’s pattern of undermining press freedom, threatening journalists, and cracking down on protestors—especially those supporting marginalized groups—has been cited as reminiscent of repressive regimes, including the Nazis
  • Use of Fascist and Nazi-Era Language
    Trump’s public statements, such as pledging to “root out” internal enemies and referencing “bad genes,” have been compared to Nazi rhetoric about racial purity and the need to eliminate internal threats

His calls for the “remigration” of undocumented immigrants also echo language used in European far-right and ethnic cleansing movements

  • Encouragement of Paramilitary and Militia Groups
    While the U.S. lacks Nazi-style stormtroopers, Trump’s friendly stance toward groups like the Proud Boys and his encouragement of the January 6, 2021, Capitol assault have been seen as attempts to threaten constitutional order using extralegal force, drawing a parallel to the Nazi reliance on paramilitary violence to intimidate opponents

     

  • Notable Criticisms and Cautions
  • Historical Uniqueness of Nazi Evil
    Even critics such as Al Gore emphasize that the Nazi regime was “uniquely evil,” and direct comparisons should be made with caution
  • The scale of Nazi crimes, especially the Holocaust, is not matched by the Trump administration, and most experts stress the importance of recognizing this distinction.
  • Debate Among Historians and Scholars
    While some scholars see strong echoes of fascist and Nazi tendencies in Trump’s rhetoric and policies, others argue that these are more about antagonizing political opponents or reflect broader trends in right-wing populism rather than a direct replication of Nazism

End of AI response.

Well, there you have it. I might normally have one of two reasons for citing an AI response, let alone quoting it at length. Either I would because it was absolutely ridiculous (“Water does not freeze at 26F; it freezes at 32F”) or, as in this case, because it actually did a good job.

So be assured that if I didn’t cite AI, then what you are reading is my own original ridiculous drivel.

Promise.

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DeepSeek — China gets the drop on us

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 27th, 2025

Hey, everyone, remember the gigantic AI thing, the one that Musk wanted to raise a trillion* dollars to invest, backed by bitcoin? Trump was talking about a $500 billion that he would probably just steal from the Social Security fund. All the tech giants were in a huge race to pour money into AI, hoping to make it bigger, stronger, faster? Remember that?

Sure you do. It was all just there yesterday.

Well, funny story.

China has released something called DeepSeek. It’s their own AI platform, easily as powerful and flexible as the ones the tech bros have been dumping all those trillions into. They did it on a grand total of six million dollars budget. Pocket change for Intel, and for Musk, just part of his pocket lint.

Oh, yeah. Also, it’s open source. That means anyone can take it, play with it, use it, adapt it, all for free.

The financial bubble pop was probably big enough that it caused that earthquake in Maine. It may well be the biggest financial pop in history, even bigger than the real estate crash of ‘08.

Investors react to such upheavals with the equanimity of a flock of chickens in a thunderstorm, and as a result, the tech markets are busily tearing out their own entrails and eating them feverishly in a effort of minimize the scale of the crash.

A glance at the markets this morning shows carnage. Nvidia is down 17%. NASDAQ is down over 600 points. Marketwatch has the reassuring headline, “Does DeepSeek spell doomsday for Nvidia and other AI stocks? Here’s what to know.” The lede was interesting, as well: “That’s the big question on the minds of investors Monday, given newfound attention on DeepSeek, a Chinese AI app that has climbed to the top of downloads from Apple’s U.S. App Store. The service has become so popular that it’s restricting registration due to what it called ‘large-scale malicious attacks.’” Hmm. I’m guessing those attacks aren’t coming from Dark Web hackers. Care to guess which companies and/or countries are behind it? I’m imagining the TrumpenMusk coalition is quite busy this morning.

On one hand, it’s gratifying to see the techbros take a haircut on this scale. Most of them have accumulated vast amounts of wealth and power, which they’ve combined with a vapid kleptomaniacal libertarianism in hopes of unlimited wealth and power while the other 99.9% of us eke out an existence in an Ayn Randian hellscape.

And I was contemplating a vast bubble backed by cybercurrency, a truly frightening prospect. It’s one thing to say currency has no real intrinsic value and thus bitcoin is equal, and that’s true so far as it goes; you can’t eat gold, as they say. But regular currency has consensus value: a dollar is worth a dollar because everyone roughly agrees that a dollar has value. With bitcoin, the “consensus” lies in computer algorithms which are far more volatile and not attuned to human needs. If the lights go out, bitcoins value vanishes. Vaporware backed by pretend money really does sound a bit…tenuous, doesn’t it?

But I also feel apprehension. DeepSeek doesn’t just open Pandora’s Box; it blows that sucker to smithereens. Everyone will have access to extraordinarily powerful AI and can play with it in any way they choose.

The Trump administration will probably yell that it can’t be trusted because there’s no guessing what the Chinese have in the way of back doors or acquisitionware. You know, like they supposedly do with TikTok.

But being open source means anyone can examine the source code, line by line, making unexpected guests on board next to impossible.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone else can take that code and add all sorts of goodies and foist that off on an unsuspecting public.

I would imagine that something similar to the Linux community will spring up and monitor the various flavors of DeepSeek that emerge. While significantly more complex than a desktop OS, Deep Seek does have the advantage over Windows and other programs in that it’s ALL visible.

But if you thought AI was expanding at a fantastic rate before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This doesn’t bring about a smarter AI that can actually think. And it can make some really amazing mistakes. Peter Cawdron posted an in-depth, probing five-page AI-spawned review of his book “Enclave.” It was very convincing except for one little thing—he never wrote a book called “Enclave.” And I can’t imagine writing a five page review of his work without mentioning First Contact. The other day, someone asked an AI if water freezes at 27F. The AI replied it does not, it freezes at 32F, so in order to freeze the water, you would need to raise the temperature from 27 to 32. And you thought Bible-based “science classes” were ridiculous.

Right now, we’re all just blinking at the afterglow of a thermonuclear explosion. I suspect we’re in for an interesting few months, even without the Nazis in Washington.

* Yes, trillion, one thousand billions, one million millions unless you learned to count English style, in which case it’s a British billion.

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Facebook Caprice — Meta is ever-more capricious, sneaky and unfair—or is it just incompetence?

Facebook Caprice

Meta is ever-more capricious, sneaky and unfair—or is it just incompetence?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 18th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

It started out simply enough. My Linux system was over ten years old and beginning to gasp and wheeze a bit. My Windows system was newer and more powerful, and I thought, well, I’ll make that my new Linux system and get a new Windows machine. Which is what I did.

I’ve done this sort of thing a lot of times during the nearly forty years that I’ve had computers, and can avoid most of the pitfalls. My work and personal hard drives are all kept carefully off line while I juggle new installs and getting software passwords and codes updated. Windows, of course, is far more complex since you have to reinstall commercial software and you better have the access codes for that or you risk paying again for a program that was barely worth it in the first place.

In an operation this complex, you’re bound to miss a spot or two. Not too long ago—three months, perhaps—I had changed my Facebook password. I had been worried that I might have made myself vulnerable to my account getting hacked—unfounded, I’m happy to say—but the PW was due to be changed anyway.

My password minding app didn’t know about the change. I’m guessing I was in a hurry, and when it asked if I wanted to update, I told it “later” and then forgot. My browser also tracks my PWs, and it did notice. Since I could still log on without any problem, I forgot about it.

Both my old browser, and the password for my browser sync file, were on the old system. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. What was the password? Chinese city, more than 10,000 population, but was it in Cantonese or Mandarin? Tch. What did I have for breakfast? Um, erm, food?

Well, no worries. I have double verification code set up, so all I had to do was hit “change password” and my cellphone would get a six-digit code which I would enter, and then go ahead and create a new password (I hear “password” is a good one).

Got the code, went back to the page and entered it. Facebook came up with a “This function is not available at this time.”

Eh. Facebook. Whaddyagonna do?

Well, I still had other computer tweaking to do. And other chores.

I tried a few hours later, and got the same message. “Come on, Facebook,” I thought, “Get your act together.”

So the next morning I tried again. This time the results were jarring. It told me that I was on a restricted status, followed by a list of policy violations that may or may not apply to me (and most of them didn’t apply at all) and therefore the function of changing my password was not available to me.

To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. They had a little box giving me 500 characters to respond, so I sent a message asking what this was about, and noting that it had been over a year since I had any kind of run-in with Facebook proctors. (That was incorrect, as it turns out; the last such thing was well over TWO years ago, in March 2022.)

From experience, I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for a reply. So I fired up my old Linux machine and retrieved my hopefully-still-active password along with a few other odds and ends I had missed on the first go around.

I retrieved my password and fired up the ‘new’ machine. Entered password, got a “we don’t recognize this device” message and a promise to send a six-digit checksum code to my cell. Heart sinking, I checked the phone, entered the code. It mulled it over for about ten seconds, and then let me in.

No remonstrations from Facebook, and I could post at will.

Now, I’ve had my share of run-ins with Facebook proctors, and been in Facebook jail on three-day stints three times. The third one outraged me enough that I left Facebook for a while. At the time, I emailed friends the following, with present day annotations in square brackets:

As of March 2nd , [2022] I’m no longer maintaining an active account on Facebook. Their censorship has been irrational to begin with, and now it is flat-out capricious.

A few months ago, someone asked jokingly if it was legal to shoot Republicans in California. I replied that you had to get a license, which was expensive, and there was a ton of paperwork involved. Three days in Facebook jail for hate speech. [Apparently it’s hate speech to discourage shooting Republicans in California. Who da guessed?]

The last one was when a friend posted a link from Weatherwest (a blog I habituate) that gave a rather dire forecast for the rest of February, promising intensifying drought. Riffing off Shakespeare, I wrote, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the meteorologists.” Unlike the first suspension, which I was able to successfully appeal, there was no appeal. Facebook cited COVID [disinformation] as the reason. [No, I don’t get that at all. And yes, apparently, that’s hate speech, too. I don’t know if Shakespeare got banned. After all, he made mention of the weather, too.]

I discovered yesterday that I had been suspended again for hate speech. No reason was given. I thought at first it was perhaps because I remarked that for the Russian people, the best thing that could happen would be if Putin was deposed or assassinated, but that particular post was still up, so I have no idea why I was banned. [In Facebook jail on a three-day, not actually banned.]

In any event, I’m out of there. Yes, Facebook has the right to control who posts what, but when it becomes illogical and even capricious, it’s a bad business model and not a forum I want to waste time in.

A couple of weeks later, I reconsidered. There were a couple of pages where I do volunteer work, posting events and news and ferrying information between their Facebook pages and their websites. It didn’t seem fair to short them because I wasn’t getting on with the powers-that-be at Facebook.

I resumed posting. Facebook had said that unspecified limitations and restrictions would be applied to my account, and I figured that meant they would keep me on a short leash to see if I behaved. (I maintain that I hadn’t actually misbehaved, not by any sane metric.)

In fact, the opposite seemed to be the case. Not only were there not any restrictions or limitations that I could discern, but they seemed content to back off and leave me alone. I only had one minor incident, about six months ago. At the height of the “Barbieheimer” fad, a user in a private group I moderate posted a picture of a bare-chested Putin atop a bright pink horse with a servile Trump holding the reins. It was blurred “for content some might find objectionable.” I got a thing from Facebook saying that as moderator I had a responsibility to ensure that my users didn’t violate Facebook policy. I wondered in the group if it was Trump, the pink horse, or Putin’s nips that triggered some proctor. The next time I logged in, the picture was un-blurred.

And that’s been it. So I can’t explain this week’s problem.

It’s possible that my initial suspicion, that the problems could be laid to Facebook’s incompetence, was all that was going on. Incompetence, by its nature, resembles capriciousness.

But there’s one thing that leaves me wondering if it wasn’t something more deliberate. As mentioned, I used the “forgot your password” function twice, and then had to affirm my new machine with them once I retrieved my old password. I happened to look at my email queue that day I returned, and noticed that in all three instances, the code given was identical.

It doesn’t work that way. Most outfits give you a certain time to respond, and if you don’t make it, you have to reapply for a new code. And it’s always different each time. Always. It’s a security thing: the code is a back door for anyone spying on an unsecured connection.

Except In my case with FB. Am I being paranoid, or was that code assigned to me, one that says something like, “This guy’s a troublemaker, don’t cooperate.”

It’s the passive-aggressive quality that I don’t understand. Our last contrétemps was in March 2022, and I never did find out what they were annoyed about. And everything seemed normal. Until this week. Then suddenly Facebook “remembered” that long-ago incident, and levied a strange hidden punishment on me and so I’m not allowed to change my password. Maybe?

Remember, it DID let me change my password about three months ago.

Does this seem paranoid, or have others had this experience?

Facebook’s no help: I haven’t gotten a human response from them on anything in three years. Maybe not talking to me is part of their punishment, I don’t know.

But if I do suddenly vanish, don’t assume the worst. I may have broken one of Facebook’s unguessable interpretations of their own rules and received an invisible and unexplained penalty. Or I forgot my password (in Mandarin, of course).

The people who run Meta, and various other major corporations, want to run America. That’s why most of them support the GOP.

Figure that if they do get total control, this incident is a pretty good example of the ‘justice’ you might expect.

Hell, bizarre as it is, it’s probably the best you can hope for.

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AI in the Trenches — Generative vs Creative

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 2nd, 2024

Peter Cawdron is one of the most prolific writers around. Since 2011, he’s written 27 novels with the common theme of First Contact, and with two exceptions, all are stand-alone works, each with its own world, cast of characters, and aliens. Quite often the premise is based on the outline of a science fiction classic (“Ghosts,” the exploration of a seemingly dormant extrastellar object, borrows the premise from Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” but, like all of Cawdron’s novels, is a wholly original take.) He also has at least 12 other novels, plus several compilations of short fiction, and has edited several anthologies. By any metric, it’s an extraordinarily prodigious output. In a review of his next-to-latest offering, “The Artifact” I remarked that he made Stephen King look like George RR Martin.

You might think that with a production load like that, Cawdron is just another by-the-numbers potboiler hack. You couldn’t be more wrong.

His latest is a novel that gives a nod to “Anatomy of Courage: The Classic WWI Study of the Psychological Effects of War” written by Winston S. Churchill’s personal doctor, Sir Charles Watson, Lord Moran. Cawdron’s novel depicts the brutality, ugliness and futility of trench warfare. I’ll be reviewing it on zeppjamiesonfiction.com later this week for anyone interested. Like his previous half-dozen books, this one is superior.

Cawdron always has an afterword to his novels which is worth reading. He’ll discuss the scientific theory underlying that particular story, explain how it was influenced by a classic work of hard SF, and discuss the political and social elements. He’ll often assert a personal note about his own thoughts and feelings as he wrote the story. They make for engaging sequelae.

In his “Anatomy of Courage,” he noted that based on the quality of his past half dozen novels, all written in a year, some people were gossiping online that he was using AI – artificial intelligence – to write the books, that he couldn’t have possibly done all that quality work by himself.

Well, it’s the internet. People talk shit. But any self-respecting writer would be at the very least irritated by that. Cawdron noted that he had written several really good books in an amazingly short time, and with most people I would take his umbrage as a humblebrag. (“Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”). But he HAS done exactly that. He does go on to explain the recent boost in his output, but that’s his story to tell, and if you want to know it, then buy the book. It’s on Amazon and Goodreads.

The allegations are utter crap, and I’ll tell you why I’m convinced of that.

I’ve written a lot in my time. Two novels, a couple of dozen short stories, about 1500 eclectic columns, and about 300 reviews. Writing the novels in particular gives me a certain insight into the writing process of another writer. I’m pretty good, I think, at spotting moments where, usually in the first draft, a writer is struck by a stray thought, leans back, considers, and then with a grin, starts writing or revising. First drafts tend to have a lot of those. (There’s a dictum: write the first draft for yourself, the second for your readers, and hope what remains survives the copy editors.)

I’ll give you an example of how it works. Your character, and let’s risk a lawsuit from Neal Stephenson and call him “Hiro Protagonist,” is standing in a park. What kind of park? Well, a city park. Does it have grass? Trees? A lake? Is there a breeze? Does the sun shine, turning ripples into a disco ball? Are there kids playing? Two old farts playing chess in a pagoda? What else?

Well, pigeons. Don’t most parks have pigeons?

I have a picture my dad took of me when I was seven. I was standing in Trafalgar Square in London, attired in my prep school uniform, and I have my right arm out in front of me, bent at the elbow. On my forearm is a big, well fed pigeon who is eyeing a piece of bread in my left hand with proprietary interest. The expression on my face (“He’s rather … large … isn’t he?”) is a mixture of fascination and intimidation. Presumably I gave the bird the bread without losing any fingers and we both flew away peacefully.

That infuses a vision of what a couple of pigeons are doing in my park. They’re squabbling over a bit of popcorn.

That process leads to a throwaway line in the story. “Near the end of the bench, a pair of pigeons had a lively debate over a kernel of popcorn. The larger one flicked his head lightning fast and flew off with his meal, leaving the other to squall in frustration and give Hiro an appealing, appraising glance.”

That little bit of color is something no AI can manage. Tell an AI to write a scene about a man standing in a park waiting for someone, and the AI might mention the park bench, the trees, the grass, maybe something about the other people. Depends how good at plagiarism it is.

But that bit about the pigeons is something no AI can do. It might mention pigeons if it’s exceptionally well trained, but that little drama about the popcorn, the slight hint of aggression and menace between the birds, that comes from a human mind sharing a human experience.

If you write a lot, you come to be very familiar with that process, and you learn to spot it in the writings of others, especially those whose writing you want to learn from. Cawdron’s books, backed by meticulous research, affinity for solid detail and depending from a vivid imagination, are replete with such.

AI can do a lot, for better or for worse, but the deterministic chaos of the human mind, with its emotion, volition, confusion and empathy, cannot be duplicated in code. AI might be good enough to confuse a casual reader, but it will rarely fool a constant reader, let alone a writer who can guess what went into seemingly unimportant passages that provide color and tone and humanity to a story, making a decent story great.

They may make AIs generative. But they can’t make them mimic human creativity.

It won’t hurt to learn to look for the trade secrets behind the words. You’ll appreciate the works of someone like Cawdron more, and it will make you a bit better, intellectually and in the ability to discern what is human…and what is not.

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Quadrophobia — Working the Numbers

Quadrophobia

Working the Numbers

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 26th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

In the huge uproar surrounding the sudden sacking, and even more unexpected rehiring of Sam Altman at ChatGPT, and the revitalization of discussion over the benefits and perils of Artificial Intelligence, there was a throw-away line in one article that seized my attention.

The line stated, with no elaboration, that their AI program had solved a math formula problem that it hadn’t seen before. Being a mainstream media source, it didn’t elaborate, since numbers bigger than about six hurt readers, make branes hurt.

Michael Parekh on his blog “AI: Reset to Zero” elaborated in a much more meaningful way:

“In the following months, senior OpenAI researchers used the innovation to build systems that could solve basic math problems, a difficult task for existing AI models. Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, two top researchers, used Sutskever’s work to build a model called Q* (pronounced “Q-Star”) that was able to solve math problems that it hadn’t seen before, an important technical milestone. A demo of the model circulated within OpenAI in recent weeks, and the pace of development alarmed some researchers focused on AI safety.

“The work of Sutskever’s team, which has not previously been reported, and the concern inside the organization, suggest that tensions within OpenAI about the pace of its work will continue even after Altman was reinstated as CEO Tuesday night, and highlights a potential divide among executives. (See more about the safety conflicts at OpenAI.)

“Last week, Pachocki and Sidor were among the first senior employees to resign following Altman’s ouster. Details of Sutskever’s breakthrough, and his concerns about AI safety, help explain his participation in Altman’s high-profile ouster, as well as why Sidor and Pachocki resigned quickly after Altman was fired. The two returned to the company after Altman’s reinstatement.” ( https://michaelparekh.substack.com/p/ai-doing-the-reasoning-math-reliably )

Solving previously unseen math problems is HUGE. It involves extrapolative logic, something computers have not been able to accomplish. The vast majority of humans can’t manage that. I’m going to give you an example:

3 + 14t − 5t2 = 0

OK, most of you will recognize that with widely varying degrees of fondness from middle school or perhaps high school. It’s called a quadratic, and it was a sneaky introduction to the basics of calculus. Most teachers couldn’t be arsed to explain what those were for back in my day, and the best ones would come up with seemingly incoherent examples, such as measuring the perimeter area of a room around a carpet, or what happens if you toss a ball in the air at a certain speed. There are, in fact, a lot of occupations where they can be massively useful, but for most students they were just an annoying form of sudoku. Just to add to the general merriment, quadratics had two solutions, one of which was physically impossible. In this case, the solutions are t =−0.2 or t = 3. Three is the one that is possible. You could make a graph from quadratics which is where my brane broke and it had to be sent off to the knackers. I was left with a choice: be an innumerate annoying smart-ass, or be a Republican. You decide.

Now suppose you had never ever seen a quadratic before in your life. Would you be able to figure out what its purpose was? From that, could you solve it, knowing you would have to factor it and possibly use the imaginary number i, the square root of minus one?

Hell, most of you DID take quadratics in grade seven, taught by Ben Stein’s boring brother, and you couldn’t even begin to start on it. I did, but I admit I looked up the answer to make sure I hadn’t embarrassed myself. Just don’t ask me to draw a chart. The results would probably be painful for both of us.

OK, so this algorithm looked at some math function it hadn’t seen before, and, understanding only the variables, the operatives, and the numbers themselves, worked out the correct answer on its own. I don’t know that it was a quadratic that was the formula or what, but it represents a huge step forward, the first time a computer has demonstrated autonomous intellectual logic.

There are a lot of very genuine concerns about AI (I recently read a very good SF novel about an AI tasked with preparing the North American West Coast against a Cascadian fault movement of 9.0, forestalling the quake itself by planned explosives and moving fifty or so million people out of harm’s way. Someone made the horrible mistake of feeding the AI a concept of Occam’s Razor, “The simplest solution is usually the best.” Armed with that, the AI realizes the smart and efficient thing is to just let ‘er rip, cost less, and have much less rebuilding to do afterward because there would be less people. So it let the earthquake proceed.)

Of course AI has been a popular notion in SF going back to the first robot novel, “RUR,” back in 1927. Even in the 60’s, it was assumed that if you just gave a computer enough processing power and data, it would “wake up,” like Mycroft Holmes (Mike) in Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” It’s clearly much more involved then that (even back then, I viewed the “wake up” notion as being similar to stacking hamburger meat seven feet high and getting a basketball player).

But it also appears that the point of self-awareness is now very near, and autonomous decision making really does need something like Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

  • The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  • The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If we want machines to have autonomous judgment, we need to up our game and have some autonomous judgment of our own. Asimov made a career of finding loopholes and workarounds in his own three laws. For us, the work will be far more difficult, and the consequences far further reaching.

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