Artificial Intelligence

There is such an awful lot of fuckwittery on facebook that it’s sometimes hard to get to the good stuff.  It needn’t be that way.  The dumb stuff is easily recognizable, so it should be a simple matter to just scroll past it, but far too often I cannot resist the temptation to make a comment.

Good morning! I am 6,000x more intelligent than you. Would you like to talk?

For instance, one that I’ve seen on my page about 3 or 4 hundred times in the past couple of weeks is “The first 3 words you see will mean something to you in 2014,” accompanied by a grid full of letters, like a scrabble board with a tile on every square.  I’ve ignored it each time, but that self-destructive little voice inside my head grabbed control of my fingers today for long enough to type “ANY 3 words are likely to mean SOMETHING to you in 2014.”

I felt I was showing admirable restraint  by leaving out the FFS and the SMDH, but since then I’ve had numerous e-mail notifications like “Peace, Love, Happiness” and  “Intelligence, Win, Sex.”  It’s amazing how almost everybody’s 3 words are positive.  One might be tempted to the uncharitable suspicion that the chart was rigged.  So, I learned my lesson.  If you comment on something, even to comment on how dumb it is, you are going to be in that conversation for more time than you want to be.

On the other hand, I have several people among my friends who generate interesting threads about politics, art, culture, and what’s happening in different corners of the world.  For instance, somebody linked to this today, which I think is kind of a genius idea.  Probably wouldn’t work, though.

The reason for that is that people may have access to the necessary information and still misinterpret it and make the wrong decision.  I know it happens to me.  Almost all of us are stupid some of the time, and some of us are stupid almost all of the time.

Soon, we will develop artificial intelligence.  The inevitability of technological progress, the ever increasing speed of it and the snowball effect virtually guarantee (in the old sense of virtual, like, of course there’s a tiny possibility that I’m wrong) that it will happen.

The weird thing is that we won’t recognize it when we do.  How could we?  An artificial intelligence is almost bound to be way more intelligent than an average human being and in terms of memory and raw data processing capability it will be light years ahead of any of us.  It will be Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and Adrian Monk all rolled into one.

It will be spouting out brilliances a dozen a minute, and nobody will even notice them.  We’ll  all be looking at cats, and talking about the weather.