AI & the Future
Klaus Schwab’s view of the future and Artificial Intelligence is seriously flawed. He argues that the fusing of the political, physical, digital, and biological worlds will have a transformative impact on every facet of human existence. He insists that this will range from the way we live our lives, the manner in which we will work, the reconfiguration of economic models, the products we sell, and I believe his self-delusion, the power to extend our lives indefinitely. Of course, his cohort, Yuval Noah Harari, dreams of converting society into programmed robots. Meanwhile, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla dreams of putting chips in every pill that confirms to a central database that you took his latest creation.
Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution is seriously flawed for he has no understanding of actual real AI programming. Yes, insofar as AI is concerned, I do not believe in the view that if you throw in mountains of data, somehow the computer will evolve and figure it all out and come up with a force or conclusion. They did that at IBM with Big Blue. They thought it would find the cure for cancer – it failed. There is something more that makes our brain function. It is NOT just a neural net and consciousness somehow emerges because of all the connections. Granted, they try to mimic the brain and look upon us as simply a biological lifeform without actually understanding there is something much deeper.
Perhaps the night you suddenly fell in love with your partner. You were out to dinner, and your unconscious mind actually recorded everything — the place, the food, the music, what they wore. You consciously are not actually noticing all these variables. But years later, you hear that song, taste that same food, or revisit the place. Suddenly, without even trying to remember, the event is relived. You can close your eyes and see the event as if it were a recorded movie. Our brain is actually recording everything without us even trying. Creating a neural net and dumping all this information in there does not recreate that ability.
Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) dived very deeply into the construct of the mind. Their view of our unconscious was the result of very deep self-analysis. Socrates is different. I created pathways and taught it how to analyze. I spend a lot of time self-analyzing how I would trade, and what I would look at as an international hedge fund manager. I had to understand how the mind actually worked both on the conscious and unconscious levels.
Because I knew I was not going to be a world globe trotter again, I got a dog. She has taught me about how the mind also works. She thinks. She has a strategy. She has the same range of emotions that we have from boredom to excitement. I can see her thinking. She clearly communicates through her eyes and body language. There is an innate ability to communicate with dogs that has evolved over the centuries, which is one of the primary reasons our canine-human love affair has gone on for centuries. There is a distinct dog-human interspecies understanding that is extraordinary, but it also is a glimpse into ourselves. She anticipates where I will go when I get up and will gently let me know when she is hungry. But to my astonishment, she will play ball, but then will try to make me go fetch. She would bang her bowl if it was out of the water, but then if she wanted me to stop working, she would bang the bowl because she knew that sound would cause me to come out of the office.
There is a whole other aspect to not just our mind, but how even a dog thinks, which reveals to me that the failure in AI with machine learning is that it is one-dimensional. There is a far deeper level of activity beyond our conscious mind that they try to duplicate with neural nets. My dog has indeed reinforced my understanding of how to really construct AI, which is substantially different from the one-dimensional neural net.
My dog understands so many words that it is astonishing. I was talking with a friend and just mentioned the word “dog,” and she got up and immediately ran to the window to see what dog dared to enter her domain. If I say we are going shopping, she goes to the front door. If I say we are going to take a walk, she runs to the back door. She obviously understands far more language than I ever expected. A 2020 study by researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary discovered that, while dogs may not pick up minute details in human speech, they can, in fact, comprehend their owners’ most basic words.
What she has taught me is that even a dog has a conscious and unconscious mind. She dreams as we go. It is really amazing when you pay attention. This is just far more involved than creating a one-dimensional neural net, throwing a bunch of data in, shaking (not stirring), and hoping for the best. Their theory that accelerating the ability to calculate and adding parameters to models was not really a game-changer. The models are faster, and playing a game of chess or Jeopardy, they can beat a human because they have the ability to test every possible outcome in a few minutes. But that is the problem. They can wow everyone with speed, but they CAN NOT create something new. That was the failure of IBM’s Big Blue.
Creativity REQUIRED imagination, and expanding the nodes and speed does not lead to imagination. Without imagination, we cannot create a real game-changer. Thus, all the AI that Schwab cheers will lead the world into his Fourth Industrial Revolution is missing the critical ingredient, which does not exist in the conscious mind but is buried in the unconscious realm where we hide our talents, dreams, and our long lost memories. This is why Socrates has provided forecasting that is even original.
So I have taken a different approach. Socrates is NOT a one-dimensional neural net. Don’t worry. It will not suddenly come alive and decide to wipe out the inferior species known as humans. But the world Schwab envisions is not real. It only leads, not to the critical ability of creativity, which exists only in freedom, but to oppression and conformity precisely as the result of Marx’s experiment we call socialism/communism. Communism collapsed because it suppressed creativity. That also necessitates FREEDOM.
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