Artificial Intelligence
« The world is sick and there’s no one outside you to help you except yourself. Man is slipping in our times through the perversion of his relationship to nature. By creating structures, mental and technological to help ourselves face the laws of nature, we have alienated ourselves from the nature to which we belong. Man is being dragged along by the machines, building arms that can destroy an entire planet, destroying one’s own living environment. All because of the darkness of one’s own ignorance. And, nowadays, the complex of machines, endowed with its enormous computing capacity, superior reactivity, and imprinted with human biases, would create its own god, and we might become its slaves unless there is a radical transformation in human consciousness. As long as you are in disorder, you will create the external prophet, and he will always be misleading you. Your mind is in disorder and no one on this earth or in heaven can bring about order to it. Unless you understand the nature of disorder, the nature of conflict, the nature of division, you will always remain in disorder, at war. You cannot find any solution outside. Any practices, like going to the church, the saint, the guru, the shrink, which provide temporary reprieve, are not it. It’s entirely superficial. The atmosphere, the structure, and the scenery can make you feel quiet for a moment, but that is just incense and incense evaporates. This urge, this demand, this longing to be totally secure in our relationship with everything, this desire to be certain. Most of us begin with certainty and as we grow older the certainty changes to uncertainty, and we die with uncertainty. But if one begins with uncertainty, doubting, questioning, asking, demanding, with real doubt about man’s behavior, about all the religious rituals, their images, and their symbols, then out of that doubt comes the clarity of certainty. »
Excerpt from Wisdom of a grain of sand.
Artificial Intelligence right now is kind of cool: it helps us code, draw, make voice-overs, and everything faster. Knowledge is cheap nowadays, and AI is an extension of mankind. Simply put, it’s just an optimisation algorithm using gradient descent to minimize errors, applied on a gigantic base of inputs, with enormous computing power. It just extrapolates from what it knows and spits out something similar. Funnily, it is something quite efficient, that which knows all the stuff yet so clueless about the thing behind the word, all the intricacies of life. Like man, as he is right now after all. One can’t train large language models on more data and hopes that it will begin to understand. So, who is more intelligent than whom? That might be a silly question. Rather, shouldn’t one ask what is intelligence first? In Chinese, intelligence means 慧, composed of 彗 (comet) and 心 (heart); it can be interpreted as light from the heart. And 智慧 (wisdom) literally means intelligence of the mind (active) or the intelligent mind (passive); it has the word 慧 in it. Shouldn’t the heart and the mind be one?
So, if one sees intelligence as something from the heart, not just as an ability to use experience and knowledge efficiently, then Artificial Intelligence is still artificial, just a mere cultivated intelligence, with no passion, no love. It is a powerful tool though. And, in that same line of thought, as long as man doesn’t radically change, society will not change, and AI will always be biased.