Darwin2049/chatgpt4 omega evolutionary
OpenAI - ChatGPT4.
In what follows we attempt to address several basic questions about the onrushing progress with the current focus of artificial intelligence. There are several competing actors in this space. These include OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and Cohere. A number of other competitors are active in the artificial intelligence market place. But for purposes of brevity and because of the overlap we will limit focus on ChatGPT4 (CG4). Further, we focus on several salient questions that that raise questions of safety, risk and prospects.
Overview
Specifically, risks that involve or are:
- Interfacing/Access: how will different groups interact with, respond to and be affected by it; might access modalities available to one group have positive or negative implications for other groups;
- Political/Competitive: how might different groups or actors gain or lose relative advantage; also, how might it be used as a tool of control.
- Evolutionary/Stratification: might new classifications of social categories emerge; were phenotypical bifurcations to emerge would or how would the manifest themselves.
In general when we refer to evolutionary changes or adaptations our thoughts tend to gravitate toward periods of time that are measured in very long spans of time. This has been by and large because changes have been based upon natural selection acting upon hereditary adaptation to changed internal or external conditions. In the current context we envision changes happening as a result of competitive pressures operating in a new if artificial environment. That environment is a creation of the combination of social-cultural-economic forces interacting with scientific-technological developments. These forces each operate with their own imperatives and they each have their own feedback mechanisms. Based upon our research to date we foresee evolutionary pressures to use CP capabilities to gain and sustain competitive advantage comparable to those that condition natural selection and survival of the fittest. On the horizon several developments have come into focus that suggest further refinement and inclusion.
- Cognitive Augmentation. Users will have access to a cognitive prosthetic using multi-modal channels. These include both visual as well as voice. The science fiction novel Dune was written by Frank Herbert in 1965. In the novel humanity had persisted and survived for several millennia. It experienced advances and setbacks. In the setting where the narrative begins humanity has had a very close miss with its cognitive augmentation devices. They were referred to as "thinking machines" and very nearly eliminated humanity. The result was that individual who demonstrated facility were selected for training in advanced cognitive skills. These were referred to as a "Mentat". A Mentat was a human that had undergone a very long and arduous training process that spanned years. They were dependent upon a psycho-active known as spice mélange to function at peak performance. The result was that they were capable of performing feats of cognition and computation that other humans were totally unable to offer.
That this capability might be available to the average human being might not be out of the range of the possible. This is indicated as a result of work down with a British subject named Stephan Wiltshire.
Wiltshire has become famous because of his extremely rare talent of being able to view a very complex scene and recall it in almost all details. He is then able to recreate what he had only minutes to see in astoundingly accurate detail. As the facts of Wiltshire's capabilities have come to be known and recognized so to is the fact that Stephan exhibits spectrum autism. He is completely unable to manage his own affairs. These have to be managed for him by a family member. Stephan Wiltshire's abilities provide existence proof that the human brain is capable of these incredible feats of almost instant long term memory consolidation. The challenge will be to identify the appropriate activators that will enable this capability in ordinary humans. Through his ability he is able to exhibit such stunning capabilities make plain that the human brain is innately capable of these kinds of feats. The challenge involves identifying how these pathways can be activated and controlled on demand.
- Temporary Psycho-Active Enhancements. Neurological research has provide very accurate maps of the structures involved in long term memory formation. These can be used as targets for psycho-actives that facilitate newly learned memories. With enhanced activation of these structures the ability to rapidly learn new skills and talents would become possible. The movie Limitless from 2011 portrayed an aspiring writer who was given an experimental psycho-active. The bag of pills that he was given proved able to dramatically enhance his ability to recall information and retain it with a single exposure to the material. He was able to learn new languages and speak them with stunning fluency. His ability to selectively focus on a topic or subject and remain in a comfortable state of awareness and attention proved to be far beyond anything that he had experienced or known anyone else to experience in their normal waking states. It is therefore not far fetched to imagine that psycho-actives can be designed and fabricated that enable selectively targeting the pathways responsible for long term memory formation and consolidation. An individual with the ability to rapidly learn and retain new knowledge on extremely short notice would be indistinguishable from any other person that one might encounter. But that person would possess selective advantages extremely well suited in navigating an increasingly technical reality.
- Long Term Psycho-Active Enhancements. Current work with implantable membranes have demonstrated the efficacy of using these devices as a long term drug delivery mechanism. Should we peer a short distance forward in time that it does not seem to be far fetched to imagine being able to use long term implantable membranes that can be refilled. This means that a dendrimer based psychoactive can be used as the mechanism to deliver long term to very long term cognitive enhancements.
- Permanent Psycho-Physical Modifications.Should one audition a composition by the Seventeenth Century violinist Paganini will recount that this was a seriously exceptional musician. Paganini's ability to play violin at a stunningly fast pace is legendary. In modern times learning to master a Paganini requires an extremely high level of virtuoso skill and years of practice. With a CP connected to a haptic device one might acquire comparable skills in a far shorter period of time. A review of semi-professional electronic piano's will show that there are beginner's keyboards with keys that can play a tract of sheet music and activate lights on all of the appropriate keys. This approach can be used to shorten the training time and effort. We can foresee controlling a CP using a comparative technique. Instead of the simplified and often cumbersome means of typing, then pointing and clicking we might train on a device that resembles a musical instrument. It might resemble a shortened flute or oboe. However mastery of its full features might require considerable training.
- Always-On Collaborative Problem Solving. On any given day a tour through your local supermarket while shopping will bring one into proximity with someone, familiar or stranger who is engaged in a conversation with someone else via their mobile phone and an ear piece that connects wirelessly to their mobile phone. Essentially they are engaging in an "always on" state of collaborative engagement. In some cases they might even be engaging in collaborative problem solving. The task might involve selecting primary elements for an upcoming dinner or social event. Or it might involve looking for alternatives should the preferred items be absent. There might be a time pressure. So there can even be a three way conversation. When users of the Zoom online conferencing tool bring multiple individuals together they are engaging in collaborative problem solving. The tool itself allows for sharing of video, voice as well as screen content. The nature of the protocol that Zoom uses might in future releases allow for multiple screen sharing. When a cognitive prosthetic with voice control is incorporated into the picture then we have the basis for having considerably enhanced cognitive augmentation. Again... a casual glance might reveal little or nothing about the fact that the individual configured to use this set of resources might not merit a second glance. But their ability to engage with others as well as one or more CP's would position them to be able to respond in ways that a person without that kind of infrastructure would not.
Advantages. Our perceptions are that:
- when these kinds of capabilities become available they will represent a bifurcation of humans; those who can highly specialized and difficult cognitive tasks and everyone else;
- those who do not possess some form of cognitive augmentation will be at a severe disadvantage
- this will represent an evolutionary bifurcation or otherwise branching point in time;
- natural selection has pruned those whose capabilities enabled them surviving from those that were not; we will see the same but at fast to ultra-fast forward speed;
- yet, without any otherwise physically evident indication will see people who are unremarkable unnoticeable in their appearance or demeanor but who possess capabilities far beyond those of their fellows.
- by way of concrete example, we can see that humans can be trained to perform the most remarkable feats of competence even without any form of enhancement;
- an psycho active augmentation will have the effect of collapsing the amount of time to accomplish the same or an even greater level competence;
- because of the recent advances in using artificial intelligence in drug design the possibilities of using single or combinations of psycho actives can only be guessed at;
- as the recognition solidifies about the potential advantages we should not be at all surprised at the rapid emergence of suppliers of a wide range of combinations will emerge; this suggests that the era of using psycho actives for recreational purposes will be demarcated as "the early drug use era";
- classes of individuals may find common cause in banding together for purposes of common defense, championing means of insuring purity and consistency in the availability of those new substances that they depend upon for their performance; this might suggest a return to a feudal era type form of guilds;
- a likely corollary is that the ability to gain access to these forms of augmentation will be of high to extremely high value; so much so that it is almost inevitable that gray and black markets will spring into existence; ultimately prompting that access be regulated
- meaning.... this will strongly suggest an evolutionary split.
Risks. In the 1966 novel Bookworm! Run by Vernor Vinge The premise structured into a narrative wherein a chimp was modified such that it was neurologically connected wirelessly to an advanced computing system. The chimp succeeded in escaping from an high security buried research facility. The computing device that it had access to was capable of offering it instructions and solutions to each of the hurdles and obstacles that it encountered. It was subsequently able to escape in a small airplane and only lost the ability to control it when the wireless connection to the computer faded out. Despite this it was able to elude capture by succeeding in getting itself picked up by a truck driver who drove it dozens to hundreds of miles away. It was ultimately recaptured but the narrative concluded with an "alphabet agency" representative arriving to get an update on progress and also relay that the Soviets had been discovered to be connecting a dog in a comparable fashion.
- Epistemological/Ethical relativism: how to reconcile ethical issues within a society, between societies; more specifically, might it provide solutions or results that are acceptable to the one group but unacceptable to the other group; recent attention has been drawn to the evidence that a LLM such as CG4 may begin to exhibit sycophancy in its interactions with a user; even if the value stance of the user can be considered as an equivocation.