The A.I. arms race has exploded so rapidly that I haven't even had a chance to sink my teeth into this project before the likes of Elon Musk (of all people) are calling for a 6 month moratorium on A.I. development to take stock before careening over a cliff [take the source with all due grains of salt, but the reporting seems fair and balanced in this particular instance].
It seems our societal collective consciousness has converged on this topic all at once, and it's... shall we say... fecund ground for ethical excavation. The question is whether we've already really stepped in it.
I generally keep two sketchbooks at any given time, one for working out the brute mechanics of a project - sketching, measuring, to-do-lists, experimentation and the like - and another for conceptual journaling, diagramming, and note-taking as I read and research. As I looked back on prior entries in the latter, I discovered my recent chat with ChatGPT was not as unprompted as I thought.
Back in November (almost 5 months ago as I write) I had just returned to some experimentation with my coding illuminated manuscripts, and was troubled as I pondered their implicit theology. Here's what I wrote:
On the Logical Conclusion of my Illuminations and the Violence of Determinism
"If we are to say the the computer text is analogous to the sacred text in its existence as a record of the logic underpinning a creative act, then we must be willing to also accept the cosmological corollary: that the universe is programmatic and digital. This of course leads into the 'shallower' waters of a digitized holographic universe, but also into the much deeper, murkier waters of determinism, where fluctuation is not based on agency but on a degree of randomness that has been inserted by the programmer. This is not constrained, hard determinism in its truest sense, but it boils down to a quantum determinism where all fluctuation is the collapse of a probabilistic wave function."The problem with determinism is it destroys the [theological] concept of Love. Love, as a freely entered relationship, requires unconstrained choice. Free will, in the quantum-deterministic sense, is an illusion, unless there are philosophical/quantum mechanical nuances or developments I'm unaware of."Agency, then, seems only to exist in Beings, no? Can 'inanimate' objects possess agency? 'Will?' Until this can be resolved, the only way forward escaping the theological dead end of determinism is to introduce the human viewer as a necessary variable. Allowing the viewer to influence/disrupt the 1:1 correlation between program and output introduces the possibility of love into the code."
"The question then becomes, to what degree should the viewer be made aware of their agency? And how? It must not result in a manipulative control, a domination over the program that the viewer discovers and then achieves, but rather in a sense of awestruck interdependence where the viewer senses an entanglement without predictable outcome."Is the [analogue] of love then randomness? Love without unpredictability becomes control. In human relationships the unpredictability is of course the agency of the recipient of the love to choose the degree and method of reciprocation. Is this a love story between a human and a machine in which randomness stands in as a simplified 'agency' for the 'beloved' algorithm? Short of a neural network, this is the closest a machine comes to unpredictability."Is A.I. the entry point? The introduction of machine learning and neural networks is a possible foothold for algorithmic agency. And whether or not this is true agency is the same question as whether or not it has true sentience. It's the question of locating the inscrutable breaking point from the 'program' to the ineffable; the spontaneous generation of the 'soul' and the origin of qualia."
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