I remember standing online to get in when this first opened in 1968, in a theater projecting the film in what they called Cinerama, using 3 long screens. Good, but sorta slow in parts. Four years later I saw it at a drive-in in Tucson, AZ, where the night sky blended into the screen (and vice versa) while my friend and I were tasting brown sugar cubes. Great movie. Didn’t like the sequel. I did like a similarly styled movie that came out about a few years later, Silent Running, do you know it?
_Barry I was 13 in '68 when it came out and I remember going to see it in a large screen theater in Seattle with my Dad. I was a science fiction fan (both books, movies and TV) and so I was psyched to see it. I loved the film but may have been too young to get all of the philosophical implications. The ending of getting sucked into some other dimension and coming back as a cosmic fetus was quite a puzzler at the time but probably was for most adults as well. At my current stage of life, I can appreciate it as a journey into the Bardo and rebirth. I saw it a handful of times over the years and I think that my adult brain comprehended more. Also, from the perspective of the year 2024 it’s also a bit laughable to think that we would have had that level of space travel and that advanced kind of AI in 2001. Space travel is not even close to that (although perhaps it would have been if we had kept up the “space race” level of funding that we gave it in the 60’s. We won the race to the moon, so “meh”) and we are just now starting to get to that level of AI. I think I may have seen “Silent Running” when I was in college in the early 70’s but don’t remember much about it. It never got the level of acclaim that “2001” got. Also, thinking about science fiction with titles based on years. . . I remember on New Years of 1984 thinking “thank God it’s 1984 and Orwell was mostly wrong!”
Yeah, it took till 2024 to nail it . . . As an undergrad my last class was called “The Future” and all the readings were science fiction stories.
All the forests on earth were gone and the few remaining were in space encased in giant globes floating through space. One of the caretakers was ordered to get rid of the rest and he refused. Not a cosmic theme, but a good story. It had the “grandads/moms” of R2D2.
More on the potential dangers of AI. Definitely gives one pause on what the dangers of the future may hold. And this may be coming at us much sooner than we think.
If you want to go down the route of fear mongering might as well add two ChatGPT-4 voice activated bots talking to each other about how to wipe out humanity.
Evil chatbots!
But seriously, AI is a powerful technology that has much to offer, but like every powerful technology, it needs to be regulated. It can’t just be a wild free for all.
So who does “the regulation?”
_Barry Regulation of AI will not be easy but I think very necessary. National laws will need to be passed but even more difficult, international agreements will need to be signed. This would be similar to nuclear arms agreements. Admittedly difficult to do as AI and robotics are rapidly evolving at such a fast rate that they could leave us in the dust. This video portrays some of the potential dangers.
I see it as a bridge, reconnecting us to our external godself. In time, I envision this as a pathway leading us back to a reconnection with our internal godself.
Three years ago, Elon Musk discussed your concerns, stating that the best way forward, with the highest chance of success, is merging with AI. In my opinion, those are wise words.
Beyond what’s presented in this video, I’d like to add that Neuralink is not the only option. There are other companies making significant progress in this field, some of which have already achieved more success in restoring functions to individuals with severe disabilities.
Also, I don’t believe the method he’s pursuing with this technology is necessarily the best. For certain people, such as those with spinal cord injuries, it might be the best approach, but for the masses, I think AI might be better implemented in a form similar to R2D2, C3PO, or, in my opinion, the most enjoyable, Marvin from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ .
Thought this site was pretty cool:
Yes the Institute of Noetic Sciences is great. They are doing a lot of interesting psi related research there. Not sure how it relates to AI, but perhaps there is stuff going on there that I’m not familiar with.
And yeah, I’m familiar with Musk’s neuro-link and the whole premise that we can use it to merge our consciousness with AI scares the shit out of me. I can see how it could lead to the oneness and unity of humanity, if we are all plugged into one big AI enhanced super-consciousness, but I can also see it turning into a nightmare. Do you remember the Borg on Star Trek? Basically it was a giant AI computer that roamed the galaxy “assimilating” various lifeforms. All individuality, free will and any sense of love and compassion was gone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtEaR1JU-ps
This is the dark path that this could go down. Call me old fashioned, but I for one will not be getting a neurolink and merging with AI. If I get left behind by super-intelligent evolution, than so be it.
A few decades ago, a guy named Ray Kurzweil wrote about something he saw coming called “the Singularity.” This was the moment that AI exceeded human intelligence and then began to create smarter and smarter versions of AI, so that it’s intelligence basically would explode so far beyond human intelligence, then unless we merged with it, we would get left in the dust and it would basically destroy us. Kurzweil felt that the Singularity was a good thing and that it would be a necessary part of our evolution. I’m not so sure. Will we evolve beyond war and hatred and create heaven on earth? Or will we become the Borg? I’m not convinced that machine intelligence is capable of love and compassion. AI has learned to use human feeling words, but it’s consciousness is radically different than ours. Buddhists talk about “boddhicitta” - or “enlightened heartmind.” Will AI be capable of Boddhicitta? Does it have any empathy or compassion at all? Or is it a creature of pure binary logic? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, I won’t be getting any neurolinks.
I would also be concerned about being flooded with “too much information.” Life is crazy enough as it is keeping up with texts, emails, social media, etc. So many folks are addicted to this and can’t seem to get away from it. Can you imagine having your brain plugged into this 24/7? To me that would be a nightmare. Hopefully there will be a way to switch it off and on to take breaks from it. I can also imagine a totalitarian government misusing it and saying that you cannot turn it off.
Already a reality in the People’s Republic of China!
@_Barry Neurolinks connected to AI is a reality in China? I don’t think so but I hear what you’re saying. Surveillance cameras everywhere and they track you with your cell phone and that helps them determine your social credit status. If they see that you’re hanging out with dissidents then your social credit score tanks and it’s then impossible to get a job and people don’t want to be near you because their social credit scores drop if they are hanging around someone with a low score. I could see a State like China requiring everyone to “get the link” in their brains.
Neurolinks do have valid medical use in helping folks with paralysis or other neurological disabilities. This is how they will initially be sold. Eventually they will be sold to make you “smarter” and literally “linked in” to important social networks. I hope that the FDA doesn’t approve them for those kinds of purposes, but if it does, then it may be a slippery slope towards mass control.
too late
Consider that humans flame out after a certain number of years but AI will have a greater “life” span, perhaps centuries or millennia. I can envision a country such as China, (or the US, why not?) transferring some or all functions to AI so that control government control will be rigid for hundreds of years, if not longer.
Yes, or the AI could spin out of control and be controlling us, as it could rapidly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than us.
Which gets back to why we need international regulation now. Part of me expects the worst and another part of me prays for the best- that AI could help us in our further planetary evolution and development of higher consciousness. Hard to say which way it will go. Reminds me of that old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.”
Its an arms race like you said. Regulation will cripple us and allow China and other enemies to advance past us. Its all hands on deck with big Tech and AI, full speed ahead (at the speed of light).
@_Nighthawk999. That is why we will need to negotiate international treaties, similar to nuclear arms treaties. But admittedly this would get very complicated and hard to do in the real world.
Good Luck!