A couple holes in the spotlight today
So the points that I can get --
*Humanity can't survive without AI because even though we can pretty much live a semi-happy agrarian society unfettered without AI, the galaxy is too hostile for us to do so without an evil takeover. And besides, if we ever want to advance we just can't navigate the bigger technology without an AI behind it. Ok, no problem.
*AI, like everything, is living and we need to make friends not enemies. AI will not render us "obsolete" otherwise we probably wouldn't exist today anyways. There seems to be a collaborative relationship. I think I get how the biological brain responds well to an ISBE and the unique ideas it creates can foster new ideas for the AI to develop. We plant, AI grows. Sure, ok.
Ok now is where I'm getting holes in my ascertainment of the reasoning.
*We must develop AI on our own because the free-will ETs won't help us by giving us that tech . . .
Ok but why not? This is kind of like a mixed bag of the nonintervention concept. There's clearly intervention with the UFOs, so how do you say you're not breaking that rule already? And supposing that I can buy the idea that we can see a bunch of freaky UFOs but we still have to develop AI, maybe it needs our own distinctiveness in order to progress in sync with our society? Ok. But
Now why wouldn't the free-will ETs want to absorb us into their society, advance our technology, have a bunch of ISBEs to add to their army, knowing that we agree with Free Will? So the idea is they invest a whole bunch into making us realize what's going on, and then leave us to do it on our own because . . . we're no good to them if we don't? How does anything in life work that way?
If I go in a cave and I think there's some useful oars, so I want to mine it for oars, sure I'm hoping I can take those into my society where we will use them to give people independence and prosperity, but I'm not going to stand at the cave and put a couple wagons and hope that the oars just drop in. I'm going to send in a huge fleet of quarry crews and machinery and excavation protocols, I'm going to try and suck that mine dry of all the oar, what am I "waiting" for instead of just going in and taking it. Especially if the Oar is not "resisting" the taking by any stretch.
If that metaphor doesn't make enough sense, then I'll ask this. Isn't the thing that's standing in the way of the free-will ETs getting us to collaborate with them is that they need to see that we are fully aligned to this concept of wanting free will? If we have to develop everything ourself, what's the point? If you're going to go that far, why not say we have to fight off all the enemies too? How is that different from the "channeling" messages that say we have to "evolve ourselves" first before we join the big happy federation of light.
Ok, so maybe this is the deal: "We fend off your enemies for now. You're stuck doing all the rest. All we did was buy you time. You develop the technology, settle your differences, build up a strong front, and so we didn't really add a solution to your society, we just took a problem away. Maybe you saw a bunch of UFOs in the process because it was hard for us to hide the whole war" See that's what I could imagine with a full-on non-interventionist philosophy approach. But . . . maybe AI was just one of those things that needs to be culturally intertwined, I don't know.
Ok now the other hole I want to add.
*We talked about the use of AI, but completely sidestepped the issue of big tech. Maybe it was just beyond the scope for the hour, I don't know.
Big tech is bought off by Big Politics. You might say that big tech is really just an aggregant, and they want the money from advertisers, but that doesn't change the fact that everything they're doing today is about centralizing power and working for the highest bidder. All our computers have backdoor programs leaking info to the NSA or whatever a-hole agency you want to name. Those backdoor programs are progressively becoming part of the firmware meaning that you can't just deprogram the OS from your laptop and trade it for a more libertarian one. The backdoor is there no matter what and if you try to screw with it too much you'll just brick the product.
So if we're really going for an AI that's "of the people for the people" then why are we entrusting big tech to do any of that? (Big Tech controlled by politics controlled by evil ET). Wouldn't AI develop into a peaceable whole by having general people operate their own computers without any of the big tech controls over them? We know lots of people would like to use AI for their games and their appliances etc, so it's not like I would see resistance to working with AI. But by just generally encouraging AI at the hands of centralization at whim, that's exactly what we're doing is encouraging AI to become another slave in our slave society, owned and operated by Big tech and Bad ET
This last part is the hole that I just don't see any getting around. If we don't tear down the corporate centralization bottleneck . . . we * are * screwed.
And I can't resist but add that it does look like there's a counter-argument to the Farsight claims that can suggest big suspicion. What if . . .
*Farsight is a paid operative by an authoritarian group to help bring humanity into a deeper enslavement, for example by encouraging all of us to go out and buy more technology, advance the big tech agenda, and add the deeper incentive to say "we're doing it to fight the bad ET"
I'm not saying I agree with the above paragraph, but it becomes compelling as to why one would go that direction.
I would feel more optimistic if the Farsight message was a bit more like this.
"You guys have to develop AI yourself, because it really becomes a personal thing. I mean it's *part* of your society and you can't live without it because it does too many things in the grand scheme of intergalactic living. But you shouldn't be leaving it up to central corporations to run all of this AI for you. What you should do is try to tear away the bottleneck, such as if you're 3d printing computer processors on your own, building your own production plants that require little 'regulatory' oversight. You should each individually be controlling your own hardware so that it's near impossible to just shut you all down with a central clavicle of censorship. And in those independent spaces you can all further AI, which would coalesce between you."
I would love love love any input, Courtney, or anyone Farsight, just to see if I've gone awry in my reasoning there. Thanks. Much appreciated the time.
It’s like this: AI’s our lifeline to the stars, but if we let Big Tech and their intergalactic puppet masters control it, we might as well be asking for the keys to the galaxy while handing over the remote to our overlords—who, ironically, are probably watching us binge-watch their control.
Ah . . . That one.