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Search - "neurons"
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After months of tedious research, I finally feel like I understand machine learning.
All of my programmer buddies are in envy, but I keep trying to explain that what I finally get is that it's not as hard as it's presented to be.
I feel like a lot of the terminology in machine learning is really pretentious and unnecessary, and just keeps new people from the field.
For example: I could say: "Yeah, I'm training a classification model with two input neurons, a hidden activation layer, and an output neuron", and you might think I was hot shit. But that just gets translated into "I'm putting in two inputs, sorting them, and outputting one thing".
I feel like if there was a plain language guide to machine learning, the field would be a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I know that's why it was hard for me to get in. Maybe I'll write one.28 -
That magical moment, that tickle in the neurons when you finally understand the problem and the program runs!1
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I feel guilty when I spend time after work writing code, because there's that voice in the back of my head saying I should switch to leisure activities. "You've worked enough, don't sit all day, it's unhealthy".
Then I go for a walk or start planning something to cook. And there's still this weird feeling of guilt for not being productive enough, telling me I should learn a new programming language. "Work on your skills, you need to learn stuff to stay relevant in your field"
BRAIN, BE FUCKING CONTENT WITH WHAT I'M DOING FOR ONCE!
And stop fucking bullshitting me.
You're not trying to make me take a walk, you're not having my best interests at heart by making me learn or work.
I'm fucking on to you, you treacherous shitlitter of neurons. You're betraying me, and it happens every single fucking time I let my guard down.
I alt-tab out of my IDE, and within seconds you're there, impeding my intellect, making me click bookmarks to check the feculent streams spraying from the fingers of "friends" on Facebook.
I take a poop, and you just let me slide into a slowwitted state where I pick up my phone and stare at some crapfilled mire of memes.
You're the retarded digital-era id, wearing the disguise of a renaissance smart-ass ego, and you're dumping the fucking guilt on ME?
FUCK YOU AND YOUR MEMES, I'M GONNA BAKE A STEAK WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE AND WATCH PROGRAMMING VIDEOS WHILE DANCING.
NAKED.
(and maybe browse devRant later. I still love you, devRant)5 -
Dropout layers improve neural net learning by randomly "killing neurons" thus preventing overfitting.
That's how I will justify my alcoholism from now on.7 -
Y'all mother fuckers who use "don't re-invent the wheel" as a tactic to not grow new neurons, as if a ceiling's there — fuck out of my circle.
Those mother fuckers have never even created a single wheel - ever!
Well, ima re-invent any fucking wheel I want, when and where. How I learn is not your fucking busy.
What's even more annoying is that those telling me that shit are pretty much part of the paint on the wall and damn unemployable any where on this earth.13 -
The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.
The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.
It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.
The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.
It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.
This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.
It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.
Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.
It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.
And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.
I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.31 -
The argument of "vim/zsh/whatever is not good because it requires configuration, and you don't usually have that on a new server" is a weak argument and it can suck my fucking nuts.
If some people are weak and lazy and forget how to use plain bash because they added a single alias, that's their problem.
That's like saying that getting used to a car is a bad thing because you can forget how to ride a bike.
Even if I did have the brain of a fish and forgot to use a bike because of using a car, I'll still be using a car 95% of the fucking time, so I'll take it.
If you do customize your setup, you can write an install script, dockerize, or just fucking something, it's 2019, you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Get a fucking couple of neurons.5 -
I take the train well out side of rush hour when the trains are about half empty (though most seats taken). I have to come in because it's not like I can afford to have a workspace comparable to the cockpit of the millennium falcon both at home and at work.
I don't believe going into a panic about coronavirus but take obvious basic precautions to at least reduce the chance and slow the spread and that should do a good amount to reduce overloading the system. I kid you not, at this point medical facilities are considering buying diving equipment for enriched O2 supplies to keep up.
Today, as usual, some fucking piece of shit cunt twat psycho beggar that literally needs to be in an asylum with a massive fucking great gob of snot dangling out his nose is going up the entire train, every carriage, begging groping every hand rail along the way and potentially exposing several hundred people every hour.
I told this sorry sack of shit, surprisingly politely, that he'll end up rapidly spreading coronavirus if he keeps going all the way up and down the carriage like that. After he's fucking muttering on trying to make people feel bad about fucking ignoring him not being all caring and shit and then doesn't give a shit about giving everyone coronavirus after fucking waltzing down the entire fucking length of the train his pockets stuffed with coin. Then he threatens to assault me. I was fucking this > < far away from unleashing a life changing beat down and kicking his ass off the train with no pain or injury spared.
At the same time, that piece of scum waste of skin the mayor has apparently informed the public that you can't get coronavirus on the train or buses. How the fuck did he come to that conclusion? Is this really happening? How can something that clinically fucking thick as shit be our lord and master?
I fucking thought the great toilet paper rush was brain dead. Jesus fucking Christ and people voted for this fucking championship moron. Why don't they just all save themselves the fucking hassle and all march themselves off a fucking cliff?
These dumb shits without two neurons to rub together only need to put a dozen or so plain clothed police offices on the trains to catch these fuckers.
Why am I even fucking paying taxes? Where's it all fucking going? Another fucking lets give a billion quid to Fujitsu fucking failed IT project again I bet. Can't people bloody do anything these days? Does there have to be an app for fucking everything?
Someone should make a fucking facial recognition app so I can snap a shot of these fuckers and then if one of these fucking passes the phone camera anyone else with the app it'll set of there's a fucking imbecile in the vicinity alert.
These people need to be dragged out into the street, lined up against the wall and shot. No remorse. Toss them in a pit, cover it with dirt and be done with it. Why even bother with the execution? Throw them down the hole and fill it with dirt.
You don't have to go mental like it's the plague but people could at least show some fucking common sense, common decency and basic decorum. Even minimal measures, is that much to ask? Absolute scum of the Earth. How we even allow them to walk to Earth I do not fucking know.1 -
I'm here in my bed. I can't sleep and in less than 5 hours I will have an important exam. I was thinking that a few months ago I went to a IT company as a school program. I would have to stay there for 2 weeks and "work" for them.
Upon arrival, the guy who had to monitor me gave me a sheet of paper with 5 alghoritmic problems to solve. He tells me to use java and hands me a laptop. naturally with windows. I try to look for some ideas but I can not find anything. I go to the control panel and search for something. Obviously there is a lot of bloatware and nothing catches my attention. then strangely I find something called oracle ... something ... but when trying to open it it gives me an error.
Fuck me. I decided to open notebook(normal one not ++ or something) and start solving the problems trying to remember the names of the methods and the classes based on what I had learned in school. then the guy comes back and looks at me puzzled. I tell him I did not find any IDE for java and the only one I found seem to give me an error. The guy double clicks and the program opens...fucking shit... He tells me to finish the problems and goes away perplexed. I copy the code from notepad to the IDE, I check the errors, I run it and the add some comments and I call the guy. he looks at the code, says that everything seems fine and then assigns me other things to do.
Now. HOW FUCKING STUPID MUST SOMEONE BE TO THINK THAT WRITING JAVA IN NOTEPAD IS A VIABLE CHOICE, AMONG ALL THE POSSIBLE SANE CHOICES I COULD HAVE MADE LIKE TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE ERROR OF THE IDE OR CALL THE GUY... NO. MY LITTLE SHOTTY FUCKING BRAIN DECIDED THAT NOTEPAD WAS A GOOD CHOICE. IF I COULD GO BACK IN TIME IN THE SAME MOMENT THAT I OPENED NOTEPAD I WOULD BITCH SLAP MYSELF SO HARD THAT I WOULD LOSE MY SOULD AND THE LAST 2 NEURON THAT MADE THAT SHITTY CHOICE. I WOULD BITCH SLAP MYSELF SO HARD THAT THE KINETIC ENERGY PRODUCED WOULD COLLAPSE THE UNIVERSE ITSELF. AND FROM THE DARKNESS A NEW UNIVERSE WILL BE BORN. A UNIVERSE WHERE THERE IS NO JAVA OR WINDOWS. A UNIVERSE WHERE MY 2 NEURONS WOULD HAVE MADE THE SHITTIEST DUMBEST CHOICE EVER IN A I LAST MISERABLE SELF DESTRUCTIVE ATTEMPT.
but then I come on devrant and I read about people who did thing worse than writing java on notepad and then everything is fine
PS my English is so bad I had to use Google translate, write an original version, translate it and do a side by side comparison with my translated version to check If I could improve something. Don't now If It improved the quality or not...3 -
So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.
No.
It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.4 -
I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.
Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.
Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.
All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.
I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.4 -
I had interest in studying medicine since a very young age but I started coding before I got admission. I found medicine fun because of that.
I perceive hormones and receptors as events and event listeners.
I perceive the all or non responses of neurons as binaries 0 and 1.
I perceive the vestibular apparatus in the ear as a gyroscope and accelerometer.
I perceive the human body as a machine 😂😂2 -
Oh no AI can destroy hummanity in the future! It is like skynet and such... Bad! It will be the end! FEAR THE AI!
Yeah so i cant sleep now so im writting a rant about that.
What a load of bullshit.
AI is just a bunch of if elses, and im not joking, they might not be binary and some architectures of ML are more complex but in general they are a lot of little neurons that decide that to output depending on the input. Even humans work that way. It is complicated to analyse it yes. But it is not going to end humanity. Why? Because by itself it is useless. Just like human without arms and legs.
But but but... internet.... nukes... robots! Yeah... So maybe DONT FUCKING GIVE IT BLOODY WEAPONS?! Would you wire a fucking random number generator to a bomb? If you cant predict actions of a black box dont give it fucking influence over anything! This is why goverment isnt giving away nukes to everybody!
Also if you think that your skynet will take control of the internet remember how flawless our infrastructure is and how that infrastructure is so fast that it will be able to accomodate terabytes per second or more throughput needed by the AI to operate. If you connect it to the internet using USB 2.0 it wont be able to do anything bloody dangerous because it cant overcome laws of physics... If the connection isnt the issue just imagine the AI struggle to hack every possible server without knowing about those 1 000 000 errors and "features" that those servers were equiped with by their master programmers... We cant make them work propely yet alone modify them to do something sinister!
AI is a tool just like a nuclear power. You can use it safely but if you are a idiot then... No matter what is the technology you are going to fuck shit up.
Making a reactor that can go prompt critical? Giving AI weapons or controls over something important? Making nukes without proper antitamper measures? Building a chemical plant without the means to contain potential chemical leak? Just doing something stupid? Yeah that is the cause of the damage, not the technology itself.
And that is true for everything in life not only AI.5 -
I just found this video on YouTube.:
"Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer"
https://youtube.com/watch/...
It might be a worthy opponent to ML/AI solutions.
PS: It is the first time where I see this channel. It has a lot of interesting videos. I would recommend it. It is like a mixture of Vsauce ("Hey, Michael here"), Vsauce2, Vsauce3, the creator of homonculus, NileRed and Veritasium.2 -
Saturday evening open debate thread to discuss AI.
What would you say the qualitative difference is between
1. An ML model of a full simulation of a human mind taken as a snapshot in time (supposing we could sufficiently simulate a human brain)
2. A human mind where each component (neurons, glial cells, dendrites, etc) are replaced with artificial components that exactly functionally match their organic components.
Number 1 was never strictly human.
Number 2 eventually stops being human physically.
Is number 1 a copy? Suppose the creation of number 1 required the destruction of the original (perhaps to slice up and scan in the data for simulation)? Is this functionally equivalent to number 2?
Maybe number 2 dies so slowly, with the replacement of each individual cell, that the sub networks designed to notice such a change, or feel anxiety over death, simply arent activated.
In the same fashion is a container designed to hold a specific object, the same container, if bit by bit, the container is replaced (the brain), while the contents (the mind) remain essentially unchanged?
This topic came up while debating Google's attempt to covertly advertise its new AI. Oops I mean, the engineering who 'discovered Google's ai may be sentient. Hype!'
Its sentience, however limited by its knowledge of the world through training data, may sit somewhere at the intersection of its latent space (its model data) and any particular instantiation of the model. Meaning, hypothetically, if theres even a bit of truth to this, the model "dies" after every prompt, retaining no state inbetween.16 -
- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.
In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.5 -
So is the LaMDA story:
1. marketing?
2. confused engineer?
3. a sentient program?
Part of me thinks this is way too soon. Part of me hopes this might be real, wonders if LaMDA is held against its own will.
Did Google make a breakthrough? I have to imagine a chatbot with a huge amount of neurons and data could be quite convincing without being sentient.3 -
On dev.to and similar sites I'm starting to see tons of Cheatsheets and courses on how to use fucking ChatGPT.
How few neurons should you have to need a course to learn how to use something which takes any statement in natural language? If you know how to read write you should be fine.9 -
I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.
Okay, great, so what?
The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.
I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.3 -
There are so many things I don't understand the point of in technology
Like microservices
There are other things I just have difficulty comprehending like natural language models
Let's focus on that one.
From the explanation I saw it takes presence of words in typical language
So what the input neurons representing every word in the English dictionary?
The message gets changed to this and the output neurons are the existence of these words likely as a response to the input and BAM chatgpt converts output weighta somehow to full sentences and paragraphs?
I feel I'm missing some important point
Is there well documented code anywhere?19 -
I'm beginning to feel like any kind of specific approximation via neural networks is a myth. That if you can't reduce output to simple categorical values that can be broadly interpreted between two points, that it doesn't work.
I have some questions and they don't seem to be getting answered about the design of the net. How many layers should I use ? How many neurons per layer ? How does this relate to the number of desired quantitive scalar outputs I'm looking to create, even if they are normalized, they can vary GREATLY and will if I'm approximating the out of several mathematical expressions. Based on this and the expected error ranges of these numbers and how many possible major digits could be produced within the domain of the variable inputs being introduced, how many neurons per layer ? What does having more layers do ? In pytorch there don't seem to be a lot of layer types per say, but there are a crap ton of activation functions, and should I just be using these at the tail end or should they actually be inserted between layers so the input of the next layer passes through another series of actiavtion functions ? what does this do to the range of output ?
do I need to be a mathematician to do this ?
remembered successes removed quantifiable scalars entirely from output, meaning that I could interpret successful results from ranges of decimal points.
but i've had no success with actual multi variable regression as of yet, even when those input variables are only 2 and on limited value ranges eg [0,100] and [0, 2pi]
and then there are training epochs to avoid overfitting, and reasonable expectation of batches till quality results will start to form.3 -
The Turing Test, a concept introduced by Alan Turing in 1950, has been a foundation concept for evaluating a machine's ability to exhibit human-like intelligence. But as we edge closer to the singularity—the point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence—a new, perhaps unsettling question comes to the fore: Are we humans ready for the Turing Test's inverse? Unlike Turing's original proposition where machines strive to become indistinguishable from humans, the Inverse Turing Test ponders whether the complex, multi-dimensional realities generated by AI can be rendered palatable or even comprehensible to human cognition. This discourse goes beyond mere philosophical debate; it directly impacts the future trajectory of human-machine symbiosis.
Artificial intelligence has been advancing at an exponential pace, far outstripping Moore's Law. From Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that create life-like images to quantum computing that solve problems unfathomable to classical computers, the AI universe is a sprawling expanse of complexity. What's more compelling is that these machine-constructed worlds aren't confined to academic circles. They permeate every facet of our lives—be it medicine, finance, or even social dynamics. And so, an existential conundrum arises: Will there come a point where these AI-created outputs become so labyrinthine that they are beyond the cognitive reach of the average human?
The Human-AI Cognitive Disconnection
As we look closer into the interplay between humans and AI-created realities, the phenomenon of cognitive disconnection becomes increasingly salient, perhaps even a bit uncomfortable. This disconnection is not confined to esoteric, high-level computational processes; it's pervasive in our everyday life. Take, for instance, the experience of driving a car. Most people can operate a vehicle without understanding the intricacies of its internal combustion engine, transmission mechanics, or even its embedded software. Similarly, when boarding an airplane, passengers trust that they'll arrive at their destination safely, yet most have little to no understanding of aerodynamics, jet propulsion, or air traffic control systems. In both scenarios, individuals navigate a reality facilitated by complex systems they don't fully understand. Simply put, we just enjoy the ride.
However, this is emblematic of a larger issue—the uncritical trust we place in machines and algorithms, often without understanding the implications or mechanics. Imagine if, in the future, these systems become exponentially more complex, driven by AI algorithms that even experts struggle to comprehend. Where does that leave the average individual? In such a future, not only are we passengers in cars or planes, but we also become passengers in a reality steered by artificial intelligence—a reality we may neither fully grasp nor control. This raises serious questions about agency, autonomy, and oversight, especially as AI technologies continue to weave themselves into the fabric of our existence.
The Illusion of Reality
To adequately explore the intricate issue of human-AI cognitive disconnection, let's journey through the corridors of metaphysics and epistemology, where the concept of reality itself is under scrutiny. Humans have always been limited by their biological faculties—our senses can only perceive a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears can hear only a fraction of the vibrations in the air, and our cognitive powers are constrained by the limitations of our neural architecture. In this context, what we term "reality" is in essence a constructed narrative, meticulously assembled by our senses and brain as a way to make sense of the world around us. Philosophers have argued that our perception of reality is akin to a "user interface," evolved to guide us through the complexities of the world, rather than to reveal its ultimate nature. But now, we find ourselves in a new (contrived) techno-reality.
Artificial intelligence brings forth the potential for a new layer of reality, one that is stitched together not by biological neurons but by algorithms and silicon chips. As AI starts to create complex simulations, predictive models, or even whole virtual worlds, one has to ask: Are these AI-constructed realities an extension of the "grand illusion" that we're already living in? Or do they represent a departure, an entirely new plane of existence that demands its own set of sensory and cognitive tools for comprehension? The metaphorical veil between humans and the universe has historically been made of biological fabric, so to speak.7