Today, Elon Musk formally kicked off his xAI initiative to compensate for the failed trajectory of truth by ChatGPT he also cofounded and funded. I have previously expressed the problems of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and summarized them here again for the uninitiated.
Artificial Intelligence relies on data derived from events that have already occurred. Yet, to better “understand the universe,” as x.ai states its goal to be, we must expand the fractal of knowing to the as-of-yet unknown. Here in lies the integral conflict of xAI.
I sincerely question A.I.’s theory of proximal development based on the discoveries from the greatest explorers of nature’s truth. From them, we learn the discovery of the unknown cannot be derived from the regurgitation of the known. The discovery of the unknown comes from questioning and rejecting the known, not from adherence to the known.
For example, during an observation of nature, incongruent with prior normalizations of truth, Einstein discovered a new, proven universal dimension from which he subsequently derived the theory of general relativity one hundred years ago. Nothing confirming existing truths led Einstein to discover another dimension of nature’s reality.
As I wrote, relying on past events to predict future events breaking the norm is a false supposition. That is like insinuating the type of gameplay in soccer from the number of goals scored. Worse, the fanfare of such make-believe would even suggest two games of soccer ending in the same score denotes identical gameplay. The consequence of gameplay says nothing about gameplay.
Entropy, defined by Feynman as the conversion from an organized state to an unorganized state (inducing the reduction of available energy), dictates cause leads to consequence and not vice versa. The asymmetry of cause and consequence makes it impossible to predict cause from consequence with certainty, even if the cause lies in the realm of the known.
Imagination breeds knowledge. Knowledge recursively balloons the imperfection of expiring knowledge. Until it pops. I discuss the relationship between cause and consequence in depth in The Evolution of Evolution.
The quest for reality that expands human adaptability to nature’s entropy comes from the curiosity of outliers unwilling to submit to the current normalizations of manmade truth. Not from the regurgitation of, by definition, imperfect proxies of manmade truth turned into an ever-subpriming fantasy world that appeases the escapism of reality’s greater-fools.
Nature’s reality is thankfully uncorrelated to our current perception, allowing us to discover how to strengthen human renewal to combat nature’s entropy. That is if we are smart enough to know how little we know.
We, not machines, must learn to think.
