we are ai
january 16, 2024the machines are not becoming us, we are becoming machines. we are the ones whose intelligence is becoming artificial. we used to be one with the land, we used to be winter and spring, dirty knees and the sweat watering the ground. now we are one with the machine, we don’t know the seasons, we operate by the alarm clock and the timers, cold and stiff and pale in the office, in the cafe. dependent upon regular maintenance to keep our surfaces fresh and shiny, shots in the face to stay young forever, pills in the morning to sleep at night. to keep our systems automated and efficient and working routinely exactly as they’ve been programmed. cold and carbon, stiff and silicon. machines following time clocks. living forever in a diluted state. living like the empty soap bottle filled back up with water, life slipping through our fingers. life is long and ominous, long and routine and sterile. long and filled to the brim with activity, with high maintenance to sustain survival. organic matter becomes more nitrates, more mercury. supplements more nutritious than food. less bone, more metal. less teeth, more plastic. engines guzzling gasoline and canola oil. our money was gold, now our money is a math equation. more mind, less body. more ether, less earth. wear this ring so we can track the efficiency of your breathing. and this watch, it’ll make sure you stand up the required amount every day. oh no, your machine didn’t perform its full potential today? it didn’t take 10,000 steps? there might be something wrong with it! check the vitals, how’s the blood pressure and heart rate, did it get enough rest last night? you plugged it in didn’t you? you didn’t?! it wouldn’t charge?!! it’s going to break down! your machine isn’t machine enough, it’s going to lose value! you better fix it up real quick, before you get behind the other machines who are performing much better than yours. you don’t wanna be left behind do you? i know you don’t wanna support the big machine, you hate being just a gear in its cycles, i know you want to stop turning and crushing the others. but where will you go? you’d be left so far behind everyone, you’d become an ancient person who should’ve died out with the dinosaurs. you can’t survive in the new age with the new tech because you say you don’t wanna compete with it. your job, there it goes, with the monster technology that’s eating our food. but you don’t understand, you are the technology. it doesn’t function without you. you are the machine now, you’ve got extra limbs, with skins of screen and dead light for blood. they lay on your wrist, hold your hand, squeeze your finger. your brain holds artificial intelligence, your wet computer of a brain. everything you know, you know it because you read the books, listened to what people told you, and you put it all together in your brain to form your intelligence. you are the artificial intelligence you fear so much. your brain is a supercomputer, your brain does exactly what ai does. it takes all the information you give it and spits it back out into coherent thoughts. your vision is this way, your pupils leave two big black dots in your eye sight that your brain fills in with its content aware auto fill setting.
“In the back of everyone's eye is a small piece of neural tissue called the retina. The retina has photosensitive cells that respond to stimulation by light. The responses of these cells are sent into the brain through the optic nerve, a bundle of neural fibers. In each retina there is a place somewhere in the periphery where the outputs from retinal cells collect and the bundled optic nerve exits to the brain. At that location, there is no photosensitivity-whatever light reflects from the world and lands in that position does not produce a signal in the brain. As a result, humans have a blind spot, a place in the visual field for which they don't process incoming stimuli.
However, people are not aware that they have blind spots; there is not an empty hole in the visual images in front of the eyes. So what do people see in their blind spots? The brain actually fills-in missing input based on the surroundings.”
(JoVE Science Education Database. Sensation and Perception. Finding Your Blind Spot and Perceptual Filling-in. JoVE, Cambridge, MA, (2023).
the difference now, between ai in the computer and ai in your brain, is that your brain can’t digest all of the information it’s constantly being given, so it gets stuck and it stops and can no longer form coherent, deep thought. it is not your fault, you are not the one responsible for the avalanche of information always being shoved into your body. but you need to remember what it’s like to take in small bits of information and think about what they mean. ai gives us more trial, less error. you can create new ideas out of new ideas my friend. it feels like the end, i know. and it is, it’s the end of the ways we’ve known for our brief lives. it’s the end and it’s the beginning of something we don’t yet understand. it’s been like this always, this cycle of golden ages and recessions and scary new technologies. we’ve invented a new way of being human once again, and this time the fear is that what we’ve created will out-human us. how could that be? if ai can only see with our vision, does it have blind spots too? we are always trying to see beyond our sight, into the future and past, into distant galaxies and to the center of the earth, into the minds of others. will ai see what is hidden from my vision, will it fill in my blind spots? will it use it against me, mock me, confuse me, warp my perception of the reality i know? trick me into believing it is more human than my own human mind? will it explore the last of the unknown and leave us with nothing new to discover? or will it be a launching pad to reach the fruits of knowledge way up high in the branches we cannot even see, let alone reach with our own limbs of flesh? this i do not know, and cannot know. these are things outside of my sight, outside of my knowledge. when something the world has never before known comes along, there is no way we could have an accurate sense of intuition about it. our bodies have no knowledge of ai, they have never experienced it like this in the history of humanity, so they cannot tell us anything about it. we have no choice but to wait and to watch, aware that we do not see the whole picture, aware that we will always have blind spots hiding something from our eyes.