The limits of Artificial Intelligence

The challenge: how to utilize AI's enormous power without losing our identity, to learn from it without being misled, and to harness its potential to create a better future for all mankind and the planet.

No one really knows where this is all heading, including me. Yet, despite not having definitive answers, I think I can be a useful guide. I have found myself to be an influential voice on the implications of AI, particularly through my newsletter, One Useful Thing, even though I am not a computer scientist myself. Indeed, I think that one of my advantages in understanding AI is that, as a professor at Wharton, I have long studied and written about how technologies are used. As a result, my coauthors and I have published some of the first research on AI in education and in business, and we have been experimenting with practical uses of AI in ways that major AI companies have cited as examples. I regularly speak with organizations, companies, and government agencies, as well as with many AI experts, to understand the world we are making. I also attempt to keep up with the flood of research in the field, much of it in the form of scientific working papers that have not yet gone through the long process of peer review but still offer valuable data about this new phenomenon (I will be citing a lot of this early work in the book to help fill in the picture of where we are headed, but it is important to realize that the field is evolving rapidly). Based on all these conversations and papers, I can assure you that there is nobody who has the complete picture of what AI means, and even the people making and using these systems do not understand their full implications.

Excerpt from: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, by Ethan Mollick associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Reason and sense don’t make people right. And why?

You can program a computer to make it think logically. You can provide it with vast amounts of data. The computer can even answer questions with right or wrong by the set of values you placed into it. Intelligence, data, and moral values are material things. Reasoning doesn’t give man spiritual value.

Again, the computer is capable of reasoning logically. Such a computer can even be developed that it becomes capable, to a degree, of material creativity. It can be programmed to construct thought patterns which can be used in technical and scientific development. But that’s it. This is the maximum ability that computers will ever reach because they are made of electronic or electro-chemical components, no matter how advanced their future development may get. The reason for this limitation is that material systems can only produce material patterns per definition. Intelligence is solely based on material creativity. They are digital constructs incapable of relationship with the spirit realm, and that leaves them without the spiritual creativity required to build eternal value.

So how is it possible that the mind of man is capable of spiritual creativity and building eternal value? In one word, unselfishness *. Unselfishness is a remarkable thing, because selfishness is an identity of the material world. Every material form of life fights for survival along the laws of evolution and so is selfish. So what special event happens in the mind of a man that thinks unselfishly? The minds of mortal man are so genius that they are capable of a third function (besides storing data (memories) and calculating reasons (thinking)): The mind of man also has the ability to function as a receiver of the divine nature of the cosmos, to establish a direct connection with the spiritual realm. The unselfish thinking of good will, the desire to do good, is purely from spiritual origin, the result of direct contact between pure spiritual-creativity and the material creative mind of man. The mind of man is an analog construct capable of this third function, a spiritual connection. The digital constructs of computers can never attain this.

* selflessness is another appropriate word. The Truth Beauty and Goodness Commission sometimes uses the phrase "the desire to do good".

TBG's trial with AI and wisdom for GLoW

I discussed the results of my AI tests with someone by email. Might be useful material in there.

From Anna

Many people are concerned about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in crafting everything from cars to legislation.

We wish to point out the most damning limitation of Artificial Intelligence: the men providing the information going into the AI's programming. When a robot or computer is programmed using flawed or prejudiced information, the output of the AI device is faulty, whether this is accidental or by design.

What we have observed to the world-at-large throughout our campaign to provide all nations with Due Process and Public Notice, is an almost universal pattern of prejudice, ignorance, and deceit being used to manipulate, defraud, and demean living people.

The mathematics we are taught is incorrect and not exact, with the result that all of our science is based on approximations. The physics we have been taught, until very recently, has been hopelessly archaic, with many topics receiving incomplete or deliberately misrepresented treatment, or being omitted altogether. Many basic science textbooks in this country haven't been updated in 40-50 years.

The teaching of world history, history in general, and even geography, is deliberately misrepresented with huge gaps and omissions that mislead people to form incorrect ideas about what has happened in the past. Religion
and law are glossed over and not even understood to have a "cause and effect" relationship by the professional promoters of both. Economics, finances, and money are all topics that are routinely bypassed entirely, and
forget the possibility of any competent courses about government or civics. We are, in short, so completely misguided and misinformed and left uninformed by the professional educators and the entire education system, that we cannot possibly develop anything amounting to "artificial intelligence", because our natural intelligence upon which artificial intelligence depends, is so grossly and determinedly crippled and therefore,
flawed.

The theory seems to be that if we just program in enough information, right, wrong, or partial, that eventually the superior Random Access Memory of computers will tend toward better analysis and problem solving, but such a conclusion has never been demonstrated overall. Instead, AI keeps falling on its nose because the information AI has received from us is contradictory, nonsensical, or imaginary.

We are, ourselves, the self-limiting factor in AI technology, and we can readily observe the Universal Law that the creation is never greater than its Creator.

So long as we lie, cheat, steal, prevaricate, and give in to prejudice, bias, payoffs, omissions, ignorance, and politics, there is no realistic possibility that AI can succeed where the creators of AI have failed.

Certain Generals have informed us that Artificial Intelligence and "forecasting technology" — think Robo-Fortune Teller — was used to plan and execute the phony pandemic as a means to depopulate the Earth. This atrocity is no different whether planned by AI or by its faulty creators. The result is still genocide and fraud on an unimaginable scale.

Not a single AI program yielded the simple objection that the developed world has been in population collapse since the mid-nineteenth century. Not a single AI program based on predictive analytics technology pointed out
that none of the predictions offered by "The Population Bomb" have proven to be true.

Thanks to the faulty operators of these systems, the correct questions were never even asked.

Similarly, none of the AI solutions to the question of how to attain world peace? — have been worth spitting on.

According to AI, we should resolve religious conflicts by staging a tech-driving "second coming of Christ" so that the Jews could have their Messiah and the Muslims could have their Mahdi, and the Christians could have their
Jesus.

All we need is a Muslim convert who is ethnically Jewish and a Big Story Production.

The so-called leaders among us have seized upon this "answer" from AI, as if it came from the hand of God, instead of a comparison of religious teachings that a second-grader could perform.

We can hear Mel Brooks saying, "They want a Messiah? So give them a Messiah!".

Here they are, busily engineering "signs and wonders" using computer generated graphics and projecting images on artificially ionized layers of the atmosphere, generating phony earthquakes and tsunamis, polluting the sea to kill a third of its biome, polluting the land so they can more readily set fire to it, breeding new kinds of locusts to create starvation, and ginning up their version of Armageddon — and all at a profit, mind you.

They not only want their narrative to pay off in total subjection of the world's deluded population (what's left of it), but they want to make money while doing it.

And then blame AI for the results.

We are not blaming AI for any of this. We are not deceived. AI is a tool like any other tool, no better than the man who uses it.

Unfortunately, the men who have been using AI for all this analysis and predictive programming haven't been worth vomiting on. The technology has simply inherited their errors and flaws.

We don't blame AI for this any more than we blame guns for violence. The violence, like the stupidity powering this entire situation, does not stem from pieces of metal and circuits and silicon chips, but issues instead from the crippled hearts and deluded minds of men who have allowed themselves to play God.

The results of this insanity are standing before us all, plain to see. We call on all officers and employees of our nations to respond and to put an end to this idiocy as quickly as possible.

Notice to Agents is Notice to Principals; Notice to Principals is Notice to Agents.

Issued by:
Anna Maria Riezinger, Fiduciary
The United States of America
In care of: Box 520994
Big Lake, Alaska 99652
December 22nd 2024

From Tom Atlee

Working with AI and all forms of co-intelligence

I suggest that if we’re going to be working well with AI, we’d better be working well with each other, with situations, with nature, and with the Spirit of Life… or we’ll be getting into big trouble, thanks to AI’s considerable powers and limitations.

I identify four enhanced forms of intelligence - multimodal intelligence, resonant intelligence, universal intelligence and wisdom. I believe we need to appreciate and use ALL these forms of intelligence. I believe they’re each precious in their own right AND that, using them together will enable us to make our growing power and intelligence - including AI - more benign.

Here are some initial thoughts about these additional four forms of co-intelligence.

* MULTIMODAL INTELLIGENCE is epitomized by the idea that Western society’s glorification of reason, fact, mathematical and verbal capacities and engineering skills are limited - even dangerous - to the extent they are exercised in the absence of “softer” intelligences like intuition, empathy, compassion, imagination, spiritual and moral intelligence and bodily/somatic intelligence.

Of course, the opposite is also true: All those soft forms of intelligence can prove problematic when we ignore facts and logic. We’ve seen plenty of that!

ALL our various modes of intelligence can add important value to each other. Not only can they synergize, but they can also help restrain any one-sided intelligence from going too far, colonizing our overall intelligence. We see the importance of this in various historic catastrophes generated by the destructive use of religion, on the one hand, and science on the other. The power of AI also needs internal checks and balances.

Closely related to these considerations we find the other three manifestations of co-intelligence - wisdom, resonant intelligence and universal intelligence. These, especially, have direct roots in wholeness and its corollaries like wholesomeness, health, holiness, holism and integrity.

* WISDOM involves seeking - and to some extent achieving - full and practical wellbeing for all involved, including all forms of life and living systems, now and especially long into the future. Wisdom seeks to take the whole into account in both the benefits and the beneficiaries of any action. In our particular challenge - the metacrisis - wisdom would constrain the use of AI wherever it would intensify the systemic drivers of collapse.

* RESONANT INTELLIGENCE involves the capacity to experience and generate energetic or empathic connection and shared experience between people or among living entities and collectives of all kinds. It dissolves seemingly solid boundaries between entities - from adversaries to species to living and non-living things - shifting them into deep interrelatedness and the wholeness of our communal being, doing and having, what I call our “core commons”. How can we help AI help us to ground ourselves in this deep common ground?

* UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE involves our capacity to tap into, align with and use the primordial greater-than-human intelligences at work in nature, evolution, psycho-spiritual realms, and complex reality in general. Universal intelligence invites our merger with the vast dynamics of evolving wholeness, of which our human intelligence is both a part and an expression. We need to help AI help us evolve into and operate out of that understanding of who we are, embedded in truly vast forms of more-than-human intelligence.

Our efforts to live and work well with AI can empower us and be empowered by our efforts to advance all forms of collaborative and collective intelligence. And those efforts can, in turn, be restrained and channeled into more sensibly secure pathways by weaving AI more fully into our multimodal intelligence and wisdom, and training it to prioritize resonance with and as the holistic creative responsiveness of the greater-than-human world.

We need that. And we need folks like Ethan Mollick to help us do it - with and beyond the growing capacities of generative AI.

Coheartedly,

Tom

PS: This integration of AI-based co-intelligence with wholeness-based co-intelligence naturally involves addressing the currently externalized harms of AI use, including not only its amplification of the systemic drivers of collapse noted above and obvious risks of dependence, but its extravagant impacts on energy, water and landscapes as well as on the livelihoods of millions of people. In virtually all these cases, radical transformation of the structures, assumptions and incentives of modern civilization are very likely called for, a process which could be greatly facilitated by the increasing integration of all forms of co-intelligence. So I see it as a virtuous spiral of evolution and learning, to be intentionally undertaken sooner rather than later.