Artificial Intelligence and Your Future Mental Health ($)

Freedom in an AI world is staying in control of your life.

“Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.”
—Tom Chatfield, tech philosopher and digital pundit

My Experience

As a physicist, I developed computer programs to simulate the behavior of real-world quantum systems. These systems “evolved” structures of different sizes depending on the environment. In programming business management systems, I created user-centered software that applied high-level business rules.

In neuropsychology, I extracted information from the brains of live humans, and fed that information back into clients to create new kinds of awareness. My separate goal in computational neurology is to create computer algorithms that create ideas.

Finally, my work on board games is axiomatic but not computer based. I want to force players to realize algorithms appropriate to contrived, human-like situations. It’s important to process the data yourself, and not to rely on computers for thinking. Once you shift decision-making to computers, it’s hard to take it back. People who play computer-based games have little option but to play the game they’re given.

Defining Artificial Intelligence

The public’s sudden interest in Artificial Intelligence, combined with uninformed reporting, is spotlighting AI with as much clarity as a burst damn. A recent Wall Street Journal article (Rosenbush 2023) tried to clarify the term “neural networks” by saying they are a form of machine learning “that mimics the way neurons act in the human brain.”

This reflects a baseless prejudice. No one knows how neurons process information. We often make the mistake of comparing the brain to a computer. One of the greatest uses of AI will be to force people to examine human intelligence as something more than conversational chit-chat.

It’s always been clear that creating a humanoid machine with a memory would bring up the question of artificial humans. This is as much a question of how much a machine can do, as it is a question of how little we expect from a human.

In the last few years of her life, dwindling away with Alzheimer’s, my mother could easily have been simulated with 1970s-era Atari computer. What is being lost in the kerfuffle is what humans are capable of, and what limits us.

There are many subfields in computation, simulation, and modeling. What is now being called “artificial intelligence” are the subfields of Natural Language Models and Artificial General Intelligence.

I don’t work in these fields. I work in natural intelligence and computation. I work with humans as a psychotherapist and with computers to stimulate and to simulate awareness.

Progress in AI

Computers, easily built for special functions, were always better than people in certain areas. It’s their ability to simulate common human experience that now make computers appear “intelligent.” It may appear that computers have caught up with us, but they have only pulled alongside us in terms of social thought.

General human intelligence has been stagnant throughout history, exploiting the insights of a few creators. General Artificial Intelligence is not so much simulating an average human, as it’s simulating humans collectively.

We build our personalities on the data we collect, and most of us stop collecting data early in life. Data is part of us, but we accumulate multiple levels of data with different perspectives. Humans manage many weakly connected levels of reality. This allows us to change what we understand to suit the situations.

If General Artificial Intelligence can now equal the thinking of an average person with vast resource access, then average is what you should no longer be. Develop your individuality.

Most people work for short-term advantage and they fail to see, think, or act in the long term. Limited thinking defines most attitudes. Our institutions encourage short-term thinking as that allows them to impose their priorities on social trends. An AI system could see more consequences, and act with more insight.

Limited thinking benefits systems designed to stabilize profits. The fork in the path of AI development depends on whether it will innovate or optimize. Innovation implies disruption. Optimization implies exhaustion. Western culture, like Western economics, is based on exhaustion. We can expect AI will be applied to the same ends.

Hopeful Things About AI

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