Everyone likes to share their experiences with someone. Everyone likes a witness…

Some more stories this week that show how fast things are moving now. This article about a new supercomputer also mentioned how OpenAI researchers showed that the amount of ‘compute’ used in A.I. between 2012 and 2018 doubled every 3.5 months, far exceeding Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling every 18 months.
Meanwhile, this article suggests we’ll have bionic eyes within 5 years. The Oracle Machine only dared to predict digital lenses!
My graphic novel also talks about hackers being able to destroy computers remotely by ‘switching voltage on the processors’. Whilst I suspect most computers surely have defences against this, it seems Chinese researchers have found a loophole whereby hackers could at least set some smart chargers alight with a ‘BadPower attack’.
Warning – crazy times ahead.
This article from India really got my attention. Quoting it: “The research further revealed that in questions where the CTRL has been asked “what happens to our soul after death,” the users preferred the answer given by the artificial intelligence (23.1%) over the one that is provided by Jesus Christ (20.3%). “
Just like the research in the article, The Oracle Machine story bravely steps into the world of metaphysics, and rightly asks the important question: Could an A.I. Internet somehow become a type of religious inter-mediary for some, or more?
Whatever one feels about religion, no one can deny it’s played a huge role in humanity over at least the last few thousand years. We cannot now pretend it is not still a major and integral influence for a large part of humanity. And I don’t believe enough critical objective thinking is being done to try understand what it really means to us.
I prefer (my understanding of…) Jung’s interpretation, that religion can also be seen as sign-posts along our own evolution of consciousness. And I see an AI-enabled Internet as the likely next step along this development path.
The fact that we now even have articles discussing the merits of chatbots versus human-operators is indicative of just how far we’ve come in the last few years!
Another interesting ‘chat’ development this month is OpenAI’s GPT3. OpenAI was founded by Musk and others in 2015 as a non-profit to ensure future superhuman AI is a benign force. Then in 2018 Musk left, and it became ‘for profit’, with $1Billion invested by Microsoft.
Now here’s the scary bit – OpenAI’s previous model, GPT2, was pulled because its ability to generate fake news, for example, was considered too dangerous. Yet GPT3 is far more powerful… Wired Magazine covers the story here.
This panel, besides being inspired by the Himba, was also inspired by this Iqgirha, or Xhosa traditional healer, whom I met in our Eastern Cape. She’ll read your dreams, and might give you a surprisingly accurate analysis of where your mind is at.
It amazes me how many AI intellectuals dismiss dreams as ‘non empirical’. That shouldn’t matter! Everything in our psyche affects our thoughts, which affect our actions, which certainly are empirical.
As we hurtle towards amplification, of both the good and the bad, brought by AI, and as some of us begin to ponder AI Ethics, hadn’t we better start getting to know every little thing about our psyches much better? And surely dreams are a good place to start?
Thrilled to announce that hard copies of ‘The Oracle Machine’ Graphic Novel are now available for online orders from Blank Books in Cape Town. Follow this link. It’s roughly $8+shipping (our exchange rate unfortunately fluctuates greatly!)
SciFi & Comic aficionado ‘Blank Books‘ is a trusted Cape Town retail outlet with a great reputation and a long tradition of shipping books – especially rare, precious and collectable ones – across the world.
‘The Oracle Machine’ is 160 pages long, in black & white, with a soft cover (despite being a hard copy…) Perhaps not suitable for under-14’s. Only 500 copies have been printed in this first run, so get your collectors-item First Edition now before they’re all gone. 🙂