A friend with whom I've discussed AI several times---among other topics---recommended the podcast <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/so-you-want-to-be-a-sorcerer-in-the-age-of/id1465445746?i=1000620936715" author="Joshua Michael Schrei" source="The Emerald">So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode)</a>. I liked it very much. The entire episode is good; my notes and transcript start at just over an hour in. The presenter's voice is soothing, even if his cadence seems, at times, a bit forced. Overall, the effect is good. It was kind of ironic when he said that perhaps, in the future, people wouldn't be able to tell whether a podcast was being read by an AI. He didn't notice the irony, but I did. At about <b>1:05:00</b>, he sums up a longer section on the damages caused by modern humanity, failed experiments in social engineering that always seem to miss their espoused goals, while enriching an elite, <bq>Modernity is humanity seeing what it can get away with.</bq> Humanity is capable of much but, of late, it seems mostly interested in get-rich-quick, effortless scams. At about <b>1:10:00</b>, he expands on the topic of patience, on how it's not a coincidence that the most revered figures in our most enduring stories and myths exhibit patience, are made to exhibit patience as part of their initiation to wisdom. <bq>In the stories, the young initiate who wants to access formidable powers, has to do what? Wait. You've seen the movies, you heard the stories, right? Of the master making the potential disciple wait outside the temple gate? You want access to the great powers? You've got to earn it. And the first way to earn it, before any physical trials, before any tests that take the would-be apprentice to the brink, the first way to earn it is---to wait. You've got to know how to wait. You know what the very first step of mystery-school initiation often is? Silence. The ability to sit with what <i>is</i>, without <i>altering it</i>, for a long period of time.</bq> This concept of patience---of <i>earning</i>---is, of course, wholly incompatible with our society, especially with the self-proclaimed elites who want to lead us off the precipice in their fervent hope that they will benefit in some short-term and frivolous way that is considered valuable by the short-term and frivolous society that somehow manages to buoy these selfsame elites on the backs of people so much more useful than they. Patience is a virtue. There's a whole, incredibly soothing section where he convinces me that I'm a duck. Immagonna just leave it at that. I didn't hate it. At <b>01:32:00</b>, he talks about the scene in the <i>Matrix</i> where Neo "learns" Kung Fu. <bq>It's an awesome scene, right? And, of course, anyone who's studied Kung-Fu---or any other somatic art---also knows that it's a laughable scene because, simply, that's not how bodies learn. Bodies learn through the time it takes to weave things into tissues. Bodies learn as patterns seep into the seven datus, the seven layers. Learning, knowledge, is an endeavor of bone marrow, and blood, and sweat, and breath, and proprioceptive weaving, over time.</bq> After doing some "like causes like" examples (e.g., if you want it to rain, than you ritually pour water, ... um, ... OK), at <b>01:39:00</b>, he says, <bq>This daemonic power is not neutral. It is not a neutral intelligence that is being called up. By choosing which aspects of the living web of intelligence are the valuable intelligences and which are not, it is already value-laden. By centering rational empiricism, it is already value-laden. By removing intelligence from a body, it is already deeply value-laden. That is a value statement. By making it irreligious, aspiritual, it is already value-laden. AI is a biased God. Talking to ChatGPT, for example, is nothing like talking to an Aboriginal elder. It's more like talking to a Stanford computer-science grad with an incredible analytic capability and very few real-life social skills. We are taking the narrow, world-naive, uninitiated, unembodied intelligence of the eager, neoliberal, Stanford grad and magnifying it on a global scale. Just what the world needs, right? All the biases inherent in the Western, scientific, analytic view of creation that has already taken us to the brink of eco-collapse---magnified 10,000 times.</bq> Goddamn, we need more philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and linguists helping us run the world. At <b>1:43:00</b>, he wraps up with, <bq>[...] morality can't be programmed in. Ethics can't be programmed in. It can't be programmed into machines or into human beings.<fn> For all the current necessity that there is for ethical regulations, moratoriums, waiting periods, before the rush to market---these are still surface measures. When will we realize that trying to add ethics, [...] to a system that is by nature hubristic, that is by nature at odds with the Gods, isn't a viable long-term solution. Within the soulless fragmentation of late-stage capitalism, in which all things are pillaged and sold, and it's everyone for themselves, all of the time.</bq> <hr> <ft>It's not true that you can't program ethics into human beings. What else is teaching then? Saying that humans can't be programmed with ethics is akin to saying that they will never have any---unless he's suggesting that everyone is born with the ethics they have?Is this an argument against free will?</ft>