Mistakes were Made

Today's riddle

What is the one recurring thing in our lives that we do that we never intend to do?

Give up

Make mistakes.

No matter how hard we try, no matter how tedious we follow through with our plans, or how talented we are at manifesting realities we can never consciously make a mistake on purpose. If we do it's not a mistake. By definition, a mistake is something that we did not intend to do. Nobody has "make a mistake" Sharpied on their to-do list.

Now most good people who busy their day with coffee and routine tasks don't give their mistakes proper acolytes. To the muggle-minded mistakes are to be minimized as much as possible if not eliminated. And there is a logic to this. Mistakes take us out of our convenience. They even can be fatal. People sometimes die because they made the mistake to pet a wild bear they think is cute, or they started a fight with someone just out of prison. Sometimes they meet their ends while doing more boring tasks like changing lanes without looking. All of which are avoidable mistakes.

So it does make sense to build up a certain defense against the idea of mistakes. But not all mistakes aren't fatal. Many are like when a weed burrows through a concrete sidewalk beautiful in its own way. We should take a moment to appreciate that beauty even if in the next moment we pluck it out by the roots.

This all leads me To artificial intelligence. It seems like all the various echo chambers I cycle through are selling doom about the A(I)pocopyse. Fears begin at, they will take over all our jobs. Of course, that is what all technology does. At the other end of the fear spectrum people are claiming that AI is going to colonize our minds leaving people unable to understand what is real or not. As if there had been a clear understanding of this throughout history. There are even fears about AI gaining sentience, which I think is a psyop, but one that many people will believe.

No matter how true any of this is the idea that these are common points of conversation indicates we are about to enter interesting times. Many people are going to be manipulated by AI to the point that they will become just as programmable as any other software. Even though I don’t believe AI will ever have true autonomy, I have no doubt some humans will be turned into robots.

Of course, this is nothing new. Technology has always been the capable servant of propaganda. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan understood that the reason WW2 had vastly more popular support than the Vietnam War was because WW2 was perceived through radio and film while we watched the Vietnam War on our televisions. Radio is auditory. We didn't have to see the brutality of war. When we did see it, it was on film in the safety of the theater. A generation later people were watching a war on a color television in the sanctity of their living rooms. It is one thing not to feel safe in the world. It's another to not feel safe in our homes. You can decide for yourself whether the mistake was to put the war on television or to put it on the radio.

So yes people are likely going to be if they are not already propagandizing past the point of recovery. This is not a new process but it will likely be worse at least in the immediate time. But not everyone is going to fall under the sway. Despite the shiny new technology propaganda will be wrapped in, the way to resist it remains unchanged since the days of telling stories around a fire.

To not succumb to the latest iteration of propaganda all we have to do is be able to separate what we know from what we believe. Many people get this confused. They believe they know something because other people know that something. Just because someone else knows something does not mean you know it. For instance, I believe the earth is round. I don’t see a persuasive case to the contrary. But I haven’t tested this belief, because the shape of the earth doesn't affect me. That does not mean no one knows whether the earth is round or not. There are likely plenty of people who do know the shape of the earth and are perplexed as to why people are so dumb. But most people who know the earth is round ( or flat ) don't actually know the shape of the earth. They haven't done the work to know it and therefore only have a belief.

This may seem like a pedantic example but it's the formula for not being swayed by propaganda no matter the technology behind it. Ignore this formula and over time you will eventually be mistaken into believing things that are not true. The only downside of this formula is that we have to admit to not knowing much.

But there is a deeper reason why the A(I)apocalypse is overhyped. AI can’t make mistakes. Everything it does is a cause and effect dictated by an inflexible code. Even so-called hallucinations are not mistakes. It's just generating information that is not correct. But it is not making a mistake. AI doesn't live in the physical world. When it generates information that is at odds with meatspace reality it's not in any violation of its intrinsic realities. We might as well argue about the temperature of Valhalla. From our vantage point, Vahalla exists in some other realm neither of us can access. There is no way to be right or wrong in such an argument.

So AI can't make mistakes. On the surface, this sounds like a selling point. And it is in the short term. But in the long term, it's disastrous. Imagine living a life deficient in mistakes. How would we learn anything?

Let's examine the anatomy of a mistake. A mistake happens when we are planning something and through some misinterpretation of reality, our actions become misaligned with our intention. While in the moment this is often unpleasant it does allow us the chance to bounce out of the cause-and-effect reality for the briefest of moments. When this happens we then get to bring our consciousness to this ever-so-slightly expanded reality. We can consider if there is anything about what we unintentionally did that has merit. Should we include it in our future behaviors? Or should we be more mindful of what led up to doing whatever our mistake was to avoid making it in the future?

It is by this process that intelligence both collective and individualistic grows. Those of us that survive this current wave of propaganda will expand our consciousness in a way AI never will. It will always remain a baby savant.

In some ways, I am reminded of an off-the-cuff comment made by Ram Dass concerning taking advice from spiritual beings. He said in his experience entities without bodies are not that smart. This makes sense as so much of what we learn at least about the physical world is predicated on having a body with a slim Goldilocks zone of not experiencing pain. Despite so many things that can cause us severe pain we for the most part live lives of relative ease. And maybe that's why we incarnate in bodies, to begin with. We want to understand the physical realm and there is no way of doing that without a body. Maybe that is a mistake our spirit will see itself as having made. at some point Either way, we are going to learn something from it.