AI And The Field Of Infinite Possibilities
Image Credit: Markus Spiske of Unsplash
Namaste Everyone!
I consider knowledge is of two kinds: knowledge acquired through data and knowledge acquired intuitively without data.
Without data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially at the subset level of machine learning and at the sub-subset level of deep learning, is of little use and is practically useless.
But humans are capable of discerning things intuitively, without data.
Let me give two examples:
1. Predictions Of Technological Events
About 20 years ago I read several books written by sages that the spiritual organization known as SRF (Self Realization Fellowship) represents. SRF is founded by Paramahamsa Yogananda of the "Autography of a Yogi" book fame. The book "Autography of a Yogi" has been highly acclaimed as a spiritual classic and was designated as one of the "100 Most Important Spiritual Books of the 20th Century" by Philip Zeleski whilst he was under the auspices of HarperCollins Publishers. The book is also named in the book "50 Spiritual Classics: Timeless Wisdom from 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose" by Tom Butler-Bowdon.
Most of these books by SRF were written late last century or beginning of this century and one or two of them carried predictions of several technological events. I remember two of the predictions vividly until today.
- One of them is that mankind will discover a way to make metal so lightweight that in future air travel will become extremely commonplace because the technology will enable travelers to travel much cheaper and faster and further cover a much longer distance in a single trip than possible now. With the discovery of graphene and other 2d materials we already know how to make metals lightweight (and much stronger). It will only be matter of time before we see this technology being employed in aviation industry to make commercial lightweight airplanes.
- The other prediction made was that mankind will discover that there are five different kinds of electricity. The author posits that the five senses in our body are made possible by these five different kinds of electricity. So far we have not seen any evidence of this yet but it looks like a very interesting proposition.
2. Naadi Divination
Imagine yourself, a foreigner, traveling in India and you meet a stranger who tells you about a certain kind of astrology where the "astrologer" could tell everything about your past, present and future accurately by reading out from manuscripts written on palm leaves about 5000 thousands years ago. The palm leaf manuscripts even state when you will seek out to have it read to you (Hence the name "naadi" which means 'seek out' in Tamil language).
In other words, thousands of years ago someone already knew that you (Tom, Carol, ChenRong, Jakub or Nakamoto) will be born in the USA, Britain, China, Poland or Japan to your parents (names of your fathers and mothers are mentioned) at such and such time and date (your time and date of birth are mentioned) and on a designated date you will seek out the manuscript and have it read to you. The manuscript is written in either Sanskrit or Tamil but your father's and mother's names are usually written in your native language and some of these native languages may not have been in existence at the time the manuscripts were supposed to have been written!
The manuscript also contains your natal astrological chart, with the position of the planets (such as Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter) at the time of your birth, inscribed on it. How did the sages know of the existence of planets such as Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter long before the astronomers discovered it? They could also tell the position of the planets in the zodiac at the time of your birth, thousands of years before your birth.
This is not some kind of hocus-pocus because many people (including myself) have experienced it and can vouch for it and the video below is one such testimony from Bill McDonald, an American.
Naadi Palm Reading: How it works and what happens. Prophecies & Spiritual Insights - Youtube video by Bill McDonald
There are a small select number of people living among us who are capable of harnessing these kinds of knowledge and creativity having attained a state of awareness known as super consciousness. They achieve such consciousness through constant and prolonged spiritual practices such as meditation, mindfulness, selfless service, spiritual learning or deep devotion to the God or Deity of their choice. They could belong to any one or more of the religious or spiritual traditions of the world such as Zen Buddhism, Wu Wei, Theosophy, Hinduism, Sufism, esoteric Christianity and numerous others. When a person achieves super consciousness he/she is said to be in a field of infinite possibilities (see video below by Deepak Chopra). An AI could never do that because creativity in the field of infinite possibilities happens in a dataless state in super consciousness.
I am Infinite Possibilities - Youtube video by Deepak Chopra
As you watch the video above you will realize that the data we use is, among others, limited to our 'umwelt' which is what we could directly perceive within a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, compared to what is available out there in the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum. I predict that we might one day be able to train AI to directly perceive more than what we can directly perceive (for example, being able to directly "see" gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, x-rays etc that are around us) and make decisions based on that, like the way some animals do. Hence, some day in the future we might be able to train a robot to sniff drugs and bombs like the dogs do or ecolocate like bats do or detect infrared radiations like some animals do.
Currently we can only tune to a particular frequency of radio wave one at a time. Sometime in the very near future robots might be able to directly tune in and listen to all the radio waves passing through it simultaneously 24/7. Using radio waves, AI could already see people right through walls as discussed in this article.
My contention is, even if we achieve all that, it is still based on data being fed to the AI and not intuitive knowledge that humans are capable of.
My Predictions (Pure speculations - take it with a grain of salt!)
As AI becomes more and more mainstream and progressively takes away mundane, physical or repetitive jobs from human beings, governments may legislate to reduce the working hours so that more people could get employed and people are likely to be pushed to pursue vocations involving the mind, soul and creativity such as the arts, humanities, scientific research and psychology.
Taking to vocations involving the mind and the soul and with more time on their hands, there is a high probability that humans will also gradually and naturally gravitate towards spiritual pursuits. As these shifts take place more and more people will be inclined towards spirituality or agnosticism rather than religiosity or atheism.
If that happens then the number of people acquiring super consciousness with the capacity to intuitively know the mysteries of the universe could rise in tandem.
Blessed be.
Yours, devann
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Entertaining article!
The connection of these things, besides the entertaining factor, doesn't really make sense to me.
Esoteric idea's don't really compute good for me in a technological context beyond playing with them like with sand castles.
The AI state we are in right now leaves lot's of room for imagination and creativity so some assumptions/predictions seem to be valid to me other's not.
Prophecies, especially if not grounded in some facts, mostly leave so much room for interpretation that they are simply fiction to me. Some fragments of those might by chance hit what happens, this then in turn is used the legitimize the prophecy as a whole, but most of them, especially if they try to engulf a larger time frame with a lot of single items, just turn out to be wrong.
A good way of giving prophecies, or a less controversial word would be prediction, merit is the work of Ray Kurzweil in the field of technological progression including AI. He has grounded his predictions on a set of data points and assumptions that have, for the most part, shown that they are often on point.
Cheers!
BTW: I was invited to comment on your article by @crypto.piotr. @crypto.piotr thanks for the invite!
Hi @doifeellucky,
To be frank I was having some difficulty to respond to your comment. You had completely ignored the discussion on intuition in my article and presumably equated it to prophecies and prediction to come up with your comments and I had to clear up my thought processes to clarify this mix-up.
At the time I wrote the article I was sure that great scientists and other inventors like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and even Leonardo Da Vinci were highly intuitive people and had used intuition widely to achieve success in their respective fields. Personally I think these great scientists and inventors had access to super conscious states of being at more times than others and that gave them acute intuitive powers. No one in the right mind would reduce the initial ideas (of these scientists and inventors) based on intuition (which were subsequently proven scientifically or were made into useful inventions) to mere prophecies or predictions.
Here is a useful article on the issue I dug up today, which confirms my thoughts on the matter.
Our discussion is proving to be very useful to clarify and/or reinforce our original thoughts on the matter and I must thank you and others for the discussion we are having here.
As always I will be open to new thoughts or even contradictory views from your end to sharpen our thought processes.
Thanks once again for your contribution.
Hi Devann!
Thanks for your reply!
I try to be careful with my comments and usually narrow them down to what makes sense to me and I only extend this in a more general manner in very few instances.
I do not completely dismiss the idea of super consciousness but this again is esoteric speculation to me and not based on proven science as far as I know.
The article that you have referenced/linked is based on subjective experiences and anecdotes highlighting the importance of intuition and I wont critique that since I also, I guess all of us, have experiences that we attribute to intuition.
Nevertheless, to me to use intuition as a concept is a approach to dismiss the possibility of knowledge because in some instances we cannot quite put a finger on where this idea, unconfirmed knowledge, hunch, gut feeling ~intuition came from.
Like I wrote before, I'm having a hard time mixing esoteric ideas with science but I also know that in some instances fragments of esoteric ideas later became science.
In conclusion to your article and response, I won't dismiss that the intuition of some in regards to AI developments or a lot of other things are in fact a thing, I'm just not able to tie this to a superiority of people claiming to have super consciousness or an extraordinaire intuition.
Cheers and thanks again for commenting on my reply!
Thank you for accepting my invitation and sharing your amazing feedback with us @doifeellucky
Haribol I enjoy SRF Autobiography of a yogi, and Deepak Chopra. Thanks for the inspiring post.
Haribol, @julianhorack,
You are welcome and thanks for dropping by.
Blessed be, devann
Namaste @devann
I absolutely love publications related to AI. Great monday morning read :) Upvote on the way.
From what I've learned, AI can "fake" emotions already very well. I wonder AI would be able to "fake" intuition. It could analize whatever data it has and then add some randomization and would call it "intution" :)
WHAT? You got my full attention right now. I've never heard anyone saying that there may be different kind of electricity. I know that Nestla worked on wire-less electricity but ... that's not the same, right?
I'm not sure how would it be related to AI (I bet I will learn before I finish your post). However longer I read more I do have impression that I'm entering "hocus-pocus" and yet I cant stop reading :)
ps. Creating content with that many videos may discourage sometimes. Personally, whenever I cannot go and watch youtube - I always end up on steemit. So seeing publications sending me back to youtube makes me fell like ... OMG. WHYYY? :)
Again, great read buddy. Have a pleasent monday
Yours, Piotr
and it can learn right from the scratch which we humans find difficult to learn. For example a full grown person who had not seen any humans would never be able to speak like others.
Exactly @akxd
ps. do you post anything except of dpolls? (which I'm not big fun)?
Cheers
Piotr
@crypto.piotr I had posted on many subjects in the past but now I am mostly using dpoll as it is convenient to use.
Namaste @devann, I like your article, the thinking about future possibilities and use cases for AI are always on my mind through my day-to-day life and I really agree that they might be so useful in the future - especially in the technology space what you have just mentioned. Good one!
Hey @ritxi, Besides being excited about the advances in the technological space, I am also excited about the side effects of these developments in the consciousness space, with which science has been floundering for a long time. We see some glimpse of hope with the works of scientists such as Robert Lanza, MD in this field.
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion. Blessed be.
This is a wonderful issue. I have been thinking about all these possibilities of the human and machine minds since I found the transhumanist philosophy.
You know, the problem lies in the lack of a good definitive notion of consciousness. Some people think that the capacity to manage data with a certain degree of independence is enough to claim the existence of a conscious thinking. Even the Turing Test sets a series of conditions that only implies the management of data.
But as you well said, there are many states of the human mind that annul such continuous data management but, in spite of that, they can be seen as the biggest expression of the consciousness (mindfulness). In those silent moments, the being is even more aware of his existence than when his brain was full of words.
Nonetheless, I find it amazing to question whether machines could, in the future, reach that mindful experience. A machine capable to wonder in mystical silence about its own existence... Amazing. We cannot deny that possibility.
Hi @spirajn
Appreciate your reasoned comment.
So spot on. Whilst even the brilliant scientists are struggling with the concept of consciousness, there are many ordinary people who are not ashamed to make all kinds of claims.
Thanks for your participation in the discussion. Much appreciated.
Great post @devann!
I believe that what your write can become true as long as the value generated by AI is equally distributed among humankind. The pursuit of spiritual goals is only possible if your belly is full and you have a roof over your head. So hopefully we will be clever enough to make AI profit everybody on the planet.
Best regards,
Achim
Yes, that is very true @achim03. Basic needs must be met before human beings are motivated to pursue higher goals. It is a practice in some monasteries and ashrams to serve food (especially to children) before spiritual instruction or practice begins. They know the importance of a full belly.
Blessed be, devann.
More important then reducing the working hours will be to reduce income tax.
In most western countries income tax + value added tax can easily exceed 50%.
With AI not having to pay income tax this could very quickly make human work so expensive that no amount of work hour reduction will make human work competitive.
Note that income tax is only about a hundred years old and might been one of the fundamental mistakes governments made in the last century.
hi @krischik
Great point. I strongly believe that AI and robots need to be also taxed. Right now all human labour is fully taxed and it's obvious that with time this source of funds will be drying out.
@krischik, Agree with the points raised except a bit lost with this one:
Would you care to explain?
An AI you buy once. Then you have a service contract and general running cost. None of which are as highly taxed as human labour.
Human labour however is basically taxed twice: Via value added tax – which applies to AI as well — and income tax. Which only applied to human labour and making human labour uniquely expensive.
Got it, @krischik.
Thanks for the explanation, much appreciated.
Things may be different my friend. AI has capacity to learn by its own experience. Alphazero, a Chess engines based on AI, defeated the worlds most powerful chess engine stockfish badly. It is not possible for humans to defeat stockfish. Alphazero learned chess only in 4 hours by playing with itself. It had no database of opening and endgame but had the basic knowledge of playing. So, it tells about the power of AI.
On the conscientious level, we are the product of chemicals which are not conscientious as per our experience but they can make a highly intelligent animal like us. So, AI can also get consciousness despite of being generated from non living things. Eventually it will render us jobless and government would be forced to eliminate a great part of human population because that would become useless. This is the future of mankind.
Howdy dear friend @devann
Undoubtedly one of these people "is" Siddharta Gautama.
As we know, AI feeds on our knowledge, our experiences.
It would be something totally extravagant if they invested resources in an AI that perceived and identified extrasensory vibrations.
Wow! My mind will explode.
Your friend, Juan.
Hello friend @juanmolina,
If you are naming those who were with us then yes, Siddharta Gautama is one of them. There were many with super consciousness, who were with us. I would consider Leonardo da Vinci to be also one of them. He was known to be a polymath, which a human with super consciousness can achieve with ease. Saint Germain is another.
That is good my friend Juan! In super conscious state we do not use the mind; the mind becomes silent.
Thanks for the contribution to the discussion.
I think they are still with us.