Deep Programming
My dog leading away from a leaf pile, for my safety, and to play tug-o-war.
My dog and I were invited over to a friend's to give him a chance to play in a leaf pile, something he's never done before. He was not interested. It took us a long time just to get him in the pile, and he never wanted to stay there, all while his best dog friend was having fun playing in the same pile. He didn't want me in the pile either. In his world, it’s too risky.
My dog was bred and raised to be a service dog but washed out of basic training. He was just fourteen months when I adopted him. He's about to turn five. In some respects, he plays like any other yellow lab, but to a limit. He has only a small handful of games he wants to play, and outside of that, he maintains a formality to just about everything except around Chelsea, my assistant, and her dog, but again, only within limits. If the play falls out of his predefined boundaries, he stops immediately.
It's surprising how so much of his character is otherwise set in stone. I can see his sense of formality when we go into a store or a hotel. There is no changing it either.
I'm on X several times a day. It's far better news than any of the networks, and you can get a real pulse on what matters to people. I also comment because I believe it's my civic duty to state my opinion. I think everyone should participate in the discussion. The debates sharpen us, and we can learn a lot in the process. If you’re not participating on X you don’t know what you’re missing.
Like my dog, everyone's opinion tends to be cemented and beyond the bounds of evolving with new ideas. What I read shapes my point of view, and I'll read articles I disagree with to see if I’m missing something. I just subscribed to a magazine where I don't think much of their political views, but I did it because I wanted to understand the argument, and as much as I disagree with liberalism, some ideas are good and credit is due. I'm not out to try to be more understanding of people who do bad things, but instead, I'm wondering how these views become so cemented in the first place, to the point where I know they are unchangeable. Even when they see the damage they are causing, they still stick with the destruction. Not one big city government is looking at their deterioration and saying, maybe we were wrong. Instead, they double down, and people defend it!
Portland? Seriously? What is it going to take for that city to wake up? At one point do people stop and say, well we may have screwed up our city and fix it? Nope, it’s like a virus in self destruct mode. It's deep programming, no different from my own dog, and there is no changing it. I know I have my cemented values too.
When I was a kid, people were like that about cars when most families owned just one. You were either a GM family, Ford, or American Motors, and MOPAR. Some people would even describe another family as Ford or GM people. They would argue about brands! They still do! Have you read my Quora? Most people never changed brands. I have a friend like that who's only owned BMWs his whole life and nothing else. He would never consider changing brands.
I live within a few miles of a very large Amish community of 1,500+. I pass them often on nearby country roads, and they always wave as they go by via horse and buggy. The Swiss Amish don't use covered carriages. They are all open, regardless of weather. The group doesn't ever seem to be impacted by the world around them. The farms look like something from two hundred years ago as I drive by. It's that same deep conditioning that keeps them within the same belief system, regardless of outside influences. They will pass on the same way of life from generation to generation. Other cultures in foreign lands are no different and they think the same about us.
Large language models and AI in general are evolving at an extraordinary rate while our deep conditioning remains the same. We’re not rising with what we learn. I’d almost argue that we’re getting dumber. In fact, it would be easy to argue that we're devolving when we look at declining birth rates, societal breakdown, and deep political unrest. Yet, AI is going in the opposite direction.
Many are worried that AI will just get rid of us entirely. I'm not so sure, but what I am concerned about is that we won't evolve to coexist in an AI world. We will be the problem. People are already afraid of the changes it will bring. AI is us humans evolving, even if we can't physically keep up.
I don't have an answer, but much of my time these days is thinking about our inability to keep evolving with technology. It's reaching a point where the two are moving further apart at an alarming rate. I'll write more on this topic after CES. What will happen when we can’t evolve while AGI does?