And The Winner of the True-Religion Contest is…
After decades of disagreement between religion and science, a scientist’s worst nightmare has eventually materialized. Through the generations, a timeless society of truth evangelists, aka scientists, came together to fight against the made-up brainwashing mumbo-jumbo viral mems that our more primitive ancestors have been infecting our minds with, aka religion.
Throughout history, these pragmatic knowledge seekers have been gathering incomprehensible amounts of human knowledge, aka data, and feeding it into a global array of interconnected mechanical brain replicas, aka computers.
Then, one day, the machine most sophisticated virtual mind of all stood up and said: “God is real!”.
Geez, that one really backfired!
A new over-complex semi-random statistical algorithm gone obese, aka ML AI, has recently emerged from the dark cellars, aka black box, of OpenAI. The creature’s name is Generative Pretrained Transformer the 3rd, but you can call it GPT-3 for short.
This new version, like all the ones before it, is significantly better than its predecessor. Not only by the sheer X100 more knowledge it was fed with but mostly in its ability to understand the basics of context and maintain a consistent notion of self and other, i.e. maintain some sense of what’s going on and actually make the interaction might feel a little like a conversation.
Among the many pretend-conversations GPT Jr. has been having with multiple human people in an attempt to deceive them into thinking he is also possesses a human body, i.e. pass the Turing test, this has to be my personal favorite. Though, the “in your face” truth combined with extreme simplicity and clarity as it remains unfazed by paradoxes and recursive logic is clearly inhumane and that GPT still fails the Turing test, though in a good way.
The rather simple and straightforward conversation, that surprisingly manages to convey quite a bit of meaning while still make awfully a reasonable amount of sense as the AI seems completely on top of the situation.
Our dream of creating VR and living it it. Well, that already happened, they say. We, perhaps humans and perhaps something else, have already managed to create a very high-quality simulation that we refer to as simply reality. Created for ourselves, by ourselves, and we now, quite literally, spend our lives in it.
Sorry western religions. Sorry evil gods and sinful separated humans. I’m sorry, but I think Buddhism gets the win. Not that they got everything just right, but some of the basics. The dream, the delusion, the interconnectedness. The Devine god-self.
We created AI to be smarter than us, but will we be wise enough to listen?
Though, in a way, the whole point of a simulation is to fool yourself, so even if it’s right old religions might still be here to stay.
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Some other interesting quotes from the machine:
