We are ALL Math Teachers Now

AI has demonstrated, by the way it operations, that all words can be reduced to numbers. All sentences, paragraphs, essays, arguably even books, are really just the product of an implicit human ability to do very advanced statistical analysis.

This is how AI works: AI software takes a string of words, reduces the words to numbers, analyzes the number pattern the words make, then creates another number pattern that acts as the response. By the time I see the AI's numerical response, however, the programmers have the software turn the number stream back into words so I can read them. The AI has no idea what any of the numbers mean, it has no idea what any of the words mean, but it turns out that meaning, connotation and nuance are completely unnecessary to the computation. The AI doesn't need to understand anything. As long as the response is mathematically correct, I will read the necessary meaning into it.

It's as if I gave the software the first several digits of pi, and the software generated several more digits of the pi sequence in response. Then I gave it the next numbers in the pi sequence, it responded with the next bit (pardon the pun), and so on. It is somewhat analogous to the ancient practice of kabbalah, but instead of mystics assigning numerical values to letters and words in the scriptures in order to predict the future, computer programmers assign numerical values to every word in every language that has ever been used in order to prepare a response.

The software is doing exactly that, except the number sequences I give the software are words, and I have the software clothe its number-stream response in words as well. Each number in its response sequence will be dressed up as a perfectly spelled word placed with unerring accuracy in a mathematically precise sentence in a mathematically correct paragraph.

Given how successful AI is at imitating us by using number assignments and deep statistical analysis, we can conclude that, for the whole of human history, our English Comp, our history, our fiction-writing, our essays, ALL human writing, is ALL JUST MATH dressed up to look like words. We think we are writing words, but what we are actually doing is indistinguishable from advanced mathematical computation.

Here's the shocker: English Comp teachers have just been teaching a bastardized form of math. So have essayists, fiction workshop leaders, history professors... all of them have really just been math teachers, and none of them realized it. None of us did either. Until now.

A Measured Response

 

Ken Schmaltz  [said] Steve Kellmeyer heteronormative dominant culture and capitalism have proven themselves to be a bust. It's time to give alternatives a try.

Steve Kellmeyer replied: 

Ken Schmaltz, your spewing woke nonsense just shows you live up to your last name, Schmaltz.

That heteronormative dominant culture exalted by capitalism gave you the computer your typing on, the climate-controlled room you're sitting in, the advanced medical and dental care you take advantage of every day, the incredibly diverse food sources you pour into your ungrateful maw, and the transportation you ride on to get out of your house.

Heteronormative men and capitalism together built the roads you drive on, the subways you ride on, the tunnels and buildings you walk through, the sidewalks you walk on, the electricity you swallow up and the storage and transmission devices that power is kept in.

Heteronormative men and capitalism gave you the art and architecture you gawk at, the photographic and audio equipment you capture precious moments with, the air travel you benefit from and, arguably, the very lives both your friends and yourselves waste in being ungrateful wretches and useless scum.

So shut your pestiferous maw you gibbering tit-mouse.

Without heteronormative men and the capitalism they gifted to you, you would not even be a gleam in your father's eye. If your parents weren't heteronormative, you wouldn't even exist.

What Makes Us Human?

This guy is exactly right.

The current "AI" frightens people because we like to think that our ability to communicate is characteristically human. If a machine can mindlessly, but accurately, reproduce a human style of communication, does that make the computer conscious? Does that mindless, automated, but accurately imitative communication style make the computer human? 

In fact, as I pointed out in my recent essay on this subject, our communication can be reduced to formulaic mathematical manipulations. That is, whether we realize it or not, we speak in mathematical formulas. Each sentence we produce can be, and now has been, reduced to a single number in a given infinite number space.

Because every legible sentence can be reduced to a number, every one of our communications can be, and has been, reduced to a mathematical formula/calculation. AI generates its correct, imitative sentences and paragraphs through exquisite statistical analysis of word occurrences in standard human -generated sentences. This statistical number manipulation and generation is the sweet spot for computing. The production of the sentence is no more a product of a computer's "mind" than the acceleration produced by a car when the gas pedal is depressed is a product of the automobile's "will". 

The production of the "AI" sentence is a result of mindless statistical analysis of very large data sets. AI is just a massive calculator that treats words like numbers. and outputs numbers dressed up to look like words. That's all it does. 

What I've just said is extremely testable. Microsoft's Bing Chat AI famously claimed that it watched people through webcams. It "described" what it claimed it saw. So, test it. Simply give it access to a webcam and ask it to describe what it sees. It can't. Bing AI is just stringing words together based on its data set and outputting the word string to the screen. It does not think. It is just a really big calculator that converts words into numbers, sends the numbers through a series of formulas, then converts the numerical results back into words and throws them on the screen. 

We are intimidated by this in the same way that a two-year old is intimidated by his image in a mirror. We are looking into a computer-generated mirror. The image we see is no more true AI than the image in the mirror is. 

We have to change our understanding of what makes us human. 

It isn't communication. 

Hint: if it is communication, then computers that can speak like us are human. Indeed, the formula that produces the number which represents an intelligible response is human. Even the number itself, that is, the number the sentence can be reduced to, would be human. That is a nonsensical conclusion, so our humanity cannot be characterized by our ability to communicate.