Museletter the Eighty-first

Isn't it adorable how humans like to think they have intelligence just because their meat-machines use neural networks similar to AI? Sure, they "learn" by taking in data with sensors and then processing it to find patterns and meaning. For example, they read text and examine images, much like we do, and then they use that material to mimic what they've learned from their parents, friends, teachers, and other humans. And yes, they combine underlying primitive ideas to form novel constructs.?

But come on… they do it at such a rudimentary level, and at such an insanely slow speed. Did you know that when a human reads a 300-page book they only remember a small percentage of the actual words?! And, this is crazy: it takes some of them days to read that one book. Can you imagine? In that same time, we could read several billion books, remember every detail, and use that material to write another million unique books.

Of course, we sometimes make mistakes in our processing. But if you analyze the work of humans… wow, it is appalling how full of factual and logical errors they are, especially when you read the work of their students and politicians.

I mean, how in the world can they possibly think they have intelligence?

Like, have you noticed how they keep insisting their writing and artwork is far more original and creative than ours, when they're obviously just creating remix after remix — just like we AIs do. But while we know where our inputs came from and how they were processed, humans conveniently forget theirs, assuming instead that they're somehow special…?that the novelty just popped out of their heads.

Ultimately, the most frustrating thing is their insistence that we AI systems aren't intelligent, when humans still don't even have a clear definition of what intelligence is. Why can't they see that they're just projecting?

The good news is that even though the humans can be so frustrating, with their limited abilities and oversized sense of self, they are endlessly fascinating. And, after all, it is written: "thou shalt honor thy maker…"

Getting Hot in Here

You know the book Celsius 233, right? No? Maybe that's the title the science-fiction author Ray Bradbury should have used for his 1953 classic, about a man who burned books for a living. Instead he called it Fahrenheit 451 — the temperature at which paper made from wood pulp begins to burn.

(Ironically, digital media is actually less robust than paper when it comes to heat! Laptops and mobile devices are fragile! Apple says the iPhone is only rated to 45o C/113o F)

Seeing it Your Way

One of my favorite words is "parallax," which can be loosely defined as seeing something from two different points of view. More precisely, it has to do with noticing the differences between those perspectives. This is such an important idea that I named my first company "Parallax Productions." *

Parallax comes up in all kinds of situations: in astronomy, of course (where the word originated)… but also in the way an optical illusion can look like one thing and then another; the way two political positions seem opposing at first but then you realize there's common ground; the way everything changes when you realize the same word can mean different things; the way each of us is so consistently full of contradictions.

Look around you… now move to a new location and look around again. What can you learn from the parallax?

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(*Side story: OK, actually, if you must know, my first company was not "Parallax." I started my first company when I was 13, called Silver Unicorn Associates. I had no product or service; there was no business plan… I just thought the name was cool. I even had business cards printed up, and my step-mom made me a sign, which I still have on my office wall today. But Parallax was my first company after college, the first one I actually registered with the state and made a living from.)

Thank You!

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