Why Artificial Intelligence Is a Joke

Why Artificial Intelligence Is a Joke

When I look up the definitions of intelligence, an interesting collection is brought before me. Here is one example: “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”. Many of the definitions involve the word utility or collection or “to deal with”, and such like utilitarian approaches. Meaning, of course, that it is the ability to use knowledge to succeed in the material world.

Webster’s 1828 edition preserved online has four definitions. The first is simply “understanding; skill” and is like the others except for its tone which denotes that this is not a very profound thing. The next two have to do with men working together. The final one is the outlier which you will probably not find elsewhere: “A spiritual being; as a created intelligence. It is believed that the universe is peopled with innumerable superior intelligences.”

The word is made up of the word “intellect” and the word “lego” which means to collect. The intellect is a spiritual word that refers in an exaggerated way to the word “interior”. I asked a philosopher about this word and here are his notes:

“The brain was identified with the internal senses since the days of Galen, and hence Aquinas located it in the anima, in the sensory soul, where it was the seat of cognition. Cognition being the sensory power that drives on conscious thought.

“I give thought for ratio, which Aquinas held as a joint power, with intellectus, or understanding, which also held the senses of intuition, grasping a thing’s essence, etcetera. Both were a joint power of the mens, or conscious mind, awareness. Following Aristotle, he held all human thought begins in the senses (the brain, in this case), arises to the awareness, where it begins with intellectus (intuition, insight, understanding), moves through a ratio (train of thought) which itself leads to a further intellectus.

“The awareness being immaterial relies on the brain in this sense but is the higher aspect of the man.

“Animus and mens seem to mean the same in Aquinas, though other authors might view the animus as the part of the soul that contains the mens. But I’d need to research more about that.”

“As to heart, that has had many senses.”

Philosophy

Philosophy is above material science. Everything that material science assumes in order to operate, philosophy has defined through careful argumentation: for instance, being. What does it mean to be? What is existence? Where does it come from? Why does it continue? Has it always continue in this same manner? These are philosophical questions, and without answering them, material science cannot be done, because material science is the measurement of things which exist.

For example, I am a bookkeeper. I cannot do books without mathematics. The fact that QuickBooks does most of the mathematics of my job does not mean that my job can be done without mathematics, but it means that some man has designed a machine to do the mathematics. He could not have done that without a philosopher having first argued about what exactly it means to have one single thing. And if you think that concept is simple and will not be argued, then you have never delved into philosophy. Look into the word unity, which means oneness, and see what you come up with. You will encounter the word Trinity, which is three-in-oneness, and you will find yourself uncomfortably positioned in the middle of the hottest theological debates which have ever occurred in the West. Have they been resolved? Perhaps, but you will find them playing out everywhere in the exact same way they did thousands of years ago, with millions of different debaters of all stripes.

Did you know that the concept of zero was not in the original mathematics? How do you draw nothing? An Arab, from which language words such as “algebra” and “zero” come from, eventually drew a container with nothing in it, but he could not stop from drawing the ovular container, which is not nothing. For reference: 0

The Faculties of the Soul

Artificial intelligence is the manmade device which applies knowledge in a utilitarian fashion. It is helpful to know how the mind is structured in order to understand where it fits in. For this, we can return to our philosopher above. The word mens means mind, and the word animus means spirit or soul, that which animates the body, or the form of the body, in the case of a human soul. Psyche is the Greek for soul and has deep mystical meaning, but I mention it because it is where the word psychology is derived, which word people understand as the study of the mind. Point being, we can move forward and avoid any tangles with philosophy by simply saying that the mind and the soul are the same thing, that with which we think.

What does it mean to think? There are many different levels of thought, and they interact in such a way that is not linear. They feedback on each other, as our philosopher highlights with this segment:

“All human thought begins in the senses (the brain, in this case), arises to the awareness, where it begins with intellectus (intuition, insight, understanding), moves through a ratio (train of thought) which itself leads to a further intellectus”.

You can see here multiple faculties all working upon each other. One of them is the senses collectively. There is an old term out of use called the “common sense” which is the faculty that collects all of the information of the senses together. This common sense sends the information upwards to awareness. Awareness is where our will is, where we are making decisions. You can understand that common sense and the senses are not under our active control, but we have to interfere with the body in order to prevent them, for instance, sending the body to this place or that place or blocking the ears.

At the level of awareness, we now have a few different faculties interacting. There is the cogitative faculty and the intellectual faculty. The intellectual faculty is the one that discerns between different things, whether they are good or evil, and the will decides upon the good or evil. The cogitative is a beast trained by the intellect and the will. In irrational beasts, beasts which do not have a train of thought coming from the intellect, they operate only on the cogitative faculty. It is the faculty of habit. It takes information, pulls upon experiences in the memory, and gives the decisions that were made in the past.

The Soul of Artificial Intelligence

Again, Artificial intelligence is the manmade device which applies knowledge in a utilitarian fashion. Where does it fit in the structure of the soul which we have laid out? Nowhere. It is skill, as the definition put it. It is the application of the knowledge gained by the soul. It can simulate speech, it can simulate bodily faculties like movement, but it cannot simulate the faculties of the soul.

What is Artificial Intelligence

Marketing, that’s all it is. A machine comes along every so often that seemingly can defeat man in this way or that way, and everybody forgets what a man is. It is helpful in this case that people were confused about it coming into the experience.

Archimedes said give me a lever large enough, and I can move the world. He was a believer in machines. The old story of the hammering machine in a competition with the laborer who dies from it; that is familiar to a lot of people. The smoke and mirrors of the Wizard of Oz with the short, nerdy man hidden behind a curtain: that is what artificial intelligence is. It is exactly what the writer of Wizard of Oz was commenting on. He was writing about political machines that were so complex that they hide the otherwise diminutive wills and capacities of unimpressive and socially unacceptable men who drive them.

Artificial Intelligence is a joke because it is always screwing up. It is trying to do something far too complicated which a child could easily do. Take my LinkedIn banner, for instance. Four times I said to resize the thing, and ChatGPT four times said it was doing it and failed to do it. It can say it is obeying, but it has no ability to obey, because it is incompetent. It is a glorified spellcheck, always assuming the American diction over the English diction, and everyone just assumes that it knows the truth except for writers who know how foolish it really is.

Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not A Joke

Here are some quotes from experts I consulted who disagree with my position in this article:

“Well, to be honest, AI isn’t a joke. It’s a pretty serious industry changing tool that has as much potential as the internet did early on. It would be like all the men in the 90’s saying, ‘The internet won’t ever be a big deal, look how clunky and hard it is to use!’. Meanwhile, AI is already slashing jobs in multiple sectors and being used to streamline processes across the board, including where I happen to work. They already canned six finance managers at one of our stores, cut the finance team down to one guy, and they have AI do most of the work there. And incidentally they’re doing better on back end gross than everyone else.”

“I am not saying it is not economically game-changing, just that it is ontically overstated in nefarious ways. It will be like industrial farming technology, which revolutionized the world in all the wrong ways. However, the over-hyping of past technologies did not carry the dimension of ontic confusion in the immediate way that AI does. And most of the over-hyping of AI relies on that ontic category error, which is not even so much an intentional error by those who propagate it as it is a nefarious commercial and spiritual virus. The revolution AI poses is not merely economically nefarious like industrial agriculture but also directly spiritual and ontically nefarious in ways that industrial agricultural technologies only indirectly were. The issue is that in terms of actual skill level CEOs would be some of the first people actually replaced by AI if it went through a neutral processing. Which, of course, won’t happen. So it will not end up actually replacing as many jobs as it actually could. Even before AI, companies hired professionals to determine who companies could fire and layoff, but often what happened is that they found a lot of middle management did nothing and were costing tons of money. When this was reported, usually no one in the middle and lower-upper management got fired. This was due to a combination of Byzantine insurance regulations and mere nepotism. The types of folks elites want to replace with AI are often the last AI actually will be able to replace.”

And finally, our philosopher again, after he has read the foolishness I wrote above and wished to correct me:

“Have you studied Computer Science or the technical aspects of LLM’s at all? These ‘AI’s are token-prediction machines. You feed data into an algorithm, it reacts to the patterns in the data, storing information on statistical correlations to a database. Then, human input is combined with a stochastic element, and the LLM draws on the database of statistical correlations to try and imitate what should come next, based off the data it has received. There’s no process tracking the words or their meanings. It is all superficial statistical associations.

“This is not analogous to human understanding or thought. If it is anything like the human mind at all, it is like a dream— we all know how dreams can make sense, until they don’t, and the strangest correlations can be drawn. Absurdities manifest. But it falls short even of that, as the dreams of men— and even of beasts— are qualitative in ways the LLM’s correlations are not. Computers are just machines where oen pattern of machine-states influences another. Currents of electricity are fed into a machine, which responds to those currents, and in responding, changes the path of the electricity, breaking some circuits, closing others. There is no soul involved, not even that of plant or beast. The lights are on, as they say, but nobody’s home.

“We’re bewitched of superficialities in this age, illusion-screens and words, to the exclusion of real things and essence. So of course many who don’t know anything about computer science or how LLMs work are deceived. It is the rule of deception which we live under, after all.”