Paint Me A Better Picture

Don't worry, be happy -- It's probably better for your telomeres

A little late this morning. Family comes first. Will check in on your thoughts later today.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash — What we see, what the bird sees — it all comes down to what sort of eyes we have.

For those of you who have supported my writing from the early days, today I venture back to nearly the beginning! I have not been a steady poster and have taken some breaks. I first dipped my toe into Substack in late September 2021. About a week into posting, I did a 4 part story which I am still quite partial to. It was about science, being human, the world we live in, and social media. No wonder I needed four parts! Part 2 applies to today’s post and is about what we have in common with every living thing. We all have senses, some better than others and our optional bigger brains just piece the sensor together. Before we get all full of ourselves, lots of animals (some of them seemingly lowly) can do way better parlor tricks than us!

How to Tame Your Lizard -- Part 2

The Creative Class Seems Anxious

The fear of an AI-written future is palpable, especially on a platform like Substack. Whether in the essays themselves or leaking into the comments there is a lot of collective angst about AI and its impact on creative things. I enjoy the expression “Never underestimate the ability of humans to rationalize”. Growing up in a working-class town, I don’t remember the creatives being anxious as robot welders replaced humans or the United States migrated its steel production over thirty years producing the same amount of steel with 20% of the workforce. The creatives in tweed jackets seemed to be okay with progress. I don’t remember folks cursing that those new robot welders will never be able to match the artistry of Uncle Frank’s welding talent. In those days writing was something a machine might never do.

A Trickle Becomes A Waterfall

We are in the EARLY days. AI 1.0 limits itself to language mostly. We are simultaneously amazed and fearful (at least the writers and other creatives). I think our current preference for Chat-GPT and the like is mostly our ego. The alphabet is about 4000 years old. What we hear utter, understand, interpret, and respond to is a small part of how we see the world. There is a lot more to our senses and the Chat-GPT craze is based mostly on a small slice of what we perceive. At least in my estimation, our perception is based a lot more on vision than talking. Most of all this world we share an an evolution over billions of years leans more heavily on smell, taste, and vision than it does on speech. We just managed to crack this aspect of us and perhaps stress it on an outsized basis.

In the same way for example that early search engine data was purely text, I think AI (at least the Chat-GPT flavor) is just text and despite the shiny object is rudimentary. I have little doubt that the rudiments of thought and even consciousness that we seem to revere will soon collapse into a familiar, understandable, and repeatable pattern.

Artificial Intelligence Is Intelligence

I am not immune to seeking a better understanding of Chat-GPT and Google Bard. I am sure there are many other interactive communicators, but these seem to be a good place to start. They are both fun to play around with. Chat-GPT is focused on generating text responses while Google Bard is more focused on a conversation. They both have their place I think. Chat-GPT is based on a somewhat large crawl of the internet including some books. It is not surprising it might generate convincing content since books in print are a reasonable analog for above-average writing.

Don’t Mind The Double Standard

The marvelous spongy blob on our brainstem is a cool bit of evolution. A while back I wrote an essay chock full of interesting ideas (wow am I full of myself today) titled “It Starts In Your Head”. I thought of this old post recently as I am making my way through an interesting book titled “The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better” by Will Storrs. There is a wonderful confluence between science and storytelling. Only a small subset of us has a firm understanding of many scientific breakthroughs. Stories are for the rest of us. My sense is one of the great opportunities ahead for the creatives is the creation of such stories.

It Starts In Your Head

It’s Just a Neural Net

A generation of computer scientists have been INSPIRED by humanity. Neurology has not quite unmasked how neurons work but this has not stopped the onward march of science! What I know for SURE is if this paragraph doesn’t wrap up quickly I will lose some of you. Neural nets are a human-inspired synthetic way to imagine how we reason and figure stuff out. I think these topics are worth learning more about if you are even a little interested. The first one is pretty good (reading), and the second one is for the truly interested (video).

• Neural Networks for Dummies

• Basics of Machine Learning

Okay, so that is as techie as we will get. Time for the fun and the reason for my excitement in this post.

Did You See That?

When I was a kid I remember hearing that if someone loses one of their senses, one of the other might be heightened. I never knew if this was true or not. What I do know is sometimes when you lose a sense some of your other senses can get worse!!! An example of this is early onset vision loss is associated with reduced taste sensation. Nearly all sensitivity to flavors is reduced except for saltiness.

This is one of my favorite diagrams. In our old home, we had a VERY LARGE map of the world. It was always fun to pause and figure out where someplace was. This would have been a great poster for one of the other walls. Here is an interactive zoomable version — if you LIKE this it is all compliments of http://thewellcometreeoflife.org/interactive

Let’s Talk Senses

I have written many posts about how our brains seem to work. I am MOST amazed that everything in the plant and animal kingdom is related and we can map the inter-relationships in a sort of tree of life. Darwin chose the tree as a great metaphor for explaining relatedness.

It just seems to me if beetles can discern visual patterns in a complex way we are barking up the wrong tree pursuing the special nature of human consciousness. If you are more interested in this topic I think a few of my essays explore this further in a useful way. I am most intrigued by the interaction BETWEEN the senses we seem to know little about. Topics that interest me include

• Why does light therapy induce cleanup cycles in our brains and fix cognitive defects?

• Why does sound therapy induce cleanup cycles in our brains and fix cognitive defects?

• If we are dramatically special why do such a broad array of animals possess senses well beyond ours like CO2 sensors, electromagnetic sensing, magnetometers for migration, color-changing capacity, etc.?

• Why do early onset blind humans experience loss of some taste capacity and heightened taste capacity for stuff like saltiness?

• If a broad array of traits have resulted across the animal kingdom why is it so hard to imagine that something as simple as a neuron might not take a bit of a trial and error path to emerge a new feature like consciousness?

What is the Future?

A very long time ago, internet pundits were up in arms with the angst that Google was reading our Gmail to generate “relevant” advertisements. Google was pretty straightforward at the time. They advised they had begun integrating AI into Google Search (around 2005). They had already begun the path toward multi-sense relevance to better understand us. This meant video, navigation, and audio (music) to better facilitate and represent what is going on in this upright walking ape with five senses. A focus and angst on “the last war” is likely a fool’s errand.

The Poll & Music

One of my favorite artists explored the silliness of leaving this up to a handful of us who know better (and are trapped inside a dual-brained animal pursuing survival and advantage). Our primitive selves and how we see things might merit a second look. I think that AI might be just the answer. It might even be able to save us from ourselves.

Closing

AI is a companion technology to what it is to be human. There is no reason to assume that a carbon-based multi-billion-year trial and error evolution of what a bunch of neurons coupled with some cool senses can accomplish. The secret sauce, in my opinion, is to (1) have a broad sensor network (2) assemble such data (3) create a model of what we “know” and (4) project the near future. A silicon-based version of this seems likely to be able to do this very well. I say strap in and enjoy the ride.

I try to embrace optimism. I think the big problems in the world (like war, indifference, inequality) need a fresh set of eyes. We have many times, perhaps due to the primitive roots of our brains pursued genuinely dangerous pursuits. I believe a more holistic evaluation of what is going on is the path to stability and humans pursuing a destiny of greater understanding of the world we share and the people we share it with. Leaving this just to people has perhaps created problems that seem intractable.