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Back in 2015 I wrote a book for TROM about humans and the machines they have created. It is called the Human Machine and you can read it here.

Back then it was one of the first hypes about A.I. And as you may know by now, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Back then Google and Apple started to promote their AIs: Google Now and Siri. You could talk to these bots and they will provide you a lot of answers from many different domains. Ask how many dogs are in the world, ask them to set up an alarm for you, how's the weather, you name it. It would integrate with a lot of apps and devices.

People were asking these bots existential questions like what is the purpose of life:

I remember the Google supercomputers generating these weird images and the news outlets calling them "machines dreaming". Meaning, how machines dream:

And that Pepper robot that you could talk to...

These came after a few years of another hype: the self driving cars that were about to revolutionize transportation. In the book Automated Autonomous World that I wrote for TROM in 2013 , I partially fell for that hype and wrote in a very non-skeptical way about them.

To be fair with my past-self, I was focused entirely on how in a saner society the tech-part of the world could look like. So I presented many prototypes and unproven tech. I talked about how we have to change the infrastructure for these to work, and so forth. However, what I did not realized as deeply, was how misleading the world is. You see I naively thought that the big tech companies may not exaggerate as much about their tech. I sourced their own claims from their own engineers. But 10 years later I could say for sure that the vast majority of the tech I showcased in that book, was BS. For the most part at least. That means, the words that came out of the mouths of these engineers and "specialists" that work for these big companies, were mostly crap. Marketing.

That book may be removed from TROM when we do a cleanup this month in preparation for the upcoming TROM II documentary.

Back to AI.

In 2016 I started to be more and more aware of how the tech world is full of bullshit and bullshitters. For that reason I chose to present tech that was already there, working, and when it was just in testing phases I would present it as such and link to scientific papers about that tech.

When it came to AI I already smelled the bullshit. The stupid fear that AI will take over the world, and all of that crap. But I said let's educate myself. And so I said the best way is to understand a bit how these things work. I took several courses and read a bunch of stuff. I learned how AIs can categorize objects:

How it interprets text and speech:


I learned how facial recognition works:

I looked at how AIs learn to play games, drive cars, do science research.

Of course I only scratched the surface of these since they are complex. But I got a solid understanding I think. I realized that these are Statistical Software. Added with a bunch of filters and rules. They are complex, cool, interesting, but nothing WOW in terms of how they work. I learned that data and computer power is what makes the difference. I realized how non-magical these AI look when you have a clue about how they work. The end result is mesmerizing only for those who have a very dim understanding of these pieces of software.

I then talked about how they compared to humans. And of course the conclusion was that AI is just a complex set of statistical software with filters and rules and a lot of data, and has nothing to do with either artificial or intelligence (whatever that means).

Of course there are some applications for these pieces of software that I touched upon in the book, but mainly it was a grotesque hype.

Anthropomorphizing

That's a new word that I learned while writhing this book. It means "to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).". That's what AI are mostly.

The present.

7 years later and the AI "revolution" has resurfaced again. This time it seems even more mesmerizing, although not so much for me. I fee like I've seen this before...

ChatGPT and the like, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, now they have different names and do similar things. They are fun to play with. Can create some weird images out of text, something I was showcasing in 2016 in another book about Language.

And the craze is starting again with people thinking these AIs will revolutionize the world, or will take over, and then no more jobs, no more artists, no more life. If you look again at how these work, they seem a lot less mesmerizing. The companies that push them use anthropomorphism to make them sound like they "think" and are like humans: neural nets, learning, hallucinating, and so forth. In fact they are still the same statistical machines that produce probabilities and that results in interesting outcomes.

Without going into specifics I recommend this funny video that explains the entire situation quite well: A.I. is B.S. ->>> ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=ro130m-f_y…

Also read through the sources of that video.

When I asked chatgpt about TROM I got this:

Which is not bad.
But when I asked who made TROM I got a very bad and totally wrong answer:

No idea who Catalin and Andrei are, but it is totally wrong. The project did not start as a research project, whatever the hell that means.

You see although it says some true things, it also says some entirely false things. Because this AI only knows how to put words together. Has no clue about anything else. And it will always produce well written sentences that can be totally wrong. Thus, this chatbot is entirely useless for factual information. And if you think it will get better and better, for one let's wait for that and then "hype" it, but second it may never be able to due to how it works (statistical prediction of what words go with what other words).

When I tell chatgpt that the project was not created by those two dudes, it invents new ones:

And so on it goes:

AI is ASS!

AI is actually Anthropomorphized Statistical Software, or ASS :)

We may find good uses for this ASS, maybe when they only rely on a main source of information like some specific research papers and provide exact quotes and sources. They are fun to play with for a bit tho. They may help us create more creative content or video/photo/audio effects. But "they" are as much as "they" as websites are "they". Depends what websites we are talking about. Same here, these ASS are diverse and made for a diverse set of purposes.

But what it is clear to me is that the HYPE is just that, a HYPE. Pushed by companies who want to make these ASS more appealing and sell them, by the bloggers and youtubers who jump on the hype train for clicks and views, by the media that does the same. Combine that with the fact that we live in a dumbed-down society where humans are just workers who have no time to learn/digest any of these things, and we are faced with an Idiotic society that has no clue about any of these.

Our trade based society is at fault here again, for incentivizing humans to hype these things all the time, in order to trade them. And for the fact that it keeps us all busy idiots for the sake of trading to survive. This has created a Land of Confusion.

Welcome to Earth.

#tromlive

School can be seen as an abusive and inefficient system that has little to nothing to do with "education".

Children are forced to wake up at a certain hour, every day, 5 days a week, for 12 years. They are categorized by ages and their "knowledge" level. School creates a competition between the kids, makes then hate science and learning in general, it is a boring and colorless place for these young minds, and overall ends up not teaching children much at all about the world we live in.

In a trade-based society the parents NEED to trade themselves in a job, so these kids need to be "livestocked" somehow. That's what school is, a place where kids can be while their parents trade to survive in this society. More to that, Universities almost exclusively prepare these young creatures to become workers, like their parents.

All in all, kids go to school to compete, memorize, get ready to be workers. NOT to be EDUCATED.

If humans could have a decent life without trading in this society, they could have the time to engage with their kids, discover, learn, enjoy. And schools could be places where kids of all ages can go because they want to. A place where experts can teach them about the world and how to do something productive.

EXAMPLES:

Tell kids: See this red dot? This is the farthest thing we can take a photo off. They call it a "star". And you show them a real photo taken by the WEBB telescope. From there on you and your class of kids will investigate what this red dot is, and in the process you'll teach kids about light, physics, maths, distances, stars, the universe.

Or show kids a real dinosaur bone and tell them: Our mission is to understand how old it is and what creature this is. And thus you can go into a journey of discovering what geology is, paleontology, rocks and fossils, and so forth.

Or tell them that our mission is to build a robot. And they will learn mechanics, programming and so forth.

We could create real schools where kids can become curious and learn so much about our world. So that they can become the next Einsteins, the next Teslas, the next ones who can discover new things.

That's the world we should have had by now....

And we wont be able to have it unless we change the trade-based society into a tradeless society. Where humans are not forced to trade in order to survive. Where humans like "teachers" can engage and develop such schools as explained above, to have time for that, not to go to school because that's their job since they have to pay their rent so they are forced to do it.

A few years ago we made a video: Rethinking Education videos.trom.tf/w/2y5RSgvREzT6m… - where we go in depth abotút this.

#TradeRuinsEverything #tromlive

We Live In The Age of The Bullshitter is an interesting and truthful article about the biggest bullshitters of our time. Musk, Peterson, Steven Pinker, Trump, Dr. Oz and the like.

The author rightly points out how these people do not know much about the world, but their confidence coupled with the clickbaity world we live in and their celebrity status, makes them superstar-influencers.

Elon Musk is the richest man on planet Earth. He is also a complete bullshitter. He makes false claims about the cars he makes. He constantly promises that he is going to accomplish things that he never, in fact, accomplishes. In March 2020, he made the confident COVID-19 prediction that “based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.” After convincing cities around the country that his “Boring Company” was going to build tunnels that would alleviate traffic congestion for low, low prices, Musk’s company simply went silent after municipal governments asked it to follow through on its commitments. 

They talk about a recently famous guy named Sam Bankman-Fried who "had committed himself to the “Effective Altruism” movement, which aims to achieve maximal moral goodness through benevolent acts and philanthropy". He was a crypto-rich-man. Basically the same Musk but instead of playing the money game he was playing the cryptocurrency game. He got caught stealing and lying. He was living like a rich man. You know, all of that.

There are many naive minds out there thinking that you can create honest businesses, you can trade fairly and do good through trading. This is almost never the case as these examples, and millions of others, prove.

Jordan Peterson sells books and makes money out of being so "radical" and yet unscientific. Pinker does the same. But real scientists are the ones you never heard of, the ones that do the work and not sell books and become viral online. To trust these figures is as naive as trusting Dr. Oz.

One of the problems is that for-profit media has a very bad set of incentives. For instance, every time Elon Musk makes some confident prediction about how he is going to implant chips in human brains or build a Mars colony or tunnel under Miami or whatever, tech websites are faced with a choice. They can print a story with the headline “MUSK SAYS BRAIN CHIPS COMING IN SIX MONTHS” or they can ignore Musk’s bluster until he offers proof that he has actually invented one of the things he keeps promising to invent. To ignore Musk is to sacrifice the precious clicks that a new Musk prediction will inevitably garner. Thus a for-profit tech journalism website faces a conflict between its financial self-interest and its integrity. In a time when it’s tough for media outlets to survive, it’s hard to turn down the clicks.

The author tries the waters but does not go for a swim. This is unfortunate because the cause of these issues is in plain sight: our trade based society.

Here's how it works as an example:

Musk is a trader and does everything he can to maximize his advantage being pushed by this competitive environment of trade. When he buys and sells, and he is also entangled with investors and clients from all sides, he (the man) cannot be unbiased. Thus, he is biased. He will exaggerate the claims about his businesses, lie, deceive, and all of that, to keep himself afloat and to swim in that sea of trades.

The people who follow Musk in his quest, from employees to his Twitter followers, are either forced to follow what he says and do like he does (his employees who have no other choice since they have to trade to survive), or the busy idiots who trade in other ways, keeping themselves busy all the time, not able to digest any information very well or much at all. So they can follow the HE, the man, whatever he says.

So far we have the rich man (the celebrity) and the idiots (the consumed ones). All created by the same trade-based society that keeps us busy and idiots, specialized on one thing (most of the time useless and mindless), and wants us to compete all the time and get better traders.

Lastly we have the media.

Guess what media wants? Same as Elon Musk or his fanboys: more for themselves. More clicks means more views, means more attention trading, means you can transform that into a currency and then stuff. The media is rich and wants to get richer, so it is very well incentivized to publish whatever crap sells. And thus they sell these bullshitters to the consuming idiots. Simple.

The rich-celebrity + the consumer idiots + the for-profit-media = a dumb down society.

Voila. Mystery solved!

All of us are victims of the same system of trade. And as long as we live in the same system, nothing will change.