There is no shortcut to greatness!

The AI cycle continues

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This image was designed with assistance from ChayGPT.

Facing a challenging adversary is how you gain respect for yourself.

In 8th grade, I was a troubled teenager, and my parents could not handle me, so I was sent to a military academy in Venezuela—or should I say, a reformatory prison for uncontrollable kids—because that was very close to what it was.

There were kids in my class who, neither weekends nor throughout the year, did not go home; they had a scholarship, and their parents lived too far away and could not afford to even feed them. “El Malandro” (Spanish for thug or hoodlum) was one of them. He was undoubtedly a street delinquent at the age of 13 and even had scars on his face to prove it. Back then, for two years, I had been training weekly in boxing and was a strong fighter for my age. I was regularly bullied in the military school-prison; I was the “rich kid” of the lot, and people delighted in making me feel unwelcome.

One day, during the midday recess in the dormitory, they circled the bunk beds to make a boxing ring, and after a couple of fights, ‘El Malandro’ came to challenge me to a fight. I was delighted—one-on-one was what I had been waiting for. We had quite a fight. I can’t say if I won or lost, but what I did do was gain his respect. From then on, no one bullied me again.

It was not that El Malandro changed; it was I who changed with that fight. I gained back my self-respect, and it changed how I related to others.

From our first article, we’ve mentioned how AI and LLMs work (AI, fire of Prometheus or fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil?), how AI uses one single attribute of our brain’s massive features, and it uses it in the most simplistic manner. That feature is our capacity to predict an outcome; AI processes it mathematically as a percentage of probability. That is all! However, and here is where it gets tricky, it has been fed all written human collective knowledge and, through fine-tuning by human training, it has developed a skilled process of pattern recognition.

There are two crucial points in this: the vast amount of “human collective knowledge” and the ‘training’ AI has received.

The ‘AI vs. Humans’ Dilemma

I am not going to “sugarcoat” reality: AI is going to be extraordinarily disruptive in human civilization across all areas that are significant to human endeavor: political, economic, cultural, and public safety, not to mention the tendency of humans toward control and misbehavior (to put it mildly). Yes, social media, legacy news media, corporations, terrorists, and corrupt politicians will use AI to attempt to control and manipulate your mind and will, and there is no safeguarding society from this except by using it to counteract it. But then again, who is going to wield this power-tool? Politicians?

It seems all our bad choices have caught up with us!

And you think the best option is to make laws that will limit AI’s capacity to disrupt our lives? Who will it limit these laws, and who will benefit from not limiting it?

Is my understanding, that leaders of the AI tech industry are right: we should not be talking so much about making guardrails for AI in order to make it “safe,” but about how we can advance it and make alliances to develop it.

There is no working around it. What will make it safe boils down to society growing up and for people to make better choices.

If you think ‘there is no time,’' I will respond: there is no choice!

Your Boxing Fight with AI Is Required

How do you fight a formidable opponent? Look at yourself in a mirror and become more than what you are today. Jordan Peterson has stated many times, “If you have to confront a monster, you have to become somewhat of a monster yourself.”

What has made AI formidable?
Definitely, OUR KNOWLEDGE!

It resembles a science fiction novel, where aliens come to Earth and, through our knowledge and knowhow, dominate us, and we must fight back. We don’t fight a monster where it is strong, but where it is weak. AI does not make decisions; it makes predictions. So, we need to develop the discernment to make better decisions. – How do we make good decisions? We broaden our knowledge base; we read and immerse ourselves in the marvelous human knowledge and get to know ourselves. We need to realize who we are and why we are where we are.

In a previous article of this series, the one we mentioned before, we compared the present situation with the fallen story of the “Garden of Eden” in Genesis. When the woman and man eat the fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge,’ their eyes are opened, they recognize their vulnerability and feel ashamed. Later God comes looking for them and can’t find them, so he asks, “Where are you?”

We need to figure out where we are… each one of us.

There are two key points in addressing the disruption that AI will bring to our world: you must define what you want to pursue in life, determine what you need to achieve it, and make the decision to go for it. Use ChatGPT or any other AI to improve your technical and personal skills if you need to. But above all, work on yourself, because:

THERE IS NO SHORTCUT TO GREATNESS!

The index with all the articles of the cycle on AI [here]