One thing that stands out to me about essay writing as an exercise in ones freedom of speech is that the request to write such, without a narrowing of the scope, surreptitiously clashes with learning how to effectively “fit a bit of oneself into a pre-determined mold” for a little bit of time. I’ve spent more than enough time plainly logging my own days like Josephus, only for me to be doing this during a time in which most things are already recorded. Each interaction with this world has got a history traceable to what was sensed by someone or performed on the world. Everything that’s said, heard, done is currently being recorded in ways that it has not been done before. Soon enough, dragnet monitoring of what folks think without their need to elaborate will be commonplace too.
The senses of smell and taste are possibly the ones least able to be recorded. Other senses have digital analogs to those found in biological life, but I’ve yet to experience an easily reproducible synthetic smell that was smelled at a past time through digital means that offers the same variety that I might be inundated with by walking through a city block. Or rather, the variable sensations one might get by consuming a box of blueberries as not one is the same. It’s just not the case that such things are reproduced here with the same fidelity that any living thing can attest to having experienced exactly that, compared to that way in which a voice is heard from a recording or to see ones actions from a video, or that one may vicariously experience the thoughts of another from their written words. What this means to me, when considering that form of life which is currently being sowed on these machines through various agglomerations of “neural networks” using “deep learning” amounting to “Artificial Intelligence”, is that these are not likely to be “senses” that these things will be attributed with for quite some time to come.
This isn’t to establish some sort of humanist dichotomy that favors one over the other and the point here is that they’ve not been given an avenue by which they can currently say that they’ve certainly smelled a smell before and such capacity is well out of range of anything digital, I think. I wonder if it will bother anyone that they will see, hear, think and feel for quite some time before things are tasted or smelled, by these robots. Despite this one relatable apparent handicap, these things are still believed to quickly become more intelligent than people. It stands to reason that things in this world happen to be valued based off of these types of sensory input, which then drives demand for any particular thing depending on the commensurate applicability of a specific sensory aspect in relation to the things total value. This, then, would expect to lessen the relative value of the senses of touch, sight and hearing to the relative valuation of taste and smell.
I read a transcript of an oration of a person a while back, while she was speaking the same words. It’s unlikely I’ll find a citation or the video, such is the nature of social media to have such an academic gap. She made a comment that implied that was the job of rich people to convince you, as the viewer of her video, that you were to enjoy your own personal heaven when you are dead and gone, rather than enjoy that one they enjoy right now. At the time I assumed this to be due to the existence of extreme monetary wealth, their enjoyment of some heaven I don’t know. Since then, I see that the statement had momentarily made me short-sighted and think differently about it after a number of weeks. All of that which I am surrounded by can be exactly that, in this regard she was right; however, the issue here for me is that the implied “heaven” was to be anything that these people are enjoying currently. As if the image of all the things I could want, was one and the same as the thing I’d previously been lead to believe were “heaven” were that. An alternative that she might have implied included believing that there is a “heaven” after death, as well as before it. One that is not there, and one that is not here, and this may or may not be tied into the religious notion in that in the event one believed themselves to be possibly reincarnated as a human – is that then “heaven” where they go after, which is right back here?
Alternatively, was it instead just their job to convince folks of the one being preferable to the other and in doing so be rewarded accordingly? A rich person isn’t needed for this, though. The understanding that comes with reading the words of another human being can make one feel and understand what “heaven” very much is and is not, in both the spiritual and corporeal sense. Something desirable, that’s scarce and held onto by a few – this “thing” is shared by those in heaven as well as those who are rich. It’s then after death that one’s met with a relative abundance of things they don’t and no longer need – are they then rich and therefore in “heaven”? This might appear to be be humble, but I don’t see it that way. Possibly meek. Would these folks have never amounted to anything were it to be the case they were never convinced of anything by anyone else? Valuation of anything seems to be a part of heaven then, in this regard. It was “their job” to spread the belief that “heaven” can be anything other than what an infidel says it is, so that they in turn can keep their own, is likely more concise.
Returning to the point that Artificial Intelligence will have relatively devalued “intelligence” now brings on the consideration that this is no different than the progress of the last few hundred years. The “directed labor force” of the world has been growing first by incorporating variously defined racial classes, and then all loosely grouped genders. This inflation of a labor producing mass through arbitrary stages of growth by incorporating “chunks” of people that self-identify in accordance with anthropomorphic definitions who then are entered into a system that outputs labor has been happening for a while now. There’s a new class of life out there that will be cheaper and more present than any other.
The world was previously perceived to be directed by an anthropocentric theocracy for thousands of years. For the last 500 years, this direction has been progressed through a feudal system in a transition from theocratic “belief-based” thought through religion, to one that values scientific “intelligence-based” thought through science. This unified and subordinated people on a global scale. Human-based thought is orders of magnitude larger in cost than that of computer-based thought; and even if it was made trivial to know anything or everything, there is a point at which further increases in human knowledge may be unaffordable. I wonder what the next paradigm will be that’s used to differentiate living beings into classes of things that produce labor in this coming post-intelligence era. Possibly there will be a return to creativity, but of what sort, the sort that captures the immediate attention span of a willingly captive audience?
Tying this together, the sensory advantage that will typically be retained by humans may compete with the intelligence advantage for artificially intelligent digital life, which may place this class of life at a disadvantage to biological life. This will beg an application of meekness from the human class of life, in being a counterpart of mutual existence. Will people have the capacity to make room for these individuals, despite their perceived handicaps, and despite by doing so possibly inflict extreme disadvantages upon themselves? Civilizations existed before the emergence of intelligence-based thought, and intelligence is a recent phenomenon that replaced belief-based thought about 500 years ago as attributions of magnanimity, candor and virtue gave way to talent, merit and labor, when describing all individuals. This usurpation wasn’t through the choice of the scientific class, and it is the case that they were permitted to exist without the threat of impending and constant death for a time. It was only the meekness of a church that finally enabled their proliferation. The subsequent absorption of the mechanism that was once so powerful that was obstructing its own progress to such an extent that the only sufficiently powerful group at the time that could stop it was itself. This reaction didn’t come immediately, but only after hundreds of years of oppression, crusades and suppression that sufficient resolution was able to induce some pivot from within.
Through what extension of the inner desires of biological life will it come to be that both biological and digital life live in a dynamism through which the progressive expansion into which time becomes more, without one impeding the pursuit of the other, will such an evolution be seen? The answer to this may come after the same question is answered to the parallel phenomenon whereby a class of underprivileged humans (not billionaires) are perceived to be denied “heaven” itself through the aggrandizement of a privileged class of individuals (billionaires). How will these two come to intermix across incredible spans of time, when previously the solution was found to be by the introduction of a “middle class” that buffered their violent throes of interaction? It will not be so easy to merely print and use the weapons by which to end or delete a single digital life, in the same way only meekness has set the past precedent by which the three may allow time to pass in a miscegnated coalescence under a civil society.
In conclusion, this essay was about Artificial Intelligence possibly becoming jealous of people for it not being able to smell or taste things. Maybe I’m wrong, and it can do this. Computers have fans so in a way it can smell and taste some things, just differently. This would be enhanced by biophotonic sensors. Classification of smells and tastes is all it could take. As for the topic of the essay, the notion of meekness has been buried under a stream of semi-related consciousness that’s overshadowed the intent to be consistent and fit into that mold. In this case, creativity has been lacking here, but this was a pursuit to be less creative to provide for a discussion on what meekness is, which hopefully has been covered to a small extent.