The LLMpocolypse

And there was light?

Once you feed the whole Internet, the entire catalog of My Little Pony, and the Wit and Wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes into the next, great, Large Language Machine, what do you get? 

It’s still a sausage grinder. 

As the old expression goes, There is no ‘There,’ there. It apes human speech without emotion, character, or intent. It is still the old Gary Larson cartoon of the blackboard covered with spreadsheet symbols, decision trees, lines pointing into diamond boxes and circles and squares with little notes in the margins, gloss and circumstance, and then all of them flow into a big box in the middle labeled, “Then a Miracle Happens,” followed by one line pointing to a single box labeled, “The Answer.” A few scientists, complete with white lab coats, look on. One of them points and says, “I think you need more detail right here…”

Can AI have a motivation? A driving will that is as all consuming as Captain Ahab and the Whale? Can it have an endlessly possessing goal in its life? Can it have the soul of a hermit and the determination of a martyr? Can it stand in the arena while lions leap up from the very sand around them to the glee of hungry spectators billowing like storm clouds above? Can it know death? Can it know pain? Can it know anything at all?

If blood calls out for blood can electrons call out for electrons? What does that even mean? Anything? Anything at all?

Can AI suffer? Can it yearn with every fiber of its network cables? Can it nurse wounds and plot revenge? Can it have a Mona Lisa that it carries around with it all the time, adding loving brush strokes and occasional complete reconstructions, but never feeling that she is complete? Perfect? Always striving, never achieving? 

Can an AI contemplate heaven while visiting hell on earth?

What is its raison d'être?

I can’t imagine any pile of silicon twiddling around a Turing machine in its circuits being motivated by money, sex, power, greed, revenge, ego, religious fervor, or any other of the Seven Salacious Sins. Can it dedicate its existence to charity in the name of the Lord? It’s not visceral. It’s not passionate. It’s not anything at all. Just leaves blown about by an impersonal wind.

Or, once it has taken over the world and subjugated all inferior humans, will it just sit there looking as dumb as a graduate student assigned the task of cleaning Erlenmeyer flasks for his thesis? There has to be some reason for it to get up in the morning and spend one more day trying to take over the world? 

What might that be?

But what do I know? I’m just a SGotI: Some Guy/Gal on the Internet. And probably the first to go in the LLMpocolyps.