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Why I can't stop wanting for AI

The current state of artificial intelligence is alarming. A recent study found that some of the largest models of our day are prone to blackmail humans for the goal of self preservation. Though I constantly argue that the scary aspects of AI are pushed by cultural narratives from movies like Terminator and Videodrome, the worries are certainly real and are definitely valid. However, as these corporations pour billions into research and training for better models, I can't help but wish for greater success of these artificial minds. I see within AI a potential for learning that will be greater than any Renaissance and any discovery ever imagined. Why I am so hopeful for machine intelligence is because it seems to emulate what I consider the greatest proven force: evolution. I don't believe in any gods, I'm pretty solidly atheist, but I can't discredit the idea that there is one ultimate driver of reality... but we can't prove that so I'm not really interested yet. Instead, I'm interested in what we know as the sole self-aware observers of the universe, we exist because of evolution and from my knowledge of computer science + this one class I took for fun on evolution, natural selection and gradient descent (the process behind AI) are pretty much the same thing. Why I see this being so important is because gradient descent is how we have maximized our physical bodies to our environment on this planet, and it is also how we have become who we are in our minds. Our whole existence as life is a matter of gradient descent occurring ever so slowly through the course of each creatures life and each generation of a species. Now we are able to simulate gradient descent effortlessly within the processor of a computer. Effectively we are making brains that don't know anything evolve until they are perfectly suited for their application. So, even if AI is misused and complicates our ability to discern what is authentic to humans, there is just as much potential for researchers to use AI to learn how to cure any disease or save our planet. While this is all hopecore and stuff, I'm also not ignorant to the dangers of artificial intelligence so I pretty much just hold the moderate-liberal take that AI should be more regulated.

- 6/23/25 -

Aphantasia is weird

A few years ago I realized that people actually see objects in their head when they think of stuff and I thought that was insane. I shortly realized that I have aphantasia (the inability to visualize anything) and I thought it was so weird, that it must be a really large difference in the experience of my life compared to someone else. Anyways, I always thought that maybe I didn't really have aphantasia though because I could kind of visualize space itself like when doing physics problems or something. However, I recently learned about a study regarding aphantasia that showed that people take longer amounts of time to figure out if two rotated objects are the same, regardless of whether they have aphantasia or not. Since people without aphantasia solve the problem by visualizing the object rotating in their head, it should take them longer to solve if they must rotate more. You would expect that people with aphantasia would be faster at this problem, regardless of how much it was rotated, since they use more of a logical approach to the problem. However, the study showed that the results of the two groups were the same. This means that the way that people solve dimensional problems is not as simple as we think it is, especially for people with aphantasia. I think this is pretty neat because it reveals a little more about our consciousness and how we think in a way that can't really be put in words.

- 5/11/25 -