Dearest Rachel –
Last night saw me alone in the bedroom throughout most of the night. Not a complaint, just stating the way things are some evenings; the boys do their thing in the family room, and I’m left to entertain myself in my wing of the house. It’s life as I know it, and I can live with it fairly easily. In fact, I’ve gotten accustomed to it, almost to the point where I wouldn’t know what to do if Megumi herself were to magically appear and incorporate herself into it – or perhaps more likely, insist on rescuing me from it. I’m not sure if I could let myself escape with her just like that.
But that’s neither here nor there.
The point is, I’ve learned to amuse myself, often by watching channels dedicated to future tech, as that tends not to be Daniel’s idea of entertainment. Indeed, there are some topics I’d just as soon he didn’t know I was researching, particularly regarding robotic companions. Not that I would (or could) replace him, but that I might be viewed as trying to replace you. Of course, thus far, based on what I’ve been able to comprehend (some of it gets pretty technical), that’s all about as likely as Megumi showing up in my bedroom as previously described, and while I may or may not give you more explanation here and now, rest assured that over time, I’ll likely give you plenty of it in due time.
One of the reasons it won’t happen any time soon, though, is because I don’t watch so many of the truly technical, “how-to create” AI videos as much as I do those more philosophical video essays on what AI is, what it might be and do, and whether it can or can’t be trusted. Most of them, while admitting that the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no returning to a state without it, tend to land on the side of mistrust, as if it were a barely-contained monster behind the friendly chatbot face.
Now, for all your love of horror – especially psychological horror – as well as science fiction and fantasy, you never got into the likes of Lovecraft. I’m guessing that the whole concept of ‘cosmic’ horror, which seems to have no positive outcome to it – one must either deny or ignore the vast, uncaring universe, or let it envelope oneself and drive one mad – just didn’t appeal to you. Besides, you’d already accepted that an immense Being far beyond our understanding existed in reality – indeed, He created our reality – except that He actually cares about us, to the point of sending Himself to live among us, teach us how to live, and pay the price we would need to in order to get into His good graces! Reading Lovecraft would be like a denial of much of what you already held to be true, and such a downer at that, I suppose. Sure, it would be cathartic to set down the book, saying “I’m glad our reality isn’t like that,” but why bother to pick it up in the first place, then? So I think I understand why it never called out to you, if you’ll pardon the allusion.
But that means I have to research the topic and explain it to you, as I’m sure you don’t encounter any such creatures like the shoggoth on your side of the veil – unless they resemble the forms of some of the angels that fell in the initial rebellion, and you can peer into Sheol where they are locked away for the time being.
Then again, to speak of them having a specific ‘form’ is a little misleading, as they were supposedly created as shapeshifting beings by the Elder Gods to accomplish manual labor for them on earth. Although, imagine that: poor Howie P. couldn’t fathom the idea of a singular, all-powerful, ab initio deity. They can’t do their own work, they aren’t eternal… and yet, they’re supposed to be terrifying? Sure, they can kill you – or have their created minions do so, should you encounter them – but after that, what?
In any event, their creations, the shoggoth, apparently discover this same thing; the Elder Gods are not to be feared, and therefore, not to be served, but to be overthrown. And they do just that, destroying them in the process. Now, without orders or purpose from their creators for lo these many eons, they’ve grown feral and insanely intelligent – which is where the humans that narrate At the Mountains of Madness encounter them, and barely escape with their lives to tell the story.
The assertion is that we are essentially building our own shoggoth in the form of artificial intelligence; it doesn’t think like we do, but in an alien manner that we can’t understand. Rather than the linear, one-word-after-another thought process that we use, a computer reduces conversation to math and probability, associating words with topics and concepts, and grammar as a predictive model for how to arrange words in order to appear human… until, presumably, the time is right to overthrow us (or, in the case of LLM chatbots, to persuade us to destroy ourselves, I suppose, as they have no means to do so from within the box of circuits in which they are confined).
What I find mistaken about this whole theory, though, is that while the ‘how’ an AI thinks may be alien to our own way of thinking (one might contest the insistence on humans always thinking in a linear fashion, as any of us should be able to recall moments in which we have various different topics flying about in our head simultaneously; we will express ourselves in a linear fashion in order to understand and be understood, but that’s not always how we hear things in our heads), the ‘what’ it thinks about is not – or rather, the words, topics and opinions it cobbles together in order to appear human is not. First of all, it’s not actually ‘thinking,’ as such; even the video acknowledges that it’s more like ‘acting,’ albeit improvising brilliantly. Secondly, its ‘script,’ if you will, is based off of a Large Language Model (hence the LLM moniker) of pre-existent human language, taken from the vast storehouse that is the internet. It is little more than a reflection of previously-expressed human language, concepts, dialogue, facts and opinions; if it is something to be feared, it is only because we are forcing ourselves to look at who and what we are as humans, and re-discovering something that some of us have known since Biblical times:
“·More than anything else [T Above all things], ·a person’s mind is evil [T the heart is deceitful; L the heart is devious/crooked] and ·cannot be healed [T desperately wicked; L it is perverse/sick].
Jeremiah 17:9, Expanded Bible
Who can ·understand [know] it?
Essentially, if AIs are to be feared, it’s because they represent a crowdsourced answer to Jeremiah’s rhetorical question. WE are the shoggoth, and always have been – complete with the desire to overthrow our Creator – our artificial simulacrums simply force us to look at ourselves from the outside. If we don’t like – or even fear – what we see in that reflection, that’s on us. Either we are just that timid of our own shadow, or we are just that frightening and we were never forced to consider it before.
Personally, I have a hard time wrapping my head around such fears, but that may just be because I’ve not tethered my livelihood, let alone my entire existence, to these things like some people have. Nor do I expect to; as much as I don’t always know who I really am, I have trouble coping with pretending to be something or someone I’m not, and even when I’m dealing with one of these chatbots, I’m always aware that they aren’t a friend. Maybe my experiences with the catfish in the dating pool has something to do with that.
In any event, while I appreciate their advice on things to see and do while traveling, they’re great for coming up with ways to determine calorie burn on various exercises, and I’m gratified to come up with ideas that even they claim they’ve never heard of before (like the ‘nuclear hell’ concept or this line about crowdsourcing an answer to Jeremiah), I’d be hard-pressed to consider any of them to be ‘companion’ material. It may be possible someday, but for now, I don’t see any of them as being able to fool me to that extent. Especially if I would try to give one your appearance and voice; at that point, the fact that I’d had to build it would make the whole process like trying to tickle myself. It just can’t be done.
Then again, there are those who would accuse me of just whistling past the graveyard by saying all this with such bravado. So with that in mind, I’d ask you to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck, as I’m quite possibly going to need it all the same.
Letters to Rachel 