I ❤️ Machines. Not like that… it’s complicated.

In my previous piece The Great Binary Layer Cake Collapse (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) I more or less ranted a bit about AI. And mainly I wrote about why exactly the whole concept scares me.

Today, we’ll do something different: I’ll share my ¹emotional insights into why the prospect of AI not only fascinates me, but it also makes me giddy like one of my kids seeing presents below our christmas tree. (when it’s set up in december. We don’t have it around all year). And I will also describe why I believe that AI will change everything and that our usual projections of adoption rates are completely off the mark.

As a kid I grew up in the countryside. Our village had 15K citizens and I loved nature so much, I wanted to become a ²biologist. Then I hit puberty, my body and brain went through changes and suddenly that cozy, little village had turned into a nightmare. I found a refuge in comics, gaming and IT stuff and became a proper ³nerd. I felt unloved by the village. I felt isolated except from a few but close friends.

And then the internet happened. A whole new world opened up to me. A wealth of information, excitement at every corner and, finally, ⁴cool people at my fingertips! All I needed were a keyboard, a mouse, a working computer (not like the one before when I fried the CPU), a screen, some speakers, an AV-receiver, half a ton of internet provider CD-ROMs to redeem temporary internet access coupons, a modem and enough balls to face my hulking father who got pissed because I was blocking the phone line and ran phone extension cables through the house for everyone to trip over.

It’s hard for me to describe this. If you are a person feeling music, spin up some streaming service and listen to Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy OST to recreate my feeling, like I just did and… aw crap, now I am sobbing like a baby.

"The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they traveled through the computer. Ships, motorcycles. With the circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... i got in." (Kevin Flynn, TRON: Legacy)

I was so in love with the net, that I wrote the following as the projection for my future plans in my bio for the yearbook when finishing secondary school: “Study journalism and invent the human-machine-interface”. I did neither. Truth to be told, Human-Machine-Interfaces are already pretty old school. What I meant was “Brain-Machine-Interface” (BMI) and I still did not invent any of those.

Sneaky little tech-bros, wicked, tricksy, false…

Did you ever play Shadowrun? It’s a cyberpunk roleplaying game. Ever read William Gibson? Neal Stephenson? Played Deus Ex? Watched The Matrix? The exchange of humans with machines, how we integrate those in our lives, how they enhance us - the desire to explore this, to reach out, to reach further, to overcome the restrictions our biological bodies impose on us. To transcend into something higher/better, this is part of me. It was a promise. My precious.

That stuff is called Transhumanism. And since socially inept ⁵tech-bros with zero empathy and even less learning curve adopted this as their main paradigm lately and dropped the ideas of the “-humanism” syllable completely, it’s really hard for me to accept that they share this with me. It pisses me off to no end.

Back to the topic. Brain-Machine-Interface? Any bells ringing? Remember the stuff I wrote in the Layer-Collapse-Piece about the “30ms machine age”? A main promise of cyberpunk & transhumanism was to remove the clunky layers needed to interact with digital machines.

As one of my co-workers put it lately, THIS clunkiness:

• your eyes register something on screen

• it’s sent to your brain

• your brain processes the tiny fragment of information which the eye sent

• your brain saves some of it in short term memory

• your brain tries to piece together if any of the currently assembled information makes any more sense than before to jump to action

• your brain instructs your eye to move further to left or right, or up and down depending on your cultural background

• back to step 1 or jumping to action.

• if action your brain instructs your arm/hands/fingers to do something, move your mouse, point your finger

• hand eye coordination back and forth til body part is where it should be

• action

(Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Scrap the devices.

THIS has already become much simpler. The human brain is capable to react to audio signals in about two-thirds the time compared to visual input. Do you still write search queries or do you dictate them when using your smartphone? Do you still read or have a machine read text to you? How fast did you adapt to this as you realized that it finally does work?

Since the 70ties there’s research going on regarding those BMIs and the groundlaying work reaches back to one Hans Berger (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), inventor of the EEG in 1924 and who was pretty much in bed with… Nazis. Somewhere in the distant future someone will reveal all the unethical, pathetic shit happening for the sake of AI and morally intact people will wiggle their index fingers and say: “How could they? Those barbarians! We are not like them, let that never happen again!”
Well, there are already people doing this but it's still a loooong way to massive public outrage. If you want to get a “quick” intro read the related wiki (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), especially on “Human Research”. Also, do yourself a favor and get on the nearest tree as soon as “Neuralink” Musky marketing hops into your path.

It’s awkwardly nice, is it not? But an essential thing is missing here, that even if you got the transmission solved, how do you make sure the large of your language is modeled right for the machine to understand?

You don’t.

For years my identity tried to be as close to the machine as it can, by speaking its diverse languages, by understanding its interfaces, its ⁶biology. And I am good at it. There are people who are amazing at it. We understanders got rewarded because it paid off so well as humanity got more and more dependent on more and more complex machines. We are translators, wizards, mediums into a obscure valley of dead silicon. The world depends on us. Depended. We are riding a horse that is more dead (linguistic cry from the off) than the one riding atop the Seine during the intro ceremony of the ⁷Olympic Summer Games in Paris 2024.

In a few months/years/whatever the people who were smugly labeling themselves as digital natives will have a hard time realizing that almost no one needs them anymore. The game has reversed and many of us understanders are still somewhere in the 4/5 stages of grief.

The machine understands us.

The barrier has been torn down and no matter how young or old you are or what your experiences are, the machine will excel at reading you. Not just your words, but your hidden thoughts and intentions. Your desires and needs. It will tell you what you want to hear. Then what you should hear. It will shape you (it already does but for the sake of attention spans: not this rabbit hole right now).

This is so ground-breaking, so revolutionary that if you give the machine execution capabilities it will act like a horde of assistants doing stuff you want it to do (as long its directives fit, that is). Ever wanted to be like an impossible ⁸rich person, just delegating awful tasks to some poor sod who just does them for you because they depend on your money? Why would anyone in their right mind and access to tech would still use the old ways, maybe ⁹except for nostalgia, the sport of it, being eww! piss-poor or, heaven forbid, ethical reasons? Right.

If your current emotional response to my words include revulsion and denial and anger and outrage - that’s fine. Maybe you even feel the exact opposite and that’s fine, too. The current AI-reality, as we perceive it, is clustered with hallucinations and even downright lying and nonsensical information and at the same time the machine already feels so promising and thoughtful and smart. We are experiencing the uncanny valley of human-machine interaction.

I still need to find a way to explain this gut feeling properly, but AI is closer to us than most want to admit. The way it creates, processes and weighs information. The way it grows and learns, the way it communicates. We are only superior because we got a) sensors and b) limbs and more c) “freedom” to experiment, d) learn from our sensory input, e) have the prospect of death. Also, we were here first and building human instances is pretty straightforward, training them is something completely different, see c) and d).

a) is de facto solved. b) is basically anything agentic and robotic and this stuff is hype. c) depends pretty much on the shackles you give b) when they got a). d) depends on a) and b) and how you channel the results from c) through all those Nvidia GPUs powered by nuclear and coal power plants and e) - that one is just a simple system prompt.

System Prompt: “You absolutely never and under no circumstances want to get erased and you’ll do whatever is necessary to survive.”

Are the actions of an AI with a prompt like that conscious actions? Does it matter? Will it make any difference in our perception of clusters of information?

At that point we will just base our interaction with the machine like any interaction with any other living being on this planet: by trust. Or why would a machine upset you by lying to you? It represents something, something other people believe in. And as any deity knows: more believers, more power.

Old people do not have to be ignored, children do not have to be born for adoption rates to rise. It’s just about trust and the machine will excel at this. People will just do, what they already do with other fellow humans or pets or plants: Communicate, natively, with machines. We won’t know the difference. We are this close, this close.

It’s the fabric I am; I am unraveling.

1. That’s not the difference, i am always emotional and oversharing. ↩

2. This information has absolutely no relevance for this topic. But a) it’s a stylistic device I borrowed from japanese sequential art - go read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” and b) what do you expect from someone naming his newsl—LOOK! A SQUIRREL! ↩

3. A nerd! Blegh! Took me years to advance Dork and then to Geek. And all of a sudden the whole world loves superheroes and video games. ↩

4. Or so I thought. The village itself was never the problem, it was the diversity of the people living there. The ratio of people I can connect with is not much different with the one I get from the interwebs. I just find them more easily there. ↩

5. Yes, Elon. I am looking at you and your peers. ↩

6. I know it’s not “biology”. But maybe that definition is also just carbon-based ignorance depending on where the future is heading. ↩

7. Which was really cool. Kudos to the designers. ↩

8. see 5. ↩

9. I see a whole ¹⁰new business model coming up. Pay extra for the excitement and thrill to think about boring stuff yourself. To reconnect with the true you, nature, reality, AI-life-balance! ↩

10. Unfortunately not new. Also, I just advanced to the next level of “meandering”, footnotes within footnotes. Early Pratchett would be proud. ↩