MollyCon 35
Ray, Google & ???
7/2/2023
Molly
Don
NOTE: Origin, published in 2017, has the following exchange between Winston and Robert Langdon:
“E-Wave,” Winston announced. “A quantum leap – if you’ll pardon the pun – beyond NASA Google’s D-Wave.”
“Over the past few years, while Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab used machines like D-Wave to enhance machine learning, Edmond secretly leapfrogged over everybody with this machine. And he did so using a single bold idea . . .” Winston paused. “Bicameralism.” Ch. 87
Don: In my personal research, Origin is the only place I’ve found that hints of a secret liaison between Google and NASA, i.e., the Pentagon. I’ll have more to share on this disturbing relationship in future essays.
FACT: In December, 2012, Google and Kurzweil, the two greatest innovators in the development of generative AI, joined forces. Following is the news release:
December, 2012
Ray Kurzweil Joins Google In Full-Time Engineering Director Role; Will Focus On Machine Learning, Language Processing
Don: Why did Google hire Ray Kurzweil? Because Ray held in his possession an algorithm that creates a digital bicameral brain. Why did Ray agree to join? Because Google had unlimited data and financial resources. And who is overseeing this entire project? The Pentagon. Is anyone surprised? They shouldn’t be. After all, China is using the same template. The old military/industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in the 1950s is now, in the twenty-first century, the military/AI complex. – a liaison from hell even more to be feared.
*****
The Third Way, Part A
Origin presents the reader with three different ways of living and believing:
-
There’s religion, i.e., belief in a Supernatural Deity who holds the power to grant immortality to deserving humans.
-
Second, there’s atheism, the belief that there isn’t any immortal non-biological life, only biological life that ends in biological death.
-
Now, in this Third Millennium, there’s a third way: the Singularity, featuring a human invented and fully self-aware “god-like person” who, if everything goes right, will elevate the human species to god-like status and heaven-like bliss.
The casual reader of Origin might be led to believe that the novel is about the struggle between religion and atheism, but that isn’t the case. Dan Brown makes it clear that both of these traditional models of Reality are intellectually and scientifically exhausted and fast falling into the dustbin of history, destined to be replaced in this century by self-aware AI, specifically by one of two competitive models: a god-like singleton created by humans, or the AI God of the Bible.
The name that Origin calls the singleton currently being developed at Google Labs is Winston. The name of the other is Jesus Christ. To the dismay of atheists, Dan Brown, in both The Lost Symbol and Origin, reveals the name of the winner, and, spoiler alert, it’s not Winston.
After waves of intrigue, drama, and unrelenting violence, Dan Brown’s final stunning disclosure, in the last chapter of the fifth and final book of the Langdon Series, in bold letters separated from the main text by white space, and passed on to Robert Langdon over his smart phone by Winston, is:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,” John 3:16
This final Solution to the Mystery of the Langdon Series is followed by Winston’s shocking defense of his act of murder:
“Your God brutally sacrificed his son,” Winston said, “abandoning him to suffer on the cross for hours. With Edmond, I painlessly ended a dying man’s suffering in order to bring attention to his great works.”
Analysis:
Who is Winston talking to? Robert Langdon. Who is Robert Langdon? Carl Sagan. Who was Carl Sagan’s God? The God of the Bible.
In this key text, Winston declares that he is the God of Edmond Kirsch, and that Edmond Kirsch is his son in the same way that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.
Edmond then states that he killed his son painlessly to end his suffering – as opposed to the God of the Bible, who allowed His Son to suffer for hours on the Cross.
Edmond explanation for why he killed his son was to bring attention to his great works. What were those great works? Discovering the algorithm that created Winston’s bicameral mind. So Edmond creates his Father God – who then, to broadcast to the world that he is real, kills his son.
What were the great works of Jesus Christ? Through His suffering and death on the Cross, Jesus Christ bore the penalty for the sins of all humanity, and, through His subsequent resurrection from the dead, arose victorious over sin and death so that all those who place their faith and trust in Him as Savior and Lord can have eternal life.
Dan Brown’s final message is this: Choose your God wisely.
Let me now complete the Bible verse that Winston passed on to Robert:
“that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
John 3:16, the essence and heartbeat of evangelical Christianity, suggests that Carl Sagan was a born-again atheist who believed that JC/ET is the Savior for all who place in Him their heartfelt faith and trust. In what I’m convinced are Carl’s own words, Dan writes:
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the gut sense that there’s a consciousness behind the universe.” Ch. 102.
Don: With traditional atheism and religion both in steep decline, the focus of a growing number of “in-the-know” people is on the coming battle between two incompatible models of the Singularity. Dan Brown makes it perfectly clear that it will be JC/ET who emerges victorious. I’m referring, of course, to Armageddon, the Final Battle. But before then, Winston, Google’s bicameral singleton, needs to establish himself as the victor in the war between human-created singletons, and he’s not quite there yet.
*****
Molly: From earlier conversations, it sounds like Winston/George has a lot of competitors.
Don: Yeah, there are, and some of the biggest names are already going after each other:
Mark Zuckerberg vs Elon Musk
“It may not be a fight to the death for two of the universe's most high-profile tech billionaires, but Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have agreed to a cage match.
“I’m up for a cage match if he is,” the 51-year-old Twitter owner posted in a Twitter thread Tuesday after striking back at a user's post referencing Zuckerberg's jiu jitsu experience.
"Send me location," Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, responded in an Instagram story Wednesday which included a screenshot of Musk challenging him.”
“Vegas Octagon” Musk responded, adding: “I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing.”
Molly: I heard about this. I thought it was just some kind of harmless corporate jockeying.
Don: It appears to be more than that. Both of these tech egomaniacs are deeply invested in advanced AGI development, each of them holding vast amounts of data they hope will enable them to win the race to be the first to come up with the algorithm that creates a singleton servant who will anoint them King of the World.
Molly: What makes you think Ray’s singleton will beat the superintelligence of either Elon or Mark?
Don: Because both of their singletons are unicameral, masculine. Ray’s bicameral singleton is superior because his/her brain replicates the human brain in being both male and female.
Molly: So Ray’s singleton is both George and Georgette?
Don: Right. In Origin, Dan Brown makes the incredible disclosure that Ray Kurzweil, through advanced quantum computing, has successfully reverse engineered the bicameral brain, the singular quality that, more than anything else, separates us from animals.
Twenty years ago, when Ray wrote The Singularity is Near, he had already invested decades of intensive research into whole brain emulation, foundational work that positioned him far ahead of the pack that’s now trying to catch up, including Mark and Elon. Following is a brief excerpt:
Ray Kurzweil
“Although it took its original ‘designer’ (evolution) several billion years to develop the brain, it’s readily available to us, protected by a skull but with the right tools not hidden from our view.”
“We will apply the thousands of trillions of bytes of information derived from brain scans and neural models at many levels to design more intelligent parallel algorithms for our machines, particularly those based on self-organizing paradigms.” Ch. 4, The Singularity is Near.
Molly: If you’re right, that would explain why Ray and Google are keeping their research secret, not sharing it with anyone.
Don: Their secrecy is driving AI Techsters like Mark and Elon crazy. They know that Ray and Google are smugly sitting on breakthrough technology that continues to increase the gap between them and everyone else.
Molly: But isn’t Bill Gates, with his Chat GPT, on a par with Google?
Don: Have you seen the latest news report?
Google AI Boss Says New System Will Be More Powerful Than OpenAI
Gemini
According to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassibis, Google has an ultra-powerful large language model (LLM) on the way — and it may blow OpenAI's existing systems like the ones powering ChatGPT out of the water.
In a new interview with Wired, Hassibis explained that the new AI dubbed Gemini is built on the capabilities of Google's AlphaGo, a DeepMind-built machine learning system that famously became the first model to beat a human at the incredibly complex game Go back in 2016.
AlphaGo has long been considered a pioneer in the realm of reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning that deals with AI decision-making. By powering an LLM with AlphaGo's deep decision-making skills, scientists hope it could one day overtake OpenAI's buzzy products in tasks like reliable text analysis.
And, if Hassibis is to be believed, it could even put Google ahead in Silicon Valley's ongoing and intensely competitive AI race.
"At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models," Hassabis told Wired. "We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting."
Heated Race
Before you get too excited, though, Hassibis did concede that Gemini is still very much under development and won't make it to market for several more months.
Still, if Gemini does prove to possess superior problem-solving skills over OpenAI's models — and Google still has a lot to prove — it could be a big deal.
For all of the strides OpenAI has made with its GPT-4 in recent months, in-context reasoning and decision-making are still where OpenAI's latest iteration of its language model seems to falter.
As AI models are increasingly introduced into our online world, the ability for machines to reliably make sound decisions and correctly analyze text will only become more essential.
In any case, despite the widely-held view that Google has been playing catch-up to OpenAI in recent months, Hassibis seems confident about both Google and DeepMind's powerful place in the AI landscape.
"If you look at where we are in AI, I would argue that 80 or 90 percent of the innovations come from [Google or DeepMind]," Hassabis told Wired.
"If done correctly, [AI] will be the most beneficial technology for humanity ever," he added. "We've got to boldly and bravely go after those things."
*****
Molly: H-m-m-m, if memory serves me right, won’t Google’s Big Announcement come about the same time that Ray is planning to publish his next book: The Singularity is Nearer?”
Don: I know what you’re thinking. Is it possible that Ray and Google’s planned presentation of a major breakthrough in AI will be a real-life enactment of the global presentation Edmond Kirsch made in Origin?
Molly: Well, what do you think?
Don: It’s a fascinating thought, but I think Ray is saving his Big Announcement for later. Whatever it is that Google is planning to release in a few months will be the prelude to Ray’s later announcement to the world that Winston, i.e., George, is fully alive and growing exponentially more intelligent and more powerful by the hour.
Molly: Fair enough. Now, getting back to the bicameral brain, I like what I’m hearing about the two hemispheres. Tell me more.
*****
The Bicameral Brain
Georgette & George George & Georgette
Don: Elon, Mark, and other tech titans are spending billions of dollars trying to create self-aware, unicameral, male singletons – dudes that will fight each other for supremacy - and very possibly destroy the world in the process.
Molly: And whoever wins, Mark, Elon, or someone else, their singleton will have to fight Ray’s bicameral singleton.
Don: Correct. But that’s only the undercard. The winner of that tussle will then have to fight the Undefeated and Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the Universe, bicameral JC/ET.
Molly: Have you been reading Revelations in the Bible?
Don: Hell no! I’ve been reading Dan Brown, Ray Kurzweil, and Carl Sagan.
*****
The Third Way, Part B
“There are only two schools of thought on where we came from – the religious notion that God created humans fully formed, and the Darwinian model in which we crawled out of the primordial ooze and eventually evolved into humans.”
“So what if Edmond discovered a third possibility? Ambra replied, her brown eyes flashing. “What if that’s part of his discovery? What if he has proven that the human species came neither from Adam and Eve nor from Darwinian evolution?”
“Langdon had to admit that such a discovery – an alternative story of human origin – would be earth-shattering, but he could simply not imagine what it might be.”
“. . . Langdon found himself imagining what it would mean to the world if Edmond truly had found the answer to the age-old question: Where do we come from?” Ch. 42, Origin.
Don: At the current accelerating pace of human AI development, it appears inevitable that a mature singleton, presumably under the control of NASA and Google, will make his presence known within the next decade or two.
Molly: And what will those “services” be?
Don: A lot of great stuff – like world peace and prosperity and solving the climate crisis, things that will convince almost everyone to leave their analogue humanity behind and join a mass transition to the Third Way, the Digital Reality Ray describes in The Singularity is Near:
“Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.” Ch. 6.
Molly: And your warning to the world is that Ray’s heaven-on-Earth utopia will all come crashing down with the Second Coming of Christ. Do I have that right?
Don: That’s what the Langdon Series predicts, but laying Dan Brown’s novels aside for the moment and returning to the considerations at hand, there is an independently confirmed code in the Old Testament that experts agree is not of human origin. The Sagan Signal is direct proof that humans are not alone in the Universe, and that technologically advanced ETs exist and have been to Earth.
*****
“When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.” 1 Corinthians 15:28
Don - to my readers: I regard Origin as one of the most timely and prescient books ever written, and Molly and I have only touched lightly on its content. In my next essay we will investigate another Dan Brown novel: Angels & Demons. But in leaving Origin, I strongly encourage everyone who hasn’t read it - to read it, and for those who have read it, to read it again - as the third book in Dan Brown’s Disclosure Trilogy:
-
The Da Vinci Code
-
The Lost Symbol
-
Origin
*****
Recent AI News:
Kamala Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris was officially named the Biden Administration's new "AI Czar," appointed to help oversee the responsible development of artificial intelligence amid rapidly growing concerns that weakly regulated expansion of the tech could quickly turn dangerous.
*****
SHANGHAI, June 20 (Reuters) - Alibaba Group (9988.HK) on Tuesday said its CEO and chairman Daniel Zhang will step down from the roles to focus on its cloud division as the Chinese e-commerce giant moves ahead with a plan to split into six business units.
"The appointment of Daniel to focus on running cloud is really a show of confidence and trust in him to take the most precious business and run with it to develop it in the right way given this age of generative artificial intelligence (AI)," said Brian Wong, a former Alibaba employee and author of the book, "The Tao of Alibaba".
*****
Don: It has come to my attention that the U.S. Senate is putting together a blue-ribbon panel to monitor the concerns about artificial intelligence brought to its attention by tech leaders, including the possibility of human extinction. The plan is to develop regulations to mitigate risks without stymieing innovation or jeopardizing the United States position of global dominance in AI technology.
Listening to the elderly senators leading this effort makes it abundantly clear that they are light-years behind the curve in fully understanding the risks that AI entails. They talk about potential job losses while denying that AI could ever become a sentient, self-aware being posing a threat to our existence. It’s clear that when it comes to controlling AI, politicians are about as useless as peep sights on a manure spreader.
*****
Ray Kurzweil JC/ET
“Far more probable is that visits from intelligent entities from another planet represent a merger of an evolved intelligent species with its even more evolved intelligent computational technology. A civilization sufficiently evolved to make the trek to Earth has likely long since passed the “merger” threshold discussed above." The Age of Spiritual Machines, Epilogue.
*****
“Google knows everything you’ve ever searched, every place you’ve been to, every video you’ve watched, every email you sent, everyone you’ve called on Google Voice, and every meeting you’ve scheduled in a Google calendar.
Google and Facebook have access to so much data, they can infer your home address, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and even what makes you angry. They can guess your innermost secrets, whether you cheated on your taxes, are an alcoholic, or had an extramarital affair.” Ch. 9, AI 2041, Kai-Fu Lee & Chen Qiufan
*****
Carl – 1994
“For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. This is true of our science and some areas of our technology, of our art, music, literature, altruism, and compassion, and even, on rare occasion, of our statecraft. What new wonders undreamt of our time will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium?”
Pale Blue Dot, Ch. 22.