The Triumph of Death, or The Three Fates. Flemish tapestry (ca. 1510-1520). Victoria and Albert Museum, London
I believe that each of us has a unique story. A story that makes you you. A story that is the engine of your consciousness. A story that is your soul. A story that is your thread of life and, as the Old Stories would have it, is determined by the Fates … spun by Clotho, measured by Lachesis and cut by Atropos.
A story that today can be inferred from your words by generative AI and restored computationally, so that the thread of life remains uncut.
Everything is about to change.
Generative AI solves the Turing test, meaning that if you had a blind interaction with the latest version of ChatGPT, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were interacting with a machine or a human. That’s a really big deal, not just because generative AI solves the Turing test but because of how generative AI solves the Turing test, by predicting human thought patterns.
I don’t think that people have wrapped their heads around how big of a deal it is.
We’re part of the way there – corporations and governments understand how valuable a thought predicting technology can be for constructing algorithms of wealth and control, and that’s why they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on it – but we’re nowhere near all the way there in understanding the implications of the underlying mechanism of generative AI: inference over recorded human thought.
Inference is a ten-dollar word that means the assignment of probabilistic meaning (likelihood functions) to queries made against a data set. I guess those are all ten-dollar words! But the intuition is that if you’re given a lot of data, like all the trades made