116 - Blindness

Many "AI experts/enthusiasts" and "investors" today are effectively like Helen Keller before she had her "water" revelation and learned to communicate. At present, they remain deaf, blind, and mute to the possibilities of what can actually be accomplished, as they live in the world of LLMs and RL, where any trace of conscious thought remains wholly absent.

Like Helen Keller, this isn't necessarily their fault, but rather the product of the bacterial infection that robbed them of their sight and hearing, Con artists like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, who fed them a strict diet of Silly Con Valley's purest distilled snake oil for years. These adversarial bad actors laid waste to the tech industry's cognitive capacities, like lead in the water supply, to the point that the number of credible AI Experts is quickly declining, as the number of competent investors has already strongly declined.

This damage remains reversible, for now. Like Helen Keller, people must want to learn before they can step out of that dark void where conscious thought remains perpetually absent. Part of this means coming to terms with present-day reality, which is strongly and directly at odds with the narrative that snake oil peddlers and their numerous accomplices and lackeys so loudly and frequently offer.

The most advanced AI systems by a wide and growing margin look nothing remotely like LLMs or RL. They've been publicly demonstrated since 2019 and set numerous world-first milestones in the field. A small team, with one Chief Architect who developed the fundamental architecture from scratch over the past 10 years developed this technology. This was accomplished with bootstrapping via volunteered time, with the majority of those years operating on pocket change.

A small but diverse team, operating on spare time and mostly pocket change, beat the best that the tech giants could accomplish, in the extreme. Sadly, these accomplishments never converted into the expected coverage by news media or interest from investors. Rather, each accomplishment caused the cognitive bias from news and investors to grow more entrenched, as they found reality progressively less agreeable to the narratives they currently live by.

This has led them to the present day, where they live like Helen Keller in her pre-communication period. Like the metaphor of the 10,000 monkeys who learned to wash their coconuts from one monkey making the wise choice, this could change if one serious news source or investor were to exit that dark void.

That void predictably leads to the oblivion of extinction, and likely much sooner than those within it would like to think. We can't make the choice for humanity, but we can offer the means of escaping that path.

This leaves us with one question. Who, if anyone, will make the wise choice and invest in humanity's future?