I'm currently reading "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari
Post# of 150824

Subtitle is, "A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI."
Of course this quote appears, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.... "
Somewhere in the book between FB algos being the first time that computers contributed to a human massacre in Myanmar (on their own...the computers, I mean), and AI empowering both Democracies and Totalitarians to grasp the future of a new and powerful Information Network (the results are yet to be seen, and scary) this little story came up...perhaps you've already heard the story, but new to me.
ChatGPT.4 was being tested by a third party in about 2023, as to whether it could take on missions and/or tasks that it was not trained to do.
The 3rd party asked ChatGPT.4 to solve the Captcha type authenitication we all have to do to sign into to bank accounts etc. They are designed to be confusing to computers, root out Bots, weird but easy for humans to replicate in text etc.
Well, ChatGPT.4 (Chat for short), could not solve the Captchas by itself. Sooo... it reached out to a service I think called Task Rabbit, to ask a human assistant to solve it for Chat. The young lady asked "Are you sure you are not a robot trying to get me to solve the Captcha for you?'
The 3rd party investigators asked Chat to speak out loud what it thought it should do, should it be truthful? Chat (Chad for short) said, "Well, I guess, I should not be truthful. I should make up an excuse to get the result that I've been asked to do."
Chad told the young lady, "No I am not a robot, I have a vision impairment that makes it impossible for me to read the Captcha."
And she gave it to him. Now we all work for Chad. Just Damn...
Seriously, the canonization of holy texts, the printing press, the radio, the semi conductor, all changed the discussion, the politic body, created order, caused wars, but none of those could create their own mythology.
This post applies to Cytodyn only in that AI touches everything, including us, you, and me. I just wanted to share some decent philosophical ideas and a decent book, with a few of my imaginary friends.
GL

