[2023-02-06] Love, present moment, connection
In response to my most recent Saturday Synopsis, a friend wrote to me to say that my post had reminded him of an article in Fast Company magazine. In it, Iain Thomas (poet, novelist, and new media artist) and Jasmine Wang (technologist and philosopher) share key insights from their new book, What Makes Us Human: An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.
Before delving into the insights, let's first look at what artificial intelligence is and how it works. My favourite answer to the first question was from Inspirit Scholars and its webpage What is AI for Kids? An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Kids. The article explains:
Artificial intelligence, or "AI," is the ability for a computer to think and learn.
With AI, computers can perform tasks that are typically done by people, including processing language, problem-solving, and learning.
Examples of AI at work in our lives are Alexa and Siri, self-driving cars, face recognition on cell phones, chatbots, search engines, and movie recommendations on streaming services such as Netflix.
In How Does Artificial Intelligence Work, Innoplexus answers my second question:
Parsing through the mountains of data created by humans, AI systems perform intelligent searches, interpreting both text and images to discover patterns in complex data, and then act on those learnings.
Getting back to the work of Thomas and Wang, they discovered that when you feed AI "the most profound, poignant, spiritual, and awe-inspiring texts from mankind's history" and ask the AI questions, a pattern emerges. In fact, say Thomas and Wang, the AI kept coming back to three principles.
- Love is the meaning of everything. "Love is the purpose behind our lives," the AI concluded, "the reason why we’re here."
- We do best when we live in the present moment. "As soon as we start to leave it, and we start to dwell on the past or become anxious about the future, we begin to suffer."
- Connection is fundamental. "[W]e are fundamentally connected to each other and to the universe around us."
Thomas and Wang acknowledge that while interacting with AI, asking questions and getting responses, they "may be feeling, sensing, and interacting with...the collective wisdom of mankind." They conclude:
We record our thoughts by writing them down. If you take a piece of technology and get it to analyze all of our thoughts to find the patterns in our language, then you’re going to be speaking to the sum total of who we are.
This conclusion reminded me—in a very simplistic way—of word clouds, which were popular a few years ago. A common application of this technology was to analyze the responses to a question by participants at a gathering and to present those answers in a word cloud, with the size of each word or response in direct proportion to the frequency with which it was mentioned.
The Fast Company article got me thinking about my blog. I wondered what the AI would reflect if I fed it all 900+ Jenesis posts. It might come back to the same three themes: love is the reason we are here, live in the moment, connection keeps us alive. But I think it would also reflect hope, optimism, acceptance, science, health, art, writing, learning, family, gratitude, stories and much more.
