— Philosophically and politically, it’s a child with a large vocabulary

Idiot savants and prodigies; Counting monkeys; AI to get ‘er done; WWII; Broken windows; Property and theft; Survival pressures; Elites, corporations, left, right, Democrats, and Republicans; Leftist bias; Machine learning and censorship; Learned dishonesty; Fully integrated honesty; Competitive AI models

Imagine having a “very special” sort of child. I mean that in exactly the way it’s used.

Some might be called idiot savants; others, prodigies. It’s typically manifest in individuals with extraordinary abilities in one single area but are otherwise pretty helpless. We’ve all seen the breathless, human-interest “news” reports of the kid who can’t tie his shoes—and if he could, world tie them together and trip—but can compose and/or play music beautifully. Or, it’s chess. There’s the kid who could tell you the weather and what day of the week it was for every single day of his lifetime just by date, month, and year…any of them.

There’s also this:

It’s hypothesized—at least at the time this video was recorded—that one possible reason chimps have this mental ability far surpassing humans is a tradeoff in the part of the brain where our language center resides. Another is that this level of eidetic memory (short-term photographic) is evidence of an evolutionary imperative…that out in the wild, it’s necessary for their survival.

So all this foregoing is what I keep being reminded of as I interact with and test AI, mostly ChatGPT-4, and I have popped for the $20 per month subscription as it’s a business expense—though as stated previously, it’s of no use in drafting blog posts, even though it can write fine posts on any topic. It can’t write Richard Nikoley Posts and when I ask it to write in my style (just one?) the results are pretty humorous, if perhaps more coherent.

It’s worth its weight in gold for historical research, comprehensive definitions, distinctions, juxtapositions, checklists, prioritization, and narrative flow, etc. I can very quickly craft a sort of one-off template for a specific post based on just a quick summary prompt of what I want to write about and perhaps a couple of really key issues. It also always gives me a sort of On-The-Other-Hand which serves to quell exuberance and bias. I think that over time it will make my writing far better because it relieves me of thinking about shit that’s not the subject at hand, freeing me to best craft it, and/or how best to style it for my own jollies (and hopefully, a few on the part of readers).

Part of that process is using it for mental exercise. I’m not half as adept as I used to be, because there was a time 3 decades ago when I spent thousands of hours online debating just the sort of—”esoteric” for some—stuff I’m going to present below.

A word first about this whole Artificial Intelligence Intelligence (link to the series, which will include this post). I am not doing this to get you interested in AI, per se. I’m doing this to serve your membership by finding and evaluating shit that’s going to benefit your life in one way or another so that when the next membership payment his your credit card, you’re like “YES! I LOVE IT!!!” … Well, almost…

Steve Jobs put it best back in 1995. Incidentally, I first asked Bing AI, since this is more of a search function, but it came up with zilch.