The world has changed since I last wrote to you: but the best is yet to come

I have been away from writing here for a while, during my journey from California to Michigan. In that time, the world went through an Indigo Point—an inflection point of profound significance—in AI

Today’s post about “AI” is the first in a new series to come, as I find myself easing back in the saddle to write—this time from my home in Michigan after a 2,400-mile Great American Road Trip while exiting California in April.

My previous posts about AI include AI Chatbots and an essay about Machine Consciousness and Turing Tests.

In the months since I left California, progress in AI has reached a breathtaking pace. Every day, there is some new jaw-dropping news.

ChatGPT 4 blows the wheels off its predecessor ChatGPT 3, this only months later after the former came into public awareness. People begin seriously talking about the appearance of AGI (artificial general intelligence), even if prematurely.

There are discussions about implementing a 6-month ‘moratorium’ on development of advanced AIs to allow the world and policy leaders to catch up. But it’s perhaps already too late to try to stuff this Pandora back into the box, not to mention the fact that ‘government’ is too slow, too incompetent, and too corrupt to be able to get ahead of the AI whirlwind anyway.

There are daily examples of LLM (large language models) like ChatGPT being connected to generative AI systems like stable diffusion, which gives the LLM the ability to create impressive drawings and photos from just a language description of the intended scene; tools like Adobe Photoshop Firefly are including generative AI to dramatically simplify the process of photo editing; there are examples that appear to show LLMs have developed what appears to be an “understanding” of certain knowledge domains, and the ability to “problem solve” and demonstrate “reasoning”.

Whether this is a genuine intrinsic capability of the LLM or just sophisticated mimicry is still being hotly debated; but regardless—it is happening.

And yet, we are still just barely at the beginning of whatever is to become of AI. This has prompted me to “peek over the horizon”, and the possibilities that I foresaw will be hard to explain, much less to digest. But that’s a topic for a subsequent post.

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Before I continue with this post, I first want to thank all of you who find value in my work and have subscribed over the years—your encouragement, interest and support helps inspire me to continue.

I’m also indescribably grateful to certain Angels who helped make all of the recent changes in my life possible in the first place. For those of you who have found value in my writing: if you haven’t yet made the transition to becoming a paying subscriber, I’d be most grateful if you would consider doing so—it matters, as it helps me to support a new family.

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You are, in a very real sense, a part of my extended family.

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As I ease into the AI topic, I want to catch you all up on what has happened in my life over these past few (whirlwind) months, and then conclude by teeing up some thoughts about the nature of the changes that are taking place in just one particular area of our world due to the rapid pace of progress in “Artificial Intelligence”—thoughts to which I will add and expand upon in future posts.

For the record, I dislike the catch-all term “Artificial Intelligence”; it has come to be an over-used, over-hyped and misused yet broadly familiar label, along with its contraction “AI.” Many different things are lumped together under the “AI” label, which leads to misunderstandings.

I plan to dive more deeply into the AI topic in future posts in the coming weeks—there are some profound and unique perspectives that I have been ruminating on which I think might interest you.

As far as I can tell from my surveys of recent content on AI, few people have so far looked at AI from the perspective that I have.

The breathtakingly rapid progress in AI since last fall is truly astonishing, and as I have been saying frequently on social media—our inability as humans to adequately perceive exponential growth will make it hard for us to grasp the rapidity of the change that is to come.

As I write this post today, I am also preparing to travel to Princeton in a few weeks to visit my friend Dr. Randell Mills, which will lead to my future writing about his continuing work in revolutionizing energy production and (hopefully) also a few video documentaries covering his work.

It turns out that AI and electrical energy production are deeply intertwined; the rapid growth of the former will place great (new) demands on the latter, as if electric vehicles weren’t already a big enough problem to add to the power grid.

Microsoft, who is behind ChatGPT, has long known this, and is planning to enter the fusion power arena by investing in Helion, because of what they see coming.

There is a risk that our current societal stratifications could grow more pronounced as a result of the coming AI revolution: one group of people will exploit these tools to their advantage over others, particularly if energy to run AI becomes a constraint. This is one of many dystopian viewpoints. But there are also some utopian views that may come to pass.

One thing is certain: the broad availability of low-cost, grid-independent, point-of-use, and ubiquitous energy production will be a key factor in determining whether beneficial AI becomes broadly accessible to the masses, or not (if, that is, “beneficial” turns out to be the right term to describe what AI will ultimately become.) [ Update: here’s a story about limiting ChatGPT sessions because of power/CPU demand.]

Energy ubiquity will also determine whether we are able to reach a new era of individual independence and self-sufficiency, or whether society will be swallowed up and choked to death by the toxicity of dependency-inducing collectivism that is the consequence of Marxist and Socialist governance—ideologies that are seeping, poisonously, into every country.

We are approaching a critical juncture in human history.

Between the coming revolutions in energy production and “AI”, the world is on the cusp of nearly inconceivable change—for better or worse, we can’t yet know.

My feeling, however, is that—contrary to the drumbeat of fear that is foisted upon us from many directions—the best is yet to come for our world.

Let me begin by filling in with a small story from my life over the last few months as I lean into the AI topic for today.

It was near the middle of March, and the April 1st date for my trek out of California—the state that I had called home for 34 years—was fast approaching. I was working hard at the blue-collar job that I had been engaged in since late 2020, and on evenings and weekends I was working to pack up everything that I owned into a small trailer for the drive to Michigan with my fiancé Emily, to start a new family with her and her daughter. If you read my posts here from January, then you know some of the backstory.

I can tell you that the miracle I wrote about in those prior posts did come to pass; I’m here, now, in this wonderful place—existing in a state of peace, mindfulness and love— that I couldn’t have conceived of experiencing last summer. The journey to get to here from there was full of literal and figurative storms, arduous work, sweat and tears, excitement and challenge, twists and turns, love and joy.

I’ll share a beautiful story about part of our cross-country journey in an upcoming post, as well.

As I look out my office window now—tucked away in a corner of a modest and old but nicely restored farmhouse that we were blessed to be able to rent, nestled in the depths of Michigan’s farm country—I can see fields of corn, alfalfa, soy and lush Michigan woods stretching out in all directions.

In this place, my mind begins to expand, once again, reaching out in a sort of resonance with the distant horizons that I’m blessed to experience out here in the countryside. I don’t think I will ever again be comfortable living within the mind-limiting confines of a suburban town or city.

My new office space in this farmhouse is nearly as large as the entire (tiny) cottage that my youngest daughter and I had been subsisting in for three years back in the hinterlands of California.

The floor slopes a bit in this house because of the age of this place, but to me it possesses a certain charming character—the uneven floor being a physical embodiment of the eras that this house has weathered.

In this office, the books that I had packed away in boxes and stored—first in a trailer and then in a dark garage during four difficult years—are now out on shelves once more. They are again at my fingertips, and serve as a visual reminder of the tapestry of rich ideas and knowledge that I had gleaned from them in my younger days.

God’s hand has clearly been at work in this past year, making this new life possible; my new life here is a new corner of Heaven for us.

Back in March, before I moved to Michigan, my two daughters, now 25 and 22, wanted to go on one more of our periodic “road trips with Dad” journeys: a day trip where we jump in the pickup and drive to the coast or up into the mountains to see the wonders of nature. And talk.

The drive times on these trips were always enhanced with deep dives into the kind of rich topics that take a while to build up to; because there is a need to explain some complex foundational concepts that have to be covered before getting to the heart of the topic, it takes a while to “get to the point”. Over the years on these trips, we’ve talked about esoteric topics involving math, science, history, philosophy, religion, and physics.

On previous road trips, we delved into Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem and how it adds mathematical rigor to the idea of faith; about dark matter and how it might be a solution to the world’s energy needs while also indirectly solving Fermi’s Paradox; about the Bible, the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and ancient history; about Sumer and India and Egypt and Gobekli Tepe and the rich mysteries that still appear in our world which testify to a history of civilizations about which we seem to have collective amnesia (Graham Hancock’s theses.)

Our times together on these trips let us dig deep into “big idea” topics that had usually been brewing in my head for months, and let us expound on them at length while the miles passed by on the way to our destinations (which sometimes we didn’t particularly plan. The journey, not the destination, being the thing.)

On this particular trip, we decided to head to the foothills of the Sierra to see the raging rivers that were the result of this season’s dramatic rain in California, and we revisited a reservoir—Lake Success—that we had been to on Father’s Day a few years prior when the water level was frighteningly low because of the California drought.

This time, though, that same reservoir was filled to the brim, and the Tule River that fed it was raging with rain runoff. The fall and winter of 2022 was an inflection point in the increasingly grim water situation in California, much to the chagrin of the climate alarmists who were sure (and in a twisted way, perhaps hoping) that the drought would continue.

Almost two decades of drought virtually ended in a single three-month period of intense rainfall. With this year’s likely El Nino, the conditions are right for continuation—another wet rainy season this fall.

The Tule River upstream of Lake Success. Even as swollen as it was, the smooth boulders far up its still-dry banks testify to there having been even more powerful flows in the river’s history.

As we drove to the foothills and onward to the Tule River, I was unpacking for my daughters my ideas about “Artificial Intelligence”, and what it might bring to bear in their world in the years to come.

In particular, I focused on the unique perspective that will form the basis of my following article about AI.

“Objects in Mirror are closer than they appear” with a sunset in the rearview mirror. A photo from my and Emily’s Route 66 road trip from California to Michigan is suggestive in two ways about the rapid transformative progress of AI

As the caption for the photo above suggests, “objects in mirror are close than they appear” is a good metaphor for what is now occurring in AI.

The future will be here faster than we can blink.

As I finished that March road trip talk with my daughters (the subject of which will appear in a subsequent post), I ended it with a comment about my youngest daughter’s graduation from college which was then coming up in mid-May (she has since graduated from Fresno State with a degree in information technology and data analytics).

Recognizing the profound “indigo point” that the world had gone through after the public release and uptake of tools like ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, I said to her:

“Yours, the class of 2023, will be the last graduating class of its kind. The future of K-12 and college education will forever be changed, as of right now.”

“An indigo point is that point at which one should ethically, at the very least plan to take pause and watch for any new trends or unanticipated consequences in their industry/market/discipline – to make ready for a change in the wind.”

“Inflection point theory in a nutshell, is the sub-discipline of value chain analytics or strategy (my expertise) in which particular focus is given those nodes, transactions or constraints which cause the entire value chain to swing wildly (whipsaw) in its outcome (ergodicity). The point of inflection at which such signal is typically detected or hopefully even anticipated, is called an indigo point.” The Ethical Skeptic

What I meant about education forever being changed because of the “AI indigo point” was this: Due to the rapid adoption of ChatGPT and its analogs—AI systems which have been shown to exhibit a linguistic and reasoning capacity sufficient for ChatGPT to pass (with average marks initially, but still pass) things like the bar exam and med school entrance exams—it would now unavoidably lead to a “fork in the road” for education.

I told my daughters that either:

(a) students would “cheat” and use ChatGPT to write their term papers and do their homework, thereby making it appear that these students had a mastery of the subject that wasn’t legitimately their own, but was due to an AI like ChatGPT—thereby (further and irreversibly) diluting the meaning and value of an academic “credential”; or

(b) the use of these tools might actually enhance education by “filling in the gaps” left by less competent teachers and professors, because students would have a highly competent 24x7 virtual assistant to interact with to help them learn; or

(c) schools might become centers of draconian “lockdown” policies, in which administrators fearful of AI abuse (and the loss of their own jobs, should the education system implode) would strictly forbid the use of technology in the classroom, perhaps even requiring onerous “surveillance” to make sure students weren’t cheating at home using AI.

Whichever of these forks end up being taken, the fact is that the broad availability of ChatGPT and similar in the fall of 2022 instantly changed the trajectory for traditional 7-12 and college education.

Instantly.

A new “teaching resource” that until late 2022 was virtually unknown to the system is now available to anyone, anywhere with a browser on a cell phone. And it instantly transforms, forever, the nature of “education” because one or more of these forks will become reality in the months ahead.

When you step back and consider just this singular impact of AI among all the others that will affect “information workers” jobs, for example, and you consider how quickly this new situation came into being, you have to concede that we have indeed passed through an AI indigo point: one of many ahead for the world, whose long-term effects we can only begin to guess at.

As I wrap up this post, here are a few photos from my collection that connect to this post.

Thank you all for being a part of the CognitiveCarbon family.

CognitiveCarbon (Eric Tilton) and Emily, from our road trip in April.

A warm spring breeze fills our new kitchen. This home has become our sanctuary.

One of my bookshelves in the new office one sunlit morning, as my books literally see the light of day again after a long period of darkness

Resources

(I may add to this in the future as I come across more supporting resources)

One of the best resources that I came across recently to understand what may be coming is this video:

The pace of adoption is truly astonishing

Update: Right on cue.