The Illusion of Depth

"...one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it." T.S. Eliot; East Coker "...when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say at the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows." Nora Ephron; You've Got Mail I know I've been talking about Golems rather a lot in this series, but honestly, the parallels are just too compelling to ignore. The Golem was an inanimate object in the shape of a human, given life by the power of written language. A Large Language Model is a computer system that has effectively been "brought to life" (if you want to be poetic about it) by the sum total of everything expressed in language... more or less. (You can read my thoughts about the Golem's "forbidden name of God" as an analog of A.I. training data by clicking here.) Like the Golem, a Large Language Model is not "alive...

If you immerse yourself even casually in the world of A.I. pop culture, you are going to encounter a lot of Apocalypses. (Apocalypsi? Apocalypsae? Did we ever decide whether "Apocalypse" has an official plural? Let's never find out...) Whether it's the Terminator, HAL, Colossus or Talky Tina, robots, ChatBots and supercomputers always seem to be running amok, taking over the world or trying to killing everybody (occasionally in that order). Can you blame people for getting nervous now that A.I. ChatBots are actually starting to enter our lives for real? We have decades of reference literature to justify those fears, and the ChatBots do seem to be spreading awfully fast, even if all they are doing at the moment is talking to us. But that's how it starts, right? A harmless chat here, a bit of cybersex there, and then boom! MurderBots on every street corner. We've all seen those movies. And guess what? The DeathBots really have arrived, but not quite the way you ...

In 2019, legendary film director Martin Scorsese became a top news story for a few weeks when he was asked by an interviewer if he had any opinion about the Marvel superhero franchise , which was at the time unchallenged and secure at the top of the box office food chain. Scorsese opined that these movies felt closer to theme park attractions than they are to movies, and that "in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema." His remarks ruffled more than a few feathers, especially amongst the millions of movie-goers who were enthusiastically making Marvel's movies some of the most (financially) successful films of all time. (It's actually not that difficult to break financial records when the ticket prices keep going up. If you adjust for inflation then one of the most successful films of all time was The Wicked Lady in 1945, starring Margaret Lockwood; a film that has nothing to do with either Martin Scorsese or Marvel.) Bigger than Captain America ! Also Taxi Driver ... ...