Game Stop, Kermit, and The Mystification of the Machine: Late Edition
Forgive this late edition, Gentle Readers. Things are changing over here at Singular XQ. Look for some fun announcements in the coming weeks. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, as we have some big upfront capital needs for what's coming next. We are excited to share when the time is right.
In the meantime, Gamestop becomes the latest to announce layoffs as revenue shows signs of weakening. This is the tech sector herd effect, which seems particularly vulnerable to the volatile excesses of shareholder economics. Maybe if they hadn’t entered the NFT marketplace so hard when ethnographic research of gamers revealed that they mistrusted NFTs and saw it as a cash grab? Again, herd effect. Monkey see, monkey do. Maybe a little Constanza principle might be called for?
Why does the puppet work? Because the child is fascinated by autonomy and agency, as well as animacy and inanimacy. The child of a certain age knows it’s a puppet, which is part of the delight. It’s also part of the delight to release that knowledge into a willing suspension of disbelief, which is what we do as adults. And this charms and delights us, teaches us, and forms community. This human capability to believe in objects temporarily allows us to think about situations and difficult emotions at a comfortable distance.
As children, Cookie Monster allows us to think about desires and self-control and laugh at the fact we lose it at a time when parents act stern about controlling our bowels and our bladder and learning discipline. Oscar lets us think about uncomfortable mood states that make us antisocial. Still, we are comforted that everyone tolerates him and lets him stay at an age where emotional regulation takes up a significant amount of the child’s brain glucose. That this enchantment of objects and our enjoyment of them continue beyond the transitional stage (as described by DW Winnicott) likely enables further release and delight and allows us to think in different ways than when focused on survival. It takes us out of ourselves. As we learn in Stanislavskian theory, the magic object, the “endowed” object, has a hold on us. If the actor looks at an object with intention and focus, providing an “as-if” reality, the audience is also drawn into it. Think about this the next time you watch Frodo hold the ring, or Amarendra hold his sword.
Further, the object that suddenly moves of its own accord grabs our attention as a matter of survival. Because the predator evolved the ability to blend into the environment and an illusion of inanimacy, the second it moves, we realize sub-cognitively that it has agency and becomes a threat. Our CNS and ANS know it before it reaches cognitive reflection. It’s why we start when we see a mouse out of the corner of our eye. Consequently, the shaman and charlatan can capture our attention and control us temporarily if they learn how to use it well. The shaman and the artist do so with a higher purpose: self-transcendence.
I like to think Jim Henson was a shaman. Recall that the secret to the power is the child half knows it is a puppet when they are small. They might not even half understand it, as the puppet may scare the child as much as it fascinates them. The very young child will go into freeze. Freeze is the third way between fight and flight. It allows for a more thorough assessment of the potential threat (if we don’t get eaten first). The older child knows it’s a puppet. That is the pure delight of it. You can see children on Sesame Street looking behind the wall to talk to the puppeteer.
Other people, in contrast, try to get our attention by making us believe that objects have autonomy and agency and may not have self-transcendence and learning in mind. If we get your attention, we tap into your amygdala and fear; therefore, you begin to attend to it as a matter of life or death.
I am delighted with AI, which captures my attention, and intelligent querying is endlessly diverting and, yes, useful.
The delight is knowing Jim Henson is there.
Many people seem to be unaware of Jim Henson regarding “AI.” Some of us seem to be in freeze. Remember, the biggest mysteries of AI are what is enclosed by NDA. How much learning supervision and maintenance go into making it act the way it does? We know they’ve backpedaled to “semi-supervised” learning. “Fine-tuning” and “maintenance” are they supervision? One form of regulation may be enforcing definitions of these terms in the future. For now, we have to wait and see how the lawsuits piling up explain precisely this phenomenon.
The Brain is Not a Computer and Other Breaking News
The brain doesn’t compute, calculate, and predict as its primary operations.Our obsession with this and the overhype of this part of the brain is simply a way of harnessing neurological research to the end of predictive markets. Neuroforecasting will stimulate a CAGR of 3.9% in neuroscience in the next decade. Using metaphors to help us understand what the human brain is and is not is both assistive and metaphoric. Not representative. We started using the idea of the computer to help us gain a weak understanding of a complex neurochemical organ made of bio-organic tissue. The language crept into our own self-descriptors
“Wait, I’m still processing.”
“Cannot compute.”
“I cannot retrieve that memory.”
Computers gave us this as a convenient metaphor. Nothing inside the brain is like a motherboard. We don’t retrieve and store memory. It’s a helpful analogy. The fact is that “Superalignment “cannot happen within a binary computational system. It can create clever and entertaining illusions, but it must be maintained and supervised by humans. There will be a catastrophe when we take these illusions to their logical ends. Not because the machines take over control.
But because humans abdicated it.
Perhaps the best part of this phase of computing history is when we move into the phase where we realize Pythagoras was named a cult leader for a reason. It doesn’t mean his theorem was wrong.
But his cult was wrong and dangerous.
Both things can be true.
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