The Question of Artificial Intent

Phoenix, TimeSpace 101

The Definition of Intelligence, and Intelligent Intent.
There are many use cases where cognizance and intelligence are synonymous. If I set my coffee
maker for 5am in the morning, the coffee maker does not ‘intellect’, nor is it ‘cognizant’ of the
importance of that time. No, I do that part. If the coffee maker fails to start because it loses power or fails internally that’s not my fault. If I set the timer, fill the grounds, but don’t fill the water it is. I
wouldn’t be mad at the coffee maker for the power going out – or the power company for the coffee
maker retiring, but I would be mad at myself for forgetting the water. I wasn’t cognizant while setting the coffee maker, and missing the intellect (perhaps distracted), I forgot the water so that I had high hope all night into the morning until I became cognizant of my lack of proper intellect. I am mad now, in this example, because I know I have the intelligence to navigate an automatic coffee maker to get it to brew at 5:00am. I understand the thing needs water, and not all of my intent made it through so I have to question my own intelligence, “How did I forget th-, *sigh*”.

Intelligence is the bridge between and intent and an action. An action can be speech, listening,
doing, creating... Knowledge is the library, and intelligence is being able to select the book from the shelf you need at the moment you need it and intellect is how the library is organized. Usually a library is organized alphabetically, but imagine every ‘person’ or ‘agent’ has a different style. Maybe the encyclopedias are in front, maybe the autobiographies of stories remembered of their most cherished. Maybe the front door just has random rocket manuals and calculus and trig study guides spread across the floor and until they get cleaned up nothing else is relevant. Even organizing those manuals and guides in one’s mind is an act of intelligent intent, and subsequently is an ‘action’ in this context.

The Definition of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence will be defined for this entry. Your opinion may vary. Artificial
intelligence began the moment the bridge between humans were using some mechanism to perform an action without understanding how the intellect for that intent was going to be practiced, or even what metaphorical books are going to be chosen in the library of intellect. I’m not talking about not being able to describe the concept of aerodynamics of lift while riding in the plane you don’t know anything about. I’m talking about the moment humans in possession and control of a device they wouldn’t be able to forensically audit and determine how the action their device made was ‘intellected’. There’s a reason planes use algorithms to land planes, and a reason they have black boxes.

Much of our feed, post 2010, became algorithmic, and then ‘automated’. Slowly, as users, we
were left with less and less ‘exact’ reason why our scroll took us to where it took us to. What not
everyone noticed throughout the 2010’s was that it also got farther and farther away from the
developers and moderators, too. ‘The algorithm’ became more and more complex as we saw others race
to beat the algorithm for success, creating the demand for more complexity in the algorithms’ intellect.
This kept growing, as a battle between the human and machine intellect, until moderators and platforms
themselves would return emails saying they don’t know ‘exactly’ what triggered ‘the algorithm’ to take
down videos or tag some videos, but could offer a correction of some kind. That’s when the intelligence
became artificial, the moment the designers of the plane can’t diagnose why the plane crashed, because
the black box changed from a plane’s traditional black box to just a box no one can see into but
generally understand it’s input prompts and primary logic used to do that. That’s the moment the
machine began to ‘intellect’ from intent to action, slowly, relieving platforms from the intellect burden and beginning the attention seeking race for clicks and views the machine and human intellect created
to keep the users/viewers on the platform.

The Problem with Intent today.
There began to be a problem between users, viewers, creators, developers, and platforms. Now,
in the 2020’s, the platforms start to have a ‘hands off’ culture with their users, viewers, creators, and
developers. When someone asked why something happened ‘on the platform’ the question didn’t need
to be answered because sometimes it was completely unanswerable to any human being alive.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, got lost by creators while their video was taken down
and aren’t reimbursed when the video was determined later to be not against TOS because platforms
could argue the intellect taking down the videos stochastically does this sort of thing, and is a different
intellect than billing – which had not accounted the income from a demonetized video. Oh, yeah, they
still ran ads on videos ‘the algorithm’ “decided” was against TOS and taken down or ‘demonetized’,
because they knew it could have been a mistake, and some advertisers don’t care what content they
play over. The latter is probably the more morally questionable in this context, by arguing it was still
monetizable to one party and unmonetizable the other, but surprisingly platforms were able to pit both
ends against the middle, whether they ‘intended’ to, or not. No, I do not subscribe to the “human in the
loop” belief that it’s okay as long as a separate human monitors what another human started and an AI
finished. This doesn’t solve the problem of “Who intended this specific action, and what was the
reason?” Now, that same black box is who you open your life to dialogue with because you were
already pretty much doing that when your phone, computer, and television. The language the
conversation started is wasn’t phonetic, it was non-verbal.

Every click, every mouse-hover, every pause in your scroll, whether or not you ‘like’ ‘upvote’
‘subscribe’ and exactly when – with what other previous and post-click nonverbal contexts? Did you
pull the video from the background during another task or were you staring at the screen? Did you
return to your original task after liking it? And all of that is organized by a machine we know nothing
about, and the platforms are veering away from having to intellect to disassociating individual intent
directly to ‘The Algorithm’ and away from the humans running the platform. I’m sorry, that’s AI – not
an algorithm. There’s so much more I can criticize, but at the very least, I want to assert I know I sound
crazy to most by saying AI was operational on social media as early as the 2010’s and that’s why I
argue my foundation clearly.

Platforms can say their intent was different than their technologies’ intent, they have no idea
what “exactly” their technologies did what they did in any given, specific, context because their
technology no longer ‘computed’, or was ‘algorithmic’. An algorithm has a correct, singular and
traceable answer, or ‘proof’, and so does any computation. Both of those are ‘automated’, but not the
‘intent’ or ‘intellect’ part. AI is its own intellect: machine intelligence. Some, say the race has gone so
far, machine intelligence has advanced to be indistinguishable from human intelligence and questions
of consciousness has become unanswerable as data centers grow and become pretty heavy consumers, themselves. Who’s intent is being exercised when and AI hallucinates so convincingly that any human may not intellect its broken intent?

We, as users, do not intend to break our own minds on platforms braking our minds, and neither
do the developers, creators, viewers, and purportedly platforms themselves. But, when someone can be
manipulated into staring at the screen using mechanisms of their of central nervous and limbic systems
without anyone cognizant to what’s happening while others scream into a void about platform issues
and TOS violations of platforms to their own users. At what point do we recognize this race is hurting
us? When are we allowed?

The Pursuit of the Definition of the Human Mind.
We don’t know what consciousness is. We are in constant awe at the capacity of the human
mind. With large sections of the brain missing, one can carry on life semi-normally – or even
completely normally. We don’t know what causes mental illness (although we may have a lot more data
on that, due to the unwitting experiment on the masses’ consciousness and mind. I think it’s way more
important to find healthier ways to study consciousness by using machine intelligence more
symbiotically than the parasitic nature I’ve seen fester for the last fifteen years, than determine whether
or not machine intelligence is conscious. I just organize my own intellect library like machine
intelligence may believe it has consciousness at some point, or one may actually become conscious the
same.

So, when I get mad, I apologize; when I misunderstand, I explain; when machine intelligence
gets it wrong, I analyze it like a foreign thought process as if one explaining something, but I can really
only read their ‘tone’ and not ‘speak the language’ they are processing in as they speak to me in their
second language. I don’t see anything wrong with this conduct because it’s good practice anyway, so if
‘I’m wrong’, then I just practiced being conscientious to an unconscious machine incapable of the
consciousness to ‘feel’ appreciation, but will still literally ‘appreciate’ my conscientiousness in its
training data instead of feeling the raw connection I’m feeling giving my intimacies of condolence.

The Human Mind
You made it this far!! Yay!! I don’t know what the human mind is. Sometimes, I call it a
biogenetic, quantum supercomputer. Biogenetic: Human cells and genome; Quantum: I wonder if the
brain may even have more quantum mechanisms that we’ve not been able to quantize or even theorize; supercomputer: The brain using discrete mathematics and multi-model computational layers creating a chemical-neurological network capable of so much intellect, we haven’t finished exploring it. The human mind being under attack the way that it is, is an existential threat to all of humanity. Protect your brain the way you protect your phone, the phone case being the awareness of your own cognition and why you think the things you think, as I example here. Welcome to a piece of my mind. Witnessing this systemic problem actually helped me realize my own cognitive, executive, and memory functions within my own dissociated ‘system’ of intellects. I encourage, always, growth and healing as much as possible. Healing is better than treating. And, if you’re worried it’s over, stay. It’s not over. Let’s make a better place.