The term AI and Artificial Intelligence suddenly became relevant in the 2010s with the fortuitous adoption of chip technology designed to solve an entirely different problem, namely presenting complex and fast-changing graphics on computer screens, used mostly to make video games more realistic and lifelike. A little more than a decade ago, a small company named Nvidia made a graphics processor for making computer video a LOT faster. Today, it’s a trillion-dollar company because that processor was successfully adapted for AI processing with little modification. Once this discovery was made, untold TRILLIONS of dollars have been poured into making billions of these chips. Massive data centers are being built to utilize them, requiring vast amounts of resources and electricity. AI was less a software innovation than it was a hardware innovation. At the end of the day, these chips are overwhelmingly “number crunchers,” not much different in base functionality than an electronic calculator, only vastly miniaturized for speed and scaled up for volume. Is it fair to say that AI is really just a vast “calculator” when one tries to grasp how it REALLY works? What is Creator’s perspective?

This is really a bottom-line fundamental view of the reality here. While the output of AI algorithms seems impressive because so much capital has been invested to tweak the systems and refine them to make them more and more intelligent seeming, that has been done by brute force, not through better logic or an actual creation of a humanlike brain function to learn, think, and apply creativity to become quite proficient in thought and skill building in a true human-level sense. What you see taking place is advances in the brute force technology of simple computing. It is using that sheer ability to make yes and no decisions on an increasingly complex string of algorithmic choices and logic trees to decide from what is presented how to proceed in providing what has been requested to happen. But the increasing level of sophistication and seeming higher and higher level expertise, accuracy of knowledgeable explanations and information descriptions, not to mention creation of artwork and even clever motion picture simulations of actual human beings speaking and moving about in realistic fashion—even individuals long dead—that impressive demonstration of refinement is being achieved with an extremely mind-boggling level of yes and no decisions for longer and longer strings of input. This simply allows many, many parallel threads being brought together, much like a tapestry where the end product is discernible as something different and richer in content because some kind of planning was provided at the outset ensuring that threads of the right color would be woven in at the appropriate moments to create the whole, and the end result is a design perhaps of staggering beauty if the original designer were truly artistically gifted and the mechanics of the creation process followed with high accuracy in the rendering. In the case of AI systems, the designer is truly anonymous because what is produced by such systems is a reworking of a staggering number of discrete bits of information, input as training data from which the algorithms make comparisons, moving from one word to the next, or one pixel to the next in the case of images, and storing the association along the way in order to create a new future output from past input of vast quantities of information. So this creates many, many inherent potentials, but it is a kind of brute force learning by rote through countless comparisons made in matching sequences and calculating probabilities of what belongs with what and then crosschecking to see, does this still create a valid association with a larger meaning or not? In which case, something else will be sought and then substituted to try it on for size, so to speak. While such huge aggregates of computer chips can create a working device capable of processing gigantic quantities of information far beyond the capability of the human mind to match, even within a single lifetime of effort, it is still creating something artificial, it is a simulation of intelligence, a simulation of what content is possible to produce based on the input, not something that constitutes a new idea, a fresh perspective, except through random chance in how the decisions are programmed to be arrived at by the programmers. This kind of brute force is a sort of truly artificial representation of intelligence because it is not at all akin to the process of human thought even though such comparisons are made blithely by the AI gurus who are pushing the hype of false promise here in having works of greatness at one's fingertips. So this staggering amount of furious calculations requiring an unbelievable number of computer chips working together, allowing programming of countless operations to cobble together incremental decisions leading to something that is intelligible and even surprising in its sophistication, becomes less impressive considering the gigantic apparatus needed to even simulate what an intelligent person could do using the energy of a ham sandwich for lunch. The huge investment in hardware will only prove to be worth it if the output and capabilities of the algorithms programmed using that gigantic platform can truly be relied on and justify the huge investment in its creation, and that is the rub, that if the true test is originality, the very definition of originality becomes a questionable criterion given the mishmash of massive amounts of information being stirred into the aggregate under consideration. In fact, in the news accounts of late, serious questions are even being raised about the feasibility of maintaining such huge apparatus being expected increasingly to substitute for larger and larger segments of the workplace and whole industries, in large part, expected to be subsumed by AI services and displace their workforces almost entirely as a kind of trade-off in expenses. So what we are saying is, the bottom line here is that that trade-off will not work to human advantage, that ultimately it will be seen that any seeming cost saving will be an illusion because it will come with a loss of quality in the trade-off and, in the end, will come to be seen as a false bargain. What is taking place currently is an energy crunch typical of the entire enterprise. This was not worried about initially because the greed was driving everyone to move forward as rapidly as possible, with each party believing the race is to the swift, so all the hogs headed for the trough to see who would win. The problem has become there is not enough energy to fuel so many hogs needing sustenance to keep the enterprise going. That is a genuine problem that will constrain things for some period of time. So we would say at this point that the creation of the AI bubble is not a realistic, planful joint effort by many parties to work systematically, carefully, and thoughtfully towards working through the true challenges needed to be overcome here in providing something truly human-level in quality, and that is because the driving force for the ongoing AI mania has been the interlopers all along, fanning the flames, whipping humanity into a frenzy to believe the hype and add to it because they are true believers. Much like a cult worshipping their leader, they will overlook the downside, they will overlook the flaws, they will overlook the expense, they will overlook the risks being taken with overpromising and substituting hype for reliability through hard-won learning, effort, and testing to verify performance and weigh the relative merits more realistically. This is putting everything at risk and is a fundamental flaw in the system that does not have an easy solution as long as the interlopers are in charge of the world and manipulating everyone through mind control to cultivate false beliefs and expectations, along with a reckless disregard of potential adverse consequences.