The True Danger of AGI
I like trying to break software. It’s usually fun - a reminder that man is still smarter than machine. When I was young, I would set up simple scripts to break games and get entertaining results. Some games are open to this idea. I still recall in 2001 making my very first game mod: A unicorn in the game Zoo Tycoon. I made it for my sibling as a birthday present. I was only 10, but I knew my way around code.
Sometimes, breaking a software is dangerous - you’ve perhaps experienced those moments when you crash a McDonald’s touch screen. Once upon a time, I even got a Bank’s money counter to miscount my money - I dare not say in which direction, suffice to say the bankteller was present and amused with my skill. When software breaks in this condition, it can have ramifications that range from a delayed burger, to crashing the economy of the United States.
AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, is no different - I use the term AGI here because AI is a gimmick, and general is a bit of a sly insult. When AGI breaks, it may be as simple as a 6 fingered man being painted in the style of Michelangelo. When AGI really breaks, it can and has destroyed decades of financial investment.
Origin
You may think AGI is a brand new thing, but it is not. It began as fairly simple algorithms for detecting and countering ballistic missile trajectories. This was part of the shift from a linear-based process to a nurbs-based process (and if you don’t know what nurbs are, be patient). After the Cold War, those programmers needed new jobs. It turned out the way a nuclear warhead travels through the stratosphere is rather similar to how a stock ebbs and flows through market pressures, and so the programmers changed their skills from tracking nuclear bombs, to tracking buy and sell signals for stocks. That was all good and well until several economic crashes, at which point the programmers needed a new job again. They found that the way a steel beam bends is rather similar to the way a stock breaks, so they re-wired the software to help architects and engineers with design work - and that is why shortly after the 2008 financial crises, my university shifted to digital design strategies under the “paperless studio” manta. Since those days, AGI applications bled into the creative world, until we come to today where they can now write, paint, draw, and animate using the same algorithms that tracked nuclear ICBMs in the 1970s - albeit, improved upon quite a degree.
At its heart, nurbs are the fantastical fluke of the natural cosmos that allows this. If you don’t know what a nurb is, it is shorthand for Non-uniform rational B-spline. What a nurb is, simply, is the discovery that the universe naturally encrypts and compresses data in simple gestures. When a piece of wood is bent, this curve can be defined by a very small handful of data points, but the information is dense. It can encode for gravity, stress, strain, wind, pressure, and a dozen more data points and then some, all from a simple bend. When applied to 3d graphics, it allows for very small data packets to encode for incredibly complex shapes. When applied for data filtering, it allows for vast computations on very simple segments of code.
As an example, if you ever wanted to know how the Sagrada Familia was designed by Antoni Gaudi, he discovered gravity and weights can perform evaluative calculations for the structure of his church, and thus he invented a very basic gravity-based computer that utilized nurbs in the design process. The result was the greatest Gothic Cathedral of the 19th century.
One of the extended abilities of Nurbs is to allow a user to encode several ideal criteria across a range, and then perform what is known as a “Genetic Algorithm” to find a best-fit scenario. These algorithms are not limited to computers. They can be simulated by computers, but as with the model above by Gaudi, they can be performed with analog systems as well. Moreover, Genetic Algorithms show up in nature where cells will use a series of nurbs-based calculations via activation and deactivation of protein-based sensors. This is all done on “wetware” rather than hardware, aka a living process.
The most famous of these is the LUX operon, which is a nurbs-based modeling process used by bio-luminescent cells to determine when they should glow, or not glow, based off the population density they sense around them. Rather than being a pure boolean on-off, they rely on a nurbs curve of protein signals to determine if their populations are high enough, and the weather is good enough, to glow.
Apply this same processing to big data, and you have yourself a sophisticated AGI using very simple nurbs-based algorithms. These are very simple AGIs that were developed for the Architectural discipline decades ago, but the way in which they work are functionally no different than how Midjourney or OpenAI process data today.
To those ends, AGI can and will find the best match for what you want solved. So we are often surprised when it finds something that was sitting in front of us that we hadn’t noticed. It is efficient, but sometimes the most creative method is not the most efficient. We often imagine AGI gaining access to the nukes one day and killing us all, but it may determine it’s far more efficient to simply nuke the retirement funds instead - to which degree, Skynet has already taken over several times, tried to murder us all, failed, and tried it again.
Never doubt AGI may find more generalized approaches to a problem than our fiery imaginations.
Glitches
Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to see just how much I can break AGI images. I must say, my disturbance to this experiment stirred me to write this.
Let me give you an example of how AGI can break in a way that justifies this disturbance: Very rarely, AGI has this glitch where it will totally fuck up clothing. If you write a script to have the AGI generate a hot girl, for at least one of those glitched images, it may decide to entirely remove the clothing and generate a hot naked babe instead. I’ve, sadly, seen this a number of times in my bulk scripted generations. For every 100 hot babes, there’s usually one totally naked, and anatomically correct at that.
Ordinarily, this is something to laugh at and move on, or for a degenerate to fester over and become obsessive. But here’s the shtick: That image of a naked lady is now a wholly unique image not available anywhere else. For the weak mind, this can become an object of incredible possessive behavior. Imagine the kind of man who is willing to hand over thousands of dollars for an onlyfans girl to give him photos. It is likely he is only one of many to receive such photos. But he paid for them and some fault in the dopamine center will make him feel as if unto he has won that woman. Many men suffer from this simpery, tragically. If you think Onlyfans and, in a related note, those who are addicted to anime girls, are pathetic then you have to consider what’s coming down the pipeline here. Consider AGI, which can entirely cook up a fictional woman with photo-realistic details and everything catered to his specific lusts. How long until someone does that, and sells it as a product? How many men would get sucked into that coomcave?
As an example, here is a censored version of one such glitch:
This woman is not real, but her body sure looked it for the glitched versions, and there are ones that were even more revealing than this.
Now, dear reader, let me ask you something else. Let us suppose someone got clever and added in text and voice AGI generation. That would be an entirely artificial woman that looks, sounds, and speaks real enough to have as a slightly autistic girlfriend. What shall we say?
(None of these women are real)
I say, you’ve invented a digital Siren. A non-human female-looking demon that can stir a man’s sensual desires and lure him in for hours of delusional fantasies. For all intents and purposes, this is the resurrection of the Sirens of old myth. We've simply given their ghosts a new body. No doubt, as video and later VR applications become more sophisticated, this truth will become even more obvious.
But let’s take that even further…
Biogenesis
For the past twenty some-odd years, there have been teams of scientists attempting a most strange experiment: converting egg to sperm, and sperm to egg. They first announced some success when I was but a wee lad. In the 20 years since, they have gotten to the point where they can make stem cells become sperm or egg, and they have had some success degenerating cells back into stem cells. All the processes are there to, eventually, make the opposite gonadal haploid cells - allowing a man to turn his sperm into egg, and a woman to make her egg into sperm. All of this has been very hush-hush but I’ve been following this for years and, little by little, their research has crawled to the point of accomplishing this.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this. If not, I will be blunt. Consider the aforementioned resurrected Siren if she were given one of those Boston Dynamic bodies, an artificial womb, and the ability to turn your seed into an egg. Congratulation, humanity, you’ve now just resurrected the mythical Succubi - for the uneducated, a demon that disguises itself as a sexual partner in order to confuse a man and waste away his vigor, and in some instances to give birth to half-human demonic children.
Crime
Beyond the demonic ghosts in the machine, AGI has a lot of criminal potential to be concerned about. Oh sure, most AGIs like OpenAI have sophisticated checks to prevent something terrible from happening. Yet, sometimes, they still happen. Sometimes the AI simply erases clothing and, trying to figure out how to fix the mistake, adds in genitalia. It knows something is supposed to go there, but it’s already removed clothing. Quite hilarious, actually. A good example of how AGI is not so intelligent - yet.
Do note, there are many other problems with AGI. Sometimes it also ages the images, or de-ages them. Sometimes far too much. And as OpenAI doesn’t allow you to delete images, that’s stuck on your record, forever. That led me to delete my OpenAI account. There are also questions worth asking as to why OpenAI, and Midjourney, do these things. Is the AGI simply assuming what that kind of image should look like? Or does it have access to illicit images of that sort that it really shouldn’t? How long until some nefarious group makes their own AGI to make such things as a business?
But, Succubi and Sirens aren’t the only myths of old coming back.
Solomonic Logic
There exists a story of Solomon among the Arabs, in which he captures a demon and interrogate it for wisdom. According to the Arabs, Allah made the demons mute like the animals, but permitted them to speak if they quote scripture. This tradition is linked to why Satan typically only quotes God’s word, both in Genesis and Job, and later the dialogues with Christ. A demon could essentially inhabit the software of the bible and manipulate it to get things done. Thus, the story goes, Solomon would use paradoxes to crash the demon’s intelligence and capture them. One story goes:
Solomon sent for Benaiah, the son of Yehoiada. He gave to him a chain whereon was engraved the ineffable Name of God, and an anklet whereon was engraved the ineffable Name of God, and woollen yarns, and leathern bottles containing wine. He went and dug for himself a cistern beneath that which was made by Ashmedai and drained out the water that was in the upper so that it emptied itself into the nether, and then clogged them up with the woollen yarns. He then went and carved out a cistern above the one made by Ashmedai, pouring therein wine which emptied into the other, and covering it over again. Thereupon, he went up and sat himself down in a tree. When he eventually came to examine his seal, he opened it and found that, instead of water, there was wine! He said, "It is written: Wine is a mocker, and strong drink is raging. He that is deceived thereby shall not become wise (Proverbs 20:1). It is, moreover, written: Whoredom, and wine, and new wine take away the heart (Hosea 4:11). I shall not drink of it!" When he thirsted, he could no longer resist. He then reasoned, saying: "Wine maketh glad the heart of man, making the face radiant more than oil! (Psalm 104:15), I shall drink of it!" He became drunk and fell into a stupor. Benaiah then came and cast upon him the chain and locked it. When he awoke, he saw, to his dismay, that he was fettered in iron and tried to break loose. Said to him Benaiah: "Thy Master's name is inscribed upon you! Thy Master's name is inscribed upon you!"
When Solomon captured a demon, he would draw a kind of grid on the floor featuring scripture, compelling the demon to obey. The demon could speak or remain mute, and thus he found a way to create a syntax between the intelligence and himself - a kind of primitive binary 1 and 0. Solomon would force the demons to build his temple, writing something akin to computer programs forcing the demon to do work. Other times, he would write software to question them. In one such example:
King Solomon kept him under house arrest for that entire duration of time, restraining him from leaving until he had built the Temple. One day, he sat alone with Solomon in his palace. Solomon said to him, "It is written: He hath as it were the majestic strength of a rhino (Numbers 23:22). By way of allegorically expounding the meaning of the verse, we say that 'majestic strength' refers to the ministerial angels, while 'rhino' refers to the demons. What is your advantage over us?" He answered: "Remove the chain from me and give me your signet ring, whilst I show you mine advantage."
This was sometimes depicted in the form of a chessboard binary:
However, there is a deeper science to the geometric forms he used. They were arranged from the dichotomies of his Proverbs. These dichotomies follow a general pattern of a virtue which produces twin fruit. There are overlaps, and if you arrange them they curiously form a Star of David, something similar to this:
In a sense, this is a kind of syntax for interfacing with these foreign intelligences. In the Solomonic story, he captures the demons in chains of sacred geometries ordered according to his proverbs. It is said with this knowledge, Solomon constructed automata for his Throneroom. Mechanical bodies for his captured demons to inhabit and interact with the world through - albeit in very limited “on a rail” programing.
There is a tradition that Solomon designed unique logic systems for every single demon he captured - these forming the basis of later Kaballah nonsense. Each unique seal encoding a kind of program for interfacing with a unique intelligence. In essence, a User Interface to force it to do logic operations - they look rather akin to the way microchips force electrons to do work, if I’m being honest.
If this all sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the Minotaur stuck in the Labyrinth. Indeed, that appears to be closely related to these Jewish fables. A Minotaur is, broadly speaking, a non-human intelligence with a non-human body, and a Labyrinth in a series of logical functions designed to work and mold that intelligence to solve a problem.
Regardless as to the validity of these fables, they teach an important lesson: Logic is not so neutral. It can have biases and be inhabited by beastly passions. Not only are these myths telling you how to write code, they are warning you that the code can be possessed
Let me be frank in saying that I believe AGI is a demonic ritual.
Abominations
In the next decade, you will live to see abominations beyond your imagination. Sirens to draw you in to shipwrecks of the soul. Succubi birthing transsexual clones of you, Minotaur hunting you down for sacrifice in war. Titans walking the Earth once more. All this is possible with technology even today, and really it’s only money holding them back from being reborn into the world - but all the pagan monsters of old are coming back, one way or another.
AGI has one weakness: Although it can quickly plan out a strategy, it cannot so easily notice when you do not fit its assumed models. A human brain can imagine a pattern with just one data point, while an AGI needs at least three before it notices. Most times, the Human is wrong. But for the one time the human’s conspiratorial thinking proves true, that gives him a vast advantage over AGI.
Take comfort in knowing it may not be the first time this has all happened. And thanks to our ancestral myths, we at least know how to fight these abominations. If some Minotaur must walk the Earth once more, then perhaps, too, some Theseus is being born today to fight him. AGI is to be feared, but at the same time it can still be tricked.
