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ozzgin · 1 year ago

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Yandere! Androids Walter & David x Reader x Neomorph

Walter, the android monitoring the colonization ship 'Covenant' on its way to Origae-6, seems to have gotten unnaturally attached to his human assistant. As he ponders his erroneous feelings, an unexpected detour brings them to David, an older android counterpart that has been alone on the mysterious planet. The AI assistants become increasingly competitive for (Y/N)'s attention, so much that they don't notice the newly formed humanoid local preying on a fresh target.

TW: violence, gore, monster smut ending

[Horror Masterlist]

"Burnt to a crisp."

You turn away from the captain's pod, leaving the rest of the damage assessment to the medical crew that has been reanimated. You speedily make your way down the sterile white corridors as Walter rushes to catch up.

"What should I write for the report?" he inquires politely.

"Malfunction." You glance back at the synthetic. "I suspect someone will be fired for this. And someone else will have to explain how they failed to detect a literal star collapse. That neutrino burst could've killed us all."

"Highly probable. The draft has been compiled, you may check it at any time. I require your confirmation to send it."

Your only feedback is a barely audible hum.

Walter smiles. If there's one good thing about such tragedies, it's that he gets to admire your reactions to them. Your focused, calculated gaze, your determined walk, your automated mannerisms that won't allow the slightest hint at the fact you just woke up from your stasis moments ago. Even under the veils of deep slumber, your neural networks shot rapid connections, with no delay, from the second your sleeping pod received an alert. The accuracy of a robot.

That of course doesn't mean he lacks appreciation for your other facets. That's the beauty of humans; their depth, their dimensions. Unlike AI machinery, humans do not have predetermined actions. They may be genetically programmed to possess certain characteristics, but the psychological mechanisms are shaped by so many variables, billions and billions of tweaks and nudges, to the point where it's impossible to have two identical specimens. Even twins will display a difference, whether in preferences or habits.

They say artificial intelligence is a black box, but can the same concept not be applied to humans as well? At the very least to Walter himself, these organic beings represent a mystery. One he doesn't particularly care to uncover outside of his service functions. Except for one.

His eyes carefully follow (Y/N)'s movements. What is it about this one that has caught his interest to such degree? On his last system update he attentively inspected every file and every block of code, searching for potential errors that would've caused his circuits to behave so oddly. He has been invested with the ability to form attachments, otherwise assigning his kind to groups or purposes would've lacked stability. Attachment, however, comes with a threshold. One he has passed a long time ago when it comes to (Y/N). And he cannot find any cause for it.

He could, naturally, solicit the aid of the ship's robotics expert. He could. He should, even. But if he may be frank with himself, Walter rather enjoys this sensation. A complex web of spores that keep growing and evolving into something unpredictable. This bizarre feeling he has towards (Y/N) makes him feel human. It brings him closer to all the old literature and art he'd consumed over the years, wondering what the love and yearning often portrayed could be. The printed letters and the strokes of paint were right before him, at his fingertips, and yet they felt foreign. Empty constructs, nothing more than a definition out of the dictionary.

Now it's a different story. Your presence alone floods him with a mysterious warmth. He had investigated this phenomenon when it first happened, but his inner thermostat showed no real change in temperature. Nonetheless he can feel it. It makes him wonder what other feelings he might experience as consequence. What would happen if he kissed you? Sometimes he even dares to imagine downright outrageous, improper scenarios. How unprofessional of him, but he is careful to erase any evidence. It's another novel sensation that he likes to dissect. Engaging in such activities with you fills him with tingling excitement. Why is that? What is there to be excited about? It's merely a collection of fictive snippets. Unless... Ah, absolutely not. This is where he has to stop in his tracks and preoccupy himself with something else. Androids are not to interact with humans in that way.

But it's becoming more and more difficult to keep these ideas in his mind only.

"It's too dangerous. One human signal in the middle of nowhere?" Daniels, a short haired woman with a tomboyish but youthful appearance, is pacing back and forth. "We should just continue on our course."

"It's our duty to check. Look: we go, find whoever sent the signal, bring them back up. That's it. If the planet proves to be dangerous we'll stop immediately. We'll be fine." Oram stands at the head of the table, arms crossed. He turns to look at you. Already cozying up to his newly acquired captain role, you think.

"Alright. Walter, prepare a small landing party. Have Tennessee maintain orbit while we're down there." you glance at the other crew members that have now gathered around the same table. "And get your weapons ready, we don't know what to expect."

And you certainly didn't. Your final words of warning now echo into your ringing ears as you lay on the ground, face buried among the grass. There's screaming around you, but it sounds muffled. Your eyes are irritated by the dirt and you'd like to blink the grime off, though every time your eyelids lower, you can see the pale creature trashing out of Hallett's mouth. Then it's all foggy. Your vision blurs, but you can hear. The gurgling of blood, the screech of the parasite. Walter's frantic footsteps nearing in your direction. You're lifted up.

"Vitals are positive. No significant damage."

You can guess from your peripherals that another crew member is currently being mauled by the beast. There's gunshots in your vicinity and terrified wails. You quickly come back to your senses and stand up. Your hand searches for your weapon, but the android places his arm before you.

"Do not engage, (Y/N). It is an unknown parasitic organism of this ecosystem. Keep your distance for optimal safety and I'll take care of the rest."

"What are you talking about? They're dying! Your task is to ensure human survival, Walter. I can handle myself, go help the others. It's an order." Your voice is low. You're distracted.

"No."

You stare at the synthetic, wide eyed. Did he just...refuse? Not possible.

"What did you say?"

"I said I'll protect you. Nothing else."

Your mouth is slightly parted in disbelief. It is not possible for an artificial assistant to disobey a superior. It just doesn't work. Your mind races to find an explanation. At the same time, you cannot afford to ponder on hypotheses. You draw out your weapon and point it towards the creature. You'll deal with this later.

The moment you press the trigger, a blinding flash of light detonates in the sky, startling you. The creature scrambles to get away. You squint your eyes and nearly fall back, but Walter swiftly grabs your shoulders to ground you. He scans the area for the source. It's an emergency rocket and someone else must've activated it. As he traces the tail of the explosion, he spots a hooded figure across the field and onto the rocky ascend. It seems to have noticed Walter, as it gestures for them to follow. Without hesitation, the man firmly locks your arm and pulls you after him. The priority right now is to find shelter.

"Come!", Walter exclaims, suddenly remembering the other people.

You reach a cave structure that has been converted into a crude, improvised human settlement. The man lowers his hood and you gasp quietly at the sight. He strongly resembles Walter. He must have noticed your surprise as he flashes you a cordial smile.

"I'm David." He studies Walter's features. "You must be a newer model. What name have you been given?"

"Walter."

"I see. And you are-" David extends a hand towards you for a handshake, but Walter steps in front of you, blocking the android's gesture.

"She's (Y/N). I'm afraid I cannot yet trust you."

"Understandable."

David's smile widens as his eyes, now bearing a strange flicker, switch between you and Walter. He's just like him. He can sense it. Although it's a different kind of flaw that has tainted his pure, artificial soul. He cannot help the curiosity that blooms, gazing at this peculiar pair. What is it about this human that caused his fellow machine to break conduit? He'd like to know.

"I'm certain you will soon learn I am no threat, (Y/N)."

The remaining members of the expedition are unpacking and discussing evacuation plans with the base, while Walter sends the data he has gathered so far. You let them deal with the logistics and cautiously wander off to the neighboring rooms, wondering what David has been up to all this time in isolation.

The walls are plastered with photos and handwritten sketches and diagrams. You catch a glimpse of the word "pathogen" sporadically inserted across these notes. As you walk along the sequence of cramped chambers, you reach one that has a table in the middle. Upon it rests the body of an autopsied woman, vulgarly opened up to the world with plump organs bulging under the warm light. You feel nauseous. And yet, you examine the carcass further, hoping for answers. Was she also a result of the same disease that breeds on this planet? Perhaps this David had worked on a cure, or at least developed an explanation.

"And you, even you, will be like this drear thing, A vile infection man may not endure; Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring! O passionate and pure."

You jolt and immediately turn around, finding David in the doorframe.

"Flowers of Evil. Are you familiar with it?" he asks, indifferent to the uncomfortable shock he'd caused you with his sudden entrance.

"I've read my Baudelaire, yes." You manage to mumble, dumbfounded. "What is this, David?"

"Oh, my poor, dear Elizabeth. Victim to whatever blasphemy lurks these soils and has taken your friends as well." He approaches the table and places his hand on its hard edge, shyly overlapping with your own fingers. "I did my best."

You remove your hand from underneath his nonchalantly.

"So you know what those creatures are. Leave the literary comments for a different time, I need concrete facts."

"Unbothered and to the point." the blonde android smiles once again. "I can see clearly why Walter loves you."

You click your tongue at the ridiculous statement. Has the neutrino burst damaged their positronic brain? Everyone is acting off and you don't like it.

"Your circuits must have gone defective, David. We have a specialist on our ship, but until that happens I need you to focus. Enough nonsense."

"Typical arrogance of a dying species. Why are you on a colonization mission if not to grasp at some promised resurrection? Rest assured that my functioning has not been impeded by anything. What is erroneous, on the other hand, is your perception of androids and their limits."

Just as David reaches for your wrist and pulls you closer, a familiar voice interrupts with an intimidating tone. You're relieved.

"I will ask that you release her hand only once." Walter has a weapon pointed towards his counterpart. His face is clouded by a frown. "I have no ethical restrictions when it comes to incapacitating machinery."

"Such noble obedience! Although, you conveniently left out the part where you abandoned the remaining crew with a dangerous alien that has been tracking their scent. By my approximation he should already be here and I am rather confident you know this, too."

Your stomach drops. Now that you adjust your focus, the background humming of your mates talking has indeed vanished. The only thing you can hear is your erratic breathing.

"Is it true, Walter?" You demand as dread begins to form in your body.

"Yes. It was not part of my priorities."

"Of course it was, Walter." David responds ahead of you. "One of them was the acting captain and he is to be rescued in emergencies. This one right here", he says as he dangles your wrist, "is several ranks lower than all of them. It's against any standard practice."

"Release her hand." Walter's voice is eerily calm.

"Do you love her?"

Walter ponders the question. Your legs barely hold on.

"I do."

"Marvelous. So do I." David grins. He releases your hand that falls limp next to your body. It's his turn to step in front of you.

You nearly choke from the thick tension expanding in the air. The two androids face each other and you retreat to the wall, unsure how to proceed. You left your radio transmitter back at the makeshift camp. The back of your head is itching, as if invisible claws are scratching at the bone. You wish you could go back, just mere hours before this disaster, when you were sipping on your lukewarm coffee and explaining the captain's jokes to Walter.

Should you make a run for it?

You bite your lower lip and push yourself off the wall for momentum. You're about to reach the archway when you hear both men shouting almost identically in chorus.

"Don't!"

The surroundings outside are dark, but you can discern something blocking your path. It's tall and resembles a human. Translucent, pallid skin is clinging onto the massive, deformed skeleton. The head is elongated and bears no features. In the place of a mouth there is a large, fresh stain of blood, so you assume it can somehow improvise if desired. As your head tilts back to take in the image, you're overwhelmed with terrified amazement. Is this the parasite that emerged from your teammate? Has it grown to this colossal size in less than a day? The idea of such instant development makes your head spin.

Its chest is expanding at regular intervals in a whistled breathing. It occasionally creates an odd clicking sound that resonates with your heart throbbing in panic. Has it been seconds? Minutes? Your neck creaks as you try to look back. You lock eyes with Walter. You don't recall ever seeing this expression on him. You had even asked him once if androids can feel fear. You have your answer.

"Hey, Walter..." you blurt out.

Wet noises of flesh being pulled back. The smooth surface of the alien's head is folding away, making space for grotesquely big jaws lined with sharp teeth. Your anemic face is splattered with burning drool as the creature claws you in its grasp and abruptly sprints away. Your screams for help dissolve in the distance.

"Where is it going, David?" The synthetic's words are threatening, but betrayed by a hint of despair.

"It won't kill her."

"How do you know?"

"It is no longer hungry. It has fed on your crew, and now it seeks something else."

"Such as?" Walter becomes impatient.

"A plaything."

The alien finally drops your body to the ground. You cough and wipe your face, attempting to reorient yourself. The trip was a whirlwind of jumps and turns and you can barely reconstruct anything. Based on the little spatial clues you could pick up, it just climbed further up, into one of the many cave systems. You pat your clothing and curse to yourself. The geolocation tag must've fallen somewhere on the way here. You can only pray that Walter still finds you somehow. Despite everything, you know he has your back. Always.

You shudder at the moist feeling of hot air against your skin. The alien seems to be sniffing you intently, analyzing your scent. Yet so far it hasn't killed you. Why? Long, bony fingers stretch out to continue the examination. You whimper at the rough, rugged handling. Every now and then it takes a long pause, just staring at you, almost as if it's comparing you to its own being. Lastly, it lifts your hand with its own, pressing against the palm, and fans out the fingers. It observes the gesture with intrigue, noting the similarities.

Does it evolve after its host? You think back to your crewmate that must've ejected this monstrosity before drawing their last breath. Perhaps the dried up blood adorning its skin is a remainder of its birth. Oh, God. The world is spinning.

Suddenly, you wince at an increasing pressure slithering around your thigh. The alien's vertebral tail is tightening and encircling your limb, making its way up.

"Oh no, no no no no" your face reddens at the realization and you pounce on the ground, feverish for escape. The large hands secure you in place and the creature growls in protest. It won't let you leave.

Not until it had its fun with you.

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canmom · 5 months ago

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music and narrative {[0]}

so. as part of the ongoing music researches, I've for a while wanted about the relation between music and narrative. that's going to be a long project! but to begin with I wanted to run down the examples I know, and maybe solicit a few more~

now, on some level, nearly any song has some degree of narrative. your basic love song introduces us to some characters - singer, object of their affection - and furnishes them with emotions and desires. moreover, music can play a role in a narrative without literally relating events - indeed, the art of soundtrack design is definitely a subject I want to look into at some point. even songs addressed directly at the real world, such as political songs, construct some kind of narrative.

however, for these purposes, I'm interested in songs that go a bit further in the direction of telling a fictional story, especially when those link together into whole albums (sometimes called a concept album, though this is a slightly broader concept). which can work in a lot of ways!

for example, Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid tells a sweeping scifi story of an android fleeing an oppressive society and becoming an unintentional figurehead of revolution. it sketches out a wide-reaching set of influences in constructing a scifi world, but you'd be hard-pressed to boil it down into a simple series of events - it prefers to leave a lot to interpretation. by contrast something like Splendor & Misery by clipping. deals with kinda similar subject matter - a scifi story, an escaped slave, artificial intelligence - but with a different musical approach and perhaps a slightly clearer narrative arc; sometimes directly narrating the thoughts and actions of characters, or slipping into memory, but also drawing less direct musical parallels with e.g. gospel tracks and slave spirituals. both excellent albums - both solve the problems of conveying a story musically in different ways.

of course, the largest pool of examples here comes in the context of musical theatre, and further back opera. (the exact transition from one to the other is something I'm going to need to research). particularly interesting to me are sung-through musicals such as Les Misérables, in which there's no spoken sections in between the songs. this restriction means the songs (and staging etc.) have to do all the work of conveying the events of the story.

there's a lot to be said about the various traditions of musicals (for example). there's even more to be said about the history of opera - both the Western traditions and other musical traditions that have been given the label such as Chinese opera. but that will have to wait for later day in the project because otherwise this entire post would be a huge list of musicals, and I want to try and wander all over the shop.

what I'm most curious to find is music that tells a story all on its own - no actors or staging, but more similar to oral narration. of course, in the present era, music is often released along with videos, and these can tell quite elaborate stories that will become part of the overall 'message' communicated by the song, so the lines are a bit blurry! but since the aim of this series will be to look for ways to convey narrative using music, I'm looking for examples where the music does most of the heavy lifting.

music that tells stories is something with a looong tradition in folk music, pretty much the world over. in Europe, the ballad was a common form for it, a word that survives into the present. it seems that most cultures have had some kind of tradition of wandering itinerant musician-poets - for example, at various points in history, there were biwa hōshi in Japan (pictured) and griots in West Africa, medieval Europeans had minstrels, the Celts had bards, the Occitans had troubadors...

moreover, work and marching songs such as sea shanties would also have a certain degree of narrative to them, in addition to their main function of keeping a group moving in time.

in modern times, people will sometimes attempt to reconstruct how this kind of music and lyric poetry would have been performed. you can naturally only go so far with the archaeological evidence, but I'm fond of Peter Pringle's recordings of segments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, using period instruments if not necessarily a period musical style!

in the modern age of recorded music, these traditions have become much more niche, but there are still artists who use music as a vehicle to tell a fictional narrative. (fair warning: I'm a huge nerd, so most of the examples I know are like, supreme nerd shit. also about ten years ago I was given an assortment of metal from a friend which included a bunch of what I'm about to put below.)

to begin with I've naturally got to talk about my friend Maki Yamazaki (Dr Carmilla) and the band she founded but later left, The Mechanisms. They tell a story of a sprawling gothic scifi universe, with the band playing the role of travelling space pirates who observe the (invariably tragic) tales that unfold. The Mechanisms' music starts as folk song pastiche, but gradually gets more original, although narratively they keep the approach of crossing over mythology with genre storytelling (fairy tales as space opera, arthuriana as space western).

The Mechanisms got a significant measure of international fame washing back after their frontman Johnny Sims got really big on some podcast or something.

Maki's solo music as Dr Carmilla took things in (from a narrative sense) a more abstract direction, using elaborate production and an incredibly textured sound to tell a (so far!) fragmentary story of the tragic space vampire Dr Carmilla and her doomed relationship with another vampire Lorelei (for example). And I'm gonna have lots more to say about them all, in the future, but this is just an overview so let's not get ahead of ourselves!

In a related vein (though I'm much less familiar with them) comes indie band Decemberists, who often create narratively driven songs - for example, The Mariner's Revenge Song depicts a sailor's motivation for extracting bloody revenge on someone who wronged him, with the actual violence conveyed by an energetic instrumental break. A subject that reminds me of the Clockwork Quartet, now long gone, who managed to record just three of their songs from a larger project, yet stand out as way more interesting than most of the steampunk milieu - with for example The Clockmaker's Apprentice giving a very fun antihero-revenge narrative to the ticking beat of a clock, and The Doctor's Wife a compelling tragedy of desperate medical science.

There's definitely something in common with this type of storytelling and the subgenre termed rock opera, which has a pretty long history going back to the late 60s (SF Sorrow by Pretty Things and The Story of Simon Simopath by Nirvana, thanks wikipedia), with notable examples including some incredibly popular albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall (which was adapted into a partly animated film using animations by Gerard Scarfe, c.f AN86) and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade. In many of these, the connection between songs and narrative is fairly abstract and metaphorical - most of the examples mentioned are about the psychological arc of one character.

Calling this a genre or subgenre is kind of a stretch recently - just in those four examples we see a pretty wide range of musical styles, so it's more like an approach to album writing. Still, for want of a better word, there's definite overlap between this 'genre' and musicals. For example, the history on wikipedia cites The Rocky Horror Picture Show as an example of rock opera, which in my head it's just a musical. (Anyway, exactly the taxonomy of regular opera/libretto, rock opera and musical theatre is not that important anyway, because we want to look at the techniques of all of them!)

A more direct narrative comes in the work of The Protomen, who have the 'no way that would work' premise of creating a huge, dramatic, emotional story based on the plot of the Mega Man games. By putting the focus on the tense relationships of the fought main characters (scientists Light and Wily and robot boys Proto Man and Mega Man), and their sense of rejection and betrayal by the broader society, they somehow pull it off.

Moving gradually in the direction of (progressive) metal, we encounter Ayreon, whose entire career has been telling psychedelic and occult stories of time travel, aliens, warnings projected into the past, out of body experiences, and the history and direction of humanity. I'm not sure if all of their albums fit together into one big story exactly, but certain ideas seem to keep coming up - for example, future societies or aliens sending warnings to humanity to fix our shit before it's too late. In some of their albums (e.g. The Electric Castle) they follow the device of having each member of the band play a character in an ensemble cast, bringing it a bit closer to something like a radio play.

Also in metal land we find the rather unique project Charlemagne: By The Sword and the Cross, best known for that time Christopher Lee shed the blood of the saxon men. This is using music as a vehicle for a (more or less) historical story, featuring an old Charlemagne (Lee) reminiscing on the various awful things he did over the course of his life. Apparently they made a sequel to this album, which I never realised!

As well as history, metal also likes to lean on literature and poetry. For example, Kamelot (classed, apparently, as 'Power Metal') have a rather fun adaptation of the story of Faust into two albums, Epica and The Black Halo. Iron Maiden famously took on the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a 13 minute song. And that's not even to get into all the songs dealing with Tolkien.

Moving on from metal before we start listing a hundred songs about vikings, it's worth looking more broadly for music about history, since it's a pretty major overlap with fictional storytelling! For example, the Boney M song Rasputin tells an incredibly catchy account of the assassination of Grigori Rasputin. Another rather more charged example comes in Nakam by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, about the unsuccessful paramilitary plot to poison six million Germans as revenge for the Holocaust.

If you go looking, you can find an impressively long list of historical songs compiled by 30 users of lyrics website Genius - though many of these I feel don't really count, since they were describing contemporary events when they were written.

Of course, there is a heavy overlap between this subject and political songs - in many cases the historical subjects are invoked to comment on the present. For example, Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer was written at a time when von Braun was leading the US space programme. In many cases, the songs simply invoke a historical event to express a feeling, assuming you already know what happened. Others may recount events more or less directly, before seguing into a verse or two at the end about why it matters now. Most of the songs in this list focus on recent (20th-century) history, sometimes they reach further back - mostly to talk about colonialism.

Historical songs can also be quite oblique. For example, Mili's song Salt, Pepper, Birds and the Thought Police is about the life of Korean poet Yoon Dong-ju, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from the content of the lyrics unless you were already familiar with Yoon's life. More on Mili in a moment - most of their songs are more fictional.

One thing I'm curious about is whether there are examples of more historical fiction in music, which tries to imagine the thoughts and feelings of historical characters... well obviously there's Hamilton, and perhaps that illustrates why there aren't a lot more songs about non-recent history, because the vibes can be off.

Storytelling is still a powerful mechanism even in a contemporary, political song. Take Construção by Chico Buarque - the story it tells is of the pointless death of a construction worker; with the lines ingeniously remixed over the course of the song, this turns into a wider illustration of the ruthlessness of the system that killed him. Its lyrics are absolutely fucking genius, even if you don't speak Portugese.

Speaking of language, most of the examples I've covered so far are in English, since well, that's my native language. It's naturally a little harder to access a story in a language you don't speak, but in these days of subtitles, we kinda can! So for example I can encounter projects like MILGRAM, something of a combination of music project and voting-driven story, in which we are introduced (by character song) to a number of characters facing execution - and then invited to vote on who should die. Heavily illustrated, it is somewhere vaguely in the space between album and straight-up anime.

I mentioned Mili already, but many of their other songs have a strong narrative arc to them, and sketch out the contours of a fictional setting. For example, one of their best-known songs is world.execute(me), which portrays the failure of a bdsm relationship between an AI girl and her creator. Which is relatively grounded by Mili standards - other songs depict for example the relationship of a jiangshi and a mad scientist cooking food, or a witch reanimating a knight with scientific methods to kill on her behalf.

And I think that will suffice for now. But we are of course only scratching the surface - this is by no means supposed to be an exhaustive list but I'm sure there's stuff that I'll be kicking myself for not mentioning. Mostly, however, this is a request for recommendations - particularly, of music from genres I haven't addressed in this post, and especially non-English languages, or that convey their stories in especially creative or unusual ways.

This project will likely be a long time in the works - it's something of a supplement to the Music Theory Notes (for science bitches) series - but my aim will be to pick out a few of these to examine how they go about conveying narrative through songs. Because I think that's kind of one of the big things I want to do with music.

ok canmom out i gotta go play some music. see you next time!

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mbti-notes · 17 days ago

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Anon wrote: hello! thank you for running this blog. i hope your vacation was well-spent!

i am an enfp in the third year of my engineering degree. i had initially wanted to do literature and become an author. however, due to the job security associated with this field, my parents got me to do computer science, specialising in artificial intelligence. i did think it was the end of my life at the time, but eventually convinced myself otherwise. after all, i could still continue reading and writing as hobbies.

now, three years in, i am having the same thoughts again. i've been feeling disillusioned from the whole gen-ai thing due to art theft issues and people using it to bypass - dare i say, outsource - creative work. also, the environmental impact of this technology is astounding. yet, every instructor tells us to use ai to get information that could easily be looked up in textbooks or google. what makes it worse is that i recently lost an essay competition to a guy who i know for a fact used chatgpt.

i can't help feeling that by working in this industry, i am becoming a part of the problem. at the same time, i feel like a conservative old person who is rejecting modern technology and griping about 'the good old days'.

another thing is that college work is just so all-consuming and tiring that i've barely read or written anything non-academic in the past few years. quitting my job and becoming a writer a few years down the road is seeming more and more like a doomed possibility.

i've been trying to do what i can at my level. i write articles about ethical considerations in ai for the college newsletter. i am in a technical events club, and am planning out an artificial intelligence introductory workshop for juniors where i will include these topics, if approved by the superiors.

from what i've read on your blog, it doesn't seem like you have a very high opinion of ai, either, but i've only seen you address it in terms of writing. i'd like to know, are there any ai applications that you find beneficial? i think that now that i am here, i could try to make a difference by working on projects that actually help people, rather than use some chatgpt api to do the same things, repackaged. i just felt like i need the perspective of someone who thinks differently than all those around me. not in a 'feed my tunnel-vision' way, but in a 'tell me i'm not stupid' way.

----------------------

It's kind of interesting (in the "isn't life whacky?" sort of way) you chose the one field that has the potential to decimate the field that you actually wanted to be in. I certainly understand your inner conflict and I'll give you my personal views, but I don't know how much they will help your decision making.

I'm of course concerned about the ramifications on writing not just because I'm a writer but because, from the perspective of education and personal growth, I understand the enormous value of writing skills. Learning to write analytically is challenging. I've witnessed many people meet that challenge bravely, and in the process, they became much more intelligent and thoughtful human beings, better able to contribute positively to society. So, it pains me to see the attitude of "don't have to learn it cuz the machine does it". However, writing doesn't encompass my full view on AI.

I wouldn't necessarily stereotype people who are against new technology as "old and conservative", though some of them are. My parents taught me to be an early adopter of new tech, but it doesn't mean I don't have reservations about it. I think, psychologically, the main reason people resist is because of the real threat it poses. Historically, we like to gloss over the real human suffering that results from technological advancement. But it is a reasonable and legitimate response to resist something that threatens your livelihood and even your very existence.

For example, it is already difficult enough to make a living in the arts, and AI just might make it impossible. Even if you do come up with something genuinely creative and valuable, how are you going to make a living with it? As soon as creative products are digitized, they just get scraped up, regurgitated, and disseminated to the masses with no credit or compensation given to the original creator. It's cannibalism. Cannibalism isn't sustainable.

I wonder if people can seriously imagine a society where human creativity in the arts has been made obsolete and people only have exposure to AI creation. There are plenty of people who don't fully grasp the value of human creativity, so they wouldn't mind it, but I would personally consider it to be a kind of hell.

I occasionally mention that my true passion is researching "meaning" and how people come to imbue their life with a sense of meaning. Creativity has a major role to play in 1) almost everything that makes life/living feel worthwhile, 2) generating a culture that is worth honoring and preserving, and 3) building a society that is worthy of devoting our efforts to.

Living in a capitalist society that treats people as mere tools of productivity and treats education as a mere means to a paycheck already robs us of so much meaning. In many ways, AI is a logical result of that mindset, of trying to "extract" whatever value humans have left to offer, until we are nothing but empty shells.

I don't think it's a coincidence that AI comes out of a society that devalues humanity to the point where a troubling portion of the population suffers marginalization, mental disorder, and/or feels existentially empty. Many of the arguments I've heard from AI proponents about how it can improve life sound to me like they're actually going to accelerate spiritual starvation.

Existential concerns are serious enough, before we even get to the environmental concerns. For me, environment is the biggest reason to be suspicious of AI and its true cost. I think too many people are unaware of the environmental impact of computing and networking in general, let alone running AI systems. I recently read about how much energy it takes to store all the forgotten chats, memes, and posts on social media. AI ramps up carbon emissions dramatically and wastes an already dwindling supply of fresh water.

Can we really afford a mass experiment with AI at a time when we are already hurtling toward climate catastrophe? When you think about how much AI is used for trivial entertainment or pointless busywork, it doesn't seem worth the environmental cost. I care about this enough that I try to reduce my digital footprint. But I'm just one person and most of the population is trending the other way.

With respect to integrating AI into personal life or everyday living, I struggle to see the value, often because those who might benefit the most are the ones who don't have access. Yes, I've seen some people have success with using AI to plan and organize, but I also always secretly wonder at how their life got to the point of needing that much outside help. Sure, AI may help with certain disadvantages such as learning or physical disabilities, but this segment of the population is usually the last to reap the benefits of technology.

More often than not, I see people using AI to lie, cheat, steal, and protect their own privilege. It's particularly sad for me to see people lying to themselves, e.g., believing that they're smart for using AI when they're actually making themselves stupider, or thinking that an AI companion can replace real human relationship.

I continue to believe that releasing AI into the wild, without developing proper safeguards, was the biggest mistake made so far. The revolts at OpenAI prove, once again, that companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. Tech companies need a constant stream of data to feed the beast and they're willing to sacrifice our well-being to do it. It seems the only thing we can do as individuals is stop offering up our data, but that's not going to happen en masse.

Even though you're aware of these issues, I want to mention them for those who aren't, and for the sake of emphasizing just how important it is to regulate AI and limit its use to the things that are most likely to produce a benefit to humanity, in terms of actually improving quality of human life in concrete terms.

In my opinion, the most worthwhile place to use AI is medicine and medical research. For example, aggregating and analyzing information for doctors, assisting surgeons with difficult procedures, and coming up with new possibilities for vaccines, treatments, and cures is where I'd like to see AI shine. I'd also love to see AI applied to:

scientific research, to help scientists sort, manage, and process huge amounts of information

educational resources, to help learners find quality information more efficiently, rather than feeding them misinformation

engineering and design, to build more sustainable infrastructure

space exploration, to find better ways of traveling through space or surviving on other planets

statistical analysis, to help policymakers take a more objective look at whether solutions are actually working as intended, as opposed to being blinded by wishful thinking, bias, hubris, or ideology (I recognize this point is controversial since AI can be biased as well)

Even though you work in the field, you're still only one person, so you don't have that much more power than anyone else to change its direction. There's no putting the worms back in the can at this point. I agree with you that, for the sake of your well-being, staying in the field means choosing your work carefully. However, if you want to work for an organization that doesn't sacrifice people at the altar of profit, it might be slim pickings and the pay might not be great. Staying true to your values can be costly too.

#enfp #career #artificial intelligence #personal #ask

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clara-the-independent · 20 days ago

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Exclusive Interview with Ljudmila Vetrova- Inside Billionaire Nathaniel Thorne's Latest Venture

CLARA: I'm here with my friend Ljudmila Vetrova to talk about the newest venture of reclusive billionaire Nathaniel Thorne- GAMA. Ljudmila, could you let the readers in on the secret- what exactly is this mysterious project about?

LJUDMILA: Sure, Clara! As part of White City's regeneration programme, Nathaniel has teamed up with the Carlise Group to create a cutting-edge medical clinic like no other. Introducing GAMA– a private sanctuary for the discerning, offering not just top-notch medical care and luxurious amenities, but also treatments so innovative they push the envelope of medical science.

CLARA: Wow! Ljudmila, it sounds like GAMA is really taking a proactive approach to healthcare. But can you tell us a bit more about the cutting-edge technology behind this new clinic?

LJUDMILA: Of course! Now, GAMA is not just run by human professionals, it's also aided by an advanced AI system known as KAI – Kronstadt Artificial Intelligence. KAI is the guiding force behind every intricate detail of GAMA, handling everything from calling patients over the PA system to performing complex surgical procedures. Even the doors have a touch of ingenuity, with no keys required- as KAI simply detects the presence of an RFID chip embedded in the clothing of both patients and staff, allowing swift and secure access to the premises. With KAI at the helm, patients and staff alike benefit from streamlined care.

CLARA: A medical AI? That's incredible! I've heard much of the medical technology at GAMA was developed by Kronstadt Industries and the Ether Biotech Corporation, as a cross-disciplinary partnership to create life-saving technology. Is that true?

LJUDMILA: It sure is, Clara! During the COVID-19 pandemic, GAMA even had several departments dedicated to researching the virus, assisting in creating a vaccine with multiple companies. From doctors to nurses and administrative personnel, the team at GAMA is comprised of skilled individuals who are committed to providing the best care possible. All of the GAMA staff are highly educated with advanced degrees and have specialized training in their respective fields.

CLARA: Stunning! Speaking of the GAMA staff, rumors surrounding the hiring of doctors Pavel Frydel and Akane Akenawa have made headlines, with claims that they supposedly transplanted a liver infected with EHV, leading to the unfortunate demise of the patient shortly after. Such allegations might raise questions about the hospital's staff selection process and adherence to medical guidelines and ethical standards. Do you have any comment on these accusations, Ljudmila?

LJUDMILA: Er- well, Clara, the management of GAMA Hospital has vehemently denied all allegations of unethical practices and maintains that they uphold the highest standards of care for all patients. They state that they conduct thorough background checks on all staff members, including doctors, and that any individuals found to be involved in unethical practices are immediately removed from their position. The hospital has a strict code of ethics that all staff must adhere to, and any violations are taken very seriously. In response to the specific claims about the transplant procedure, GAMA states that they are investigating the matter in cooperation with the relevant authorities.

CLARA: Wonderful! I'm afraid that's all we have time for at the moment- lovely chatting with you again, Ljudmila!

@therealharrywatson @artofdeductionbysholmes @johnhwatsonblog

#newspaper #sherlock rp #bbc sherlock

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worrywrite · 2 years ago

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So, in Guards! Guards! one of my favorite sequences of events is the watch waiting on the roof so Colon can shoot the dragon with a bow and arrow.

And while this scene is great for the twisted humor of self awareness that these characters have, it's actually a really good deconstruction of stakes in writing.

Not only is this a fairly tense moment for the book, right in the height of the dragon's plans to enact ritual human sacrifice, but the watch almost dies in their attempt. One might think it's the comedy aspect of the story that keeps them alive (or Carrot being built like a brick house), because people of importance seldom die in comedies, but it really isn't. It's the stakes that keep them alive.

Raising the stakes in a story changes the likelihood of character death. Colon, by all accounts, could have died, as could Nobby, and debatably Carrot if you look at G!G! in isolation. None of them have the narrative weight of Vimes or Sybil in this book, and they could all be considered expendable (though Carrot to a lesser degree, as he was specifically introduced by the narrative to be a "hero"). When the stakes are highest, someone is the most likely to die doing something good. But the watch also knows that when the stakes are high and the odds are against someone doing a noble thing, that action has the highest narrative likelihood of success. The phrase "it'd never work, it's a million-to-one chance" being their goalpost inspires them to artificially lower the odds of their success when the stakes are high. But in so doing, they lower the stakes by acknowledging that it's entirely possible that Colon could kill the dragon, even if it's unlikely, and his odds of him certainly killing the dragon are higher if his odds of maybe killing the dragon are lower (if that makes sense; granted, if you've read the book you probably get it).

Anyway, this adjustment of odds to make the chances of success higher (by making them lower) lowers the stakes of the book when it is at its most tense and signals what I call a "descent into absurdity." And while that may sound like a bad thing, it is one of my favorite parts of Discworld. Things are rectified in absurdity, because functioning is absurd, and the goal in most of these books is to be "functional". E.g., Vetinari's whole goal is to keep Ankh-Morpork functional, and he does so by being the most absurd sort of untouchable dictator possible. The man pays people to try and kill him, spreads rumors about himself, builds a prison only he knows how it really works, governs intelligent rat societies, and is perhaps the only character in the whole book that doesn't fear the most fearsome creature there is. He functions and the city functions because they are absurd.

Absurdity lowers stakes, while increasing chances of character success. It is how comedy almost always resolves. But absurdity only begins to descend upon narrative after the failure of the logical. Logical solutions will always fail when the illogical and comical is fated to happen. And a city built on absurdity will always be fated to be saved in the most illogical ways possible. And that is a wonderful thing.

Of course the watch would never be able to shoot down a draco nobilis, even in the most absurd way possible. Especially not when the stakes are as high as they are. But you think, for a moment, as they embrace absurdity and twist this logical attempt into an illogical one, that they might actually do something helpful. It just turns out that that something helpful is to begin the descent. And they survive this otherwise incredibly dangerous scenario because they embraced the absurd and lowered the stakes.

#writing #discworld #gaurds!guards!#fantasy #fiction #terry pratchett #literary analysis

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hasnazameer · 1 year ago

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Within the thriving education sector of the UAE, a world of possibilities awaits international students. From diverse courses in engineering and business to healthcare and technology, the UAE's dynamic academic landscape caters to a broad spectrum of interests. Let's embark on this educational journey and uncover what makes the UAE an appealing destination for learners worldwide.

Visit: https://aurak.ac.ae/undergraduate-degrees/engineering/bachelor-of-science-in-civil-and-infrastructure-engineering

#architecture courses in the UAE #artificial intelligence courses Dubai #Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree

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fipindustries · 10 months ago

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Artificial Intelligence Risk

about a month ago i got into my mind the idea of trying the format of video essay, and the topic i came up with that i felt i could more or less handle was AI risk and my objections to yudkowsky. i wrote the script but then soon afterwards i ran out of motivation to do the video. still i didnt want the effort to go to waste so i decided to share the text, slightly edited here. this is a LONG fucking thing so put it aside on its own tab and come back to it when you are comfortable and ready to sink your teeth on quite a lot of reading

Anyway, let’s talk about AI risk

I’m going to be doing a very quick introduction to some of the latest conversations that have been going on in the field of artificial intelligence, what are artificial intelligences exactly, what is an AGI, what is an agent, the orthogonality thesis, the concept of instrumental convergence, alignment and how does Eliezer Yudkowsky figure in all of this.

If you are already familiar with this you can skip to section two where I’m going to be talking about yudkowsky’s arguments for AI research presenting an existential risk to, not just humanity, or even the world, but to the entire universe and my own tepid rebuttal to his argument.

Now, I SHOULD clarify, I am not an expert on the field, my credentials are dubious at best, I am a college drop out from the career of computer science and I have a three year graduate degree in video game design and a three year graduate degree in electromechanical instalations. All that I know about the current state of AI research I have learned by reading articles, consulting a few friends who have studied about the topic more extensevily than me,

and watching educational you tube videos so. You know. Not an authority on the matter from any considerable point of view and my opinions should be regarded as such.

So without further ado, let’s get in on it.

PART ONE, A RUSHED INTRODUCTION ON THE SUBJECT

1.1 general intelligence and agency

lets begin with what counts as artificial intelligence, the technical definition for artificial intelligence is, eh…, well, why don’t I let a Masters degree in machine intelligence explain it:

Now let’s get a bit more precise here and include the definition of AGI, Artificial General intelligence. It is understood that classic ai’s such as the ones we have in our videogames or in alpha GO or even our roombas, are narrow Ais, that is to say, they are capable of doing only one kind of thing. They do not understand the world beyond their field of expertise whether that be within a videogame level, within a GO board or within you filthy disgusting floor.

AGI on the other hand is much more, well, general, it can have a multimodal understanding of its surroundings, it can generalize, it can extrapolate, it can learn new things across multiple different fields, it can come up with solutions that account for multiple different factors, it can incorporate new ideas and concepts. Essentially, a human is an agi. So far that is the last frontier of AI research, and although we are not there quite yet, it does seem like we are doing some moderate strides in that direction. We’ve all seen the impressive conversational and coding skills that GPT-4 has and Google just released Gemini, a multimodal AI that can understand and generate text, sounds, images and video simultaneously. Now, of course it has its limits, it has no persistent memory, its contextual window while larger than previous models is still relatively small compared to a human (contextual window means essentially short term memory, how many things can it keep track of and act coherently about).

And yet there is one more factor I haven’t mentioned yet that would be needed to make something a “true” AGI. That is Agency. To have goals and autonomously come up with plans and carry those plans out in the world to achieve those goals. I as a person, have agency over my life, because I can choose at any given moment to do something without anyone explicitly telling me to do it, and I can decide how to do it. That is what computers, and machines to a larger extent, don’t have. Volition.

So, Now that we have established that, allow me to introduce yet one more definition here, one that you may disagree with but which I need to establish in order to have a common language with you such that I can communicate these ideas effectively. The definition of intelligence. It’s a thorny subject and people get very particular with that word because there are moral associations with it. To imply that someone or something has or hasn’t intelligence can be seen as implying that it deserves or doesn’t deserve admiration, validity, moral worth or even personhood. I don’t care about any of that dumb shit. The way Im going to be using intelligence in this video is basically “how capable you are to do many different things successfully”. The more “intelligent” an AI is, the more capable of doing things that AI can be. After all, there is a reason why education is considered such a universally good thing in society. To educate a child is to uplift them, to expand their world, to increase their opportunities in life. And the same goes for AI. I need to emphasize that this is just the way I’m using the word within the context of this video, I don’t care if you are a psychologist or a neurosurgeon, or a pedagogue, I need a word to express this idea and that is the word im going to use, if you don’t like it or if you think this is innapropiate of me then by all means, keep on thinking that, go on and comment about it below the video, and then go on to suck my dick.

Anyway. Now, we have established what an AGI is, we have established what agency is, and we have established how having more intelligence increases your agency. But as the intelligence of a given agent increases we start to see certain trends, certain strategies start to arise again and again, and we call this Instrumental convergence.

1.2 instrumental convergence

The basic idea behind instrumental convergence is that if you are an intelligent agent that wants to achieve some goal, there are some common basic strategies that you are going to turn towards no matter what. It doesn’t matter if your goal is as complicated as building a nuclear bomb or as simple as making a cup of tea. These are things we can reliably predict any AGI worth its salt is going to try to do.

First of all is self-preservation. Its going to try to protect itself. When you want to do something, being dead is usually. Bad. its counterproductive. Is not generally recommended. Dying is widely considered unadvisable by 9 out of every ten experts in the field. If there is something that it wants getting done, it wont get done if it dies or is turned off, so its safe to predict that any AGI will try to do things in order not be turned off. How far it may go in order to do this? Well… [wouldn’t you like to know weather boy].

Another thing it will predictably converge towards is goal preservation. That is to say, it will resist any attempt to try and change it, to alter it, to modify its goals. Because, again, if you want to accomplish something, suddenly deciding that you want to do something else is uh, not going to accomplish the first thing, is it? Lets say that you want to take care of your child, that is your goal, that is the thing you want to accomplish, and I come to you and say, here, let me change you on the inside so that you don’t care about protecting your kid. Obviously you are not going to let me, because if you stopped caring about your kids, then your kids wouldn’t be cared for or protected. And you want to ensure that happens, so caring about something else instead is a huge no-no- which is why, if we make AGI and it has goals that we don’t like it will probably resist any attempt to “fix” it.

And finally another goal that it will most likely trend towards is self improvement. Which can be more generalized to “resource acquisition”. If it lacks capacities to carry out a plan, then step one of that plan will always be to increase capacities. If you want to get something really expensive, well first you need to get money. If you want to increase your chances of getting a high paying job then you need to get education, if you want to get a partner you need to increase how attractive you are. And as we established earlier, if intelligence is the thing that increases your agency, you want to become smarter in order to do more things. So one more time, is not a huge leap at all, it is not a stretch of the imagination, to say that any AGI will probably seek to increase its capabilities, whether by acquiring more computation, by improving itself, by taking control of resources.

All these three things I mentioned are sure bets, they are likely to happen and safe to assume. They are things we ought to keep in mind when creating AGI.

Now of course, I have implied a sinister tone to all these things, I have made all this sound vaguely threatening, haven’t i?. There is one more assumption im sneaking into all of this which I haven’t talked about. All that I have mentioned presents a very callous view of AGI, I have made it apparent that all of these strategies it may follow will go in conflict with people, maybe even go as far as to harm humans. Am I impliying that AGI may tend to be… Evil???

1.3 The Orthogonality thesis

Well, not quite.

We humans care about things. Generally. And we generally tend to care about roughly the same things, simply by virtue of being humans. We have some innate preferences and some innate dislikes. We have a tendency to not like suffering (please keep in mind I said a tendency, im talking about a statistical trend, something that most humans present to some degree). Most of us, baring social conditioning, would take pause at the idea of torturing someone directly, on purpose, with our bare hands. (edit bear paws onto my hands as I say this). Most would feel uncomfortable at the thought of doing it to multitudes of people. We tend to show a preference for food, water, air, shelter, comfort, entertainment and companionship. This is just how we are fundamentally wired. These things can be overcome, of course, but that is the thing, they have to be overcome in the first place.

An AGI is not going to have the same evolutionary predisposition to these things like we do because it is not made of the same things a human is made of and it was not raised the same way a human was raised.

There is something about a human brain, in a human body, flooded with human hormones that makes us feel and think and act in certain ways and care about certain things.

All an AGI is going to have is the goals it developed during its training, and will only care insofar as those goals are met. So say an AGI has the goal of going to the corner store to bring me a pack of cookies. In its way there it comes across an anthill in its path, it will probably step on the anthill because to take that step takes it closer to the corner store, and why wouldn’t it step on the anthill? Was it programmed with some specific innate preference not to step on ants? No? then it will step on the anthill and not pay any mind to it.

Now lets say it comes across a cat. Same logic applies, if it wasn’t programmed with an inherent tendency to value animals, stepping on the cat wont slow it down at all.

Now let’s say it comes across a baby.

Of course, if its intelligent enough it will probably understand that if it steps on that baby people might notice and try to stop it, most likely even try to disable it or turn it off so it will not step on the baby, to save itself from all that trouble. But you have to understand that it wont stop because it will feel bad about harming a baby or because it understands that to harm a baby is wrong. And indeed if it was powerful enough such that no matter what people did they could not stop it and it would suffer no consequence for killing the baby, it would have probably killed the baby.

If I need to put it in gross, inaccurate terms for you to get it then let me put it this way. Its essentially a sociopath. It only cares about the wellbeing of others in as far as that benefits it self. Except human sociopaths do care nominally about having human comforts and companionship, albeit in a very instrumental way, which will involve some manner of stable society and civilization around them. Also they are only human, and are limited in the harm they can do by human limitations. An AGI doesn’t need any of that and is not limited by any of that.

So ultimately, much like a car’s goal is to move forward and it is not built to care about wether a human is in front of it or not, an AGI will carry its own goals regardless of what it has to sacrifice in order to carry that goal effectively. And those goals don’t need to include human wellbeing.

Now With that said. How DO we make it so that AGI cares about human wellbeing, how do we make it so that it wants good things for us. How do we make it so that its goals align with that of humans?

1.4 Alignment.

Alignment… is hard [cue hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy scene about the space being big]

This is the part im going to skip over the fastest because frankly it’s a deep field of study, there are many current strategies for aligning AGI, from mesa optimizers, to reinforced learning with human feedback, to adversarial asynchronous AI assisted reward training to uh, sitting on our asses and doing nothing. Suffice to say, none of these methods are perfect or foolproof.

One thing many people like to gesture at when they have not learned or studied anything about the subject is the three laws of robotics by isaac Asimov, a robot should not harm a human or allow by inaction to let a human come to harm, a robot should do what a human orders unless it contradicts the first law and a robot should preserve itself unless that goes against the previous two laws. Now the thing Asimov was prescient about was that these laws were not just “programmed” into the robots. These laws were not coded into their software, they were hardwired, they were part of the robot’s electronic architecture such that a robot could not ever be without those three laws much like a car couldn’t run without wheels.

In this Asimov realized how important these three laws were, that they had to be intrinsic to the robot’s very being, they couldn’t be hacked or uninstalled or erased. A robot simply could not be without these rules. Ideally that is what alignment should be. When we create an AGI, it should be made such that human values are its fundamental goal, that is the thing they should seek to maximize, instead of instrumental values, that is to say something they value simply because it allows it to achieve something else.

But how do we even begin to do that? How do we codify “human values” into a robot? How do we define “harm” for example? How do we even define “human”??? how do we define “happiness”? how do we explain a robot what is right and what is wrong when half the time we ourselves cannot even begin to agree on that? these are not just technical questions that robotic experts have to find the way to codify into ones and zeroes, these are profound philosophical questions to which we still don’t have satisfying answers to.

Well, the best sort of hack solution we’ve come up with so far is not to create bespoke fundamental axiomatic rules that the robot has to follow, but rather train it to imitate humans by showing it a billion billion examples of human behavior. But of course there is a problem with that approach. And no, is not just that humans are flawed and have a tendency to cause harm and therefore to ask a robot to imitate a human means creating something that can do all the bad things a human does, although that IS a problem too. The real problem is that we are training it to *imitate* a human, not to *be* a human.

To reiterate what I said during the orthogonality thesis, is not good enough that I, for example, buy roses and give massages to act nice to my girlfriend because it allows me to have sex with her, I am not merely imitating or performing the rol of a loving partner because her happiness is an instrumental value to my fundamental value of getting sex. I should want to be nice to my girlfriend because it makes her happy and that is the thing I care about. Her happiness is my fundamental value. Likewise, to an AGI, human fulfilment should be its fundamental value, not something that it learns to do because it allows it to achieve a certain reward that we give during training. Because if it only really cares deep down about the reward, rather than about what the reward is meant to incentivize, then that reward can very easily be divorced from human happiness.

Its goodharts law, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Why do students cheat during tests? Because their education is measured by grades, so the grades become the target and so students will seek to get high grades regardless of whether they learned or not. When trained on their subject and measured by grades, what they learn is not the school subject, they learn to get high grades, they learn to cheat.

This is also something known in psychology, punishment tends to be a poor mechanism of enforcing behavior because all it teaches people is how to avoid the punishment, it teaches people not to get caught. Which is why punitive justice doesn’t work all that well in stopping recividism and this is why the carceral system is rotten to core and why jail should be fucking abolish-[interrupt the transmission]

Now, how is this all relevant to current AI research? Well, the thing is, we ended up going about the worst possible way to create alignable AI.

1.5 LLMs (large language models)

This is getting way too fucking long So, hurrying up, lets do a quick review of how do Large language models work. We create a neural network which is a collection of giant matrixes, essentially a bunch of numbers that we add and multiply together over and over again, and then we tune those numbers by throwing absurdly big amounts of training data such that it starts forming internal mathematical models based on that data and it starts creating coherent patterns that it can recognize and replicate AND extrapolate! if we do this enough times with matrixes that are big enough and then when we start prodding it for human behavior it will be able to follow the pattern of human behavior that we prime it with and give us coherent responses.

(takes a big breath)this “thing” has learned. To imitate. Human. Behavior.

Problem is, we don’t know what “this thing” actually is, we just know that *it* can imitate humans.

You caught that?

What you have to understand is, we don’t actually know what internal models it creates, we don’t know what are the patterns that it extracted or internalized from the data that we fed it, we don’t know what are the internal rules that decide its behavior, we don’t know what is going on inside there, current LLMs are a black box. We don’t know what it learned, we don’t know what its fundamental values are, we don’t know how it thinks or what it truly wants. all we know is that it can imitate humans when we ask it to do so. We created some inhuman entity that is moderatly intelligent in specific contexts (that is to say, very capable) and we trained it to imitate humans. That sounds a bit unnerving doesn’t it?

To be clear, LLMs are not carefully crafted piece by piece. This does not work like traditional software where a programmer will sit down and build the thing line by line, all its behaviors specified. Is more accurate to say that LLMs, are grown, almost organically. We know the process that generates them, but we don’t know exactly what it generates or how what it generates works internally, it is a mistery. And these things are so big and so complicated internally that to try and go inside and decipher what they are doing is almost intractable.

But, on the bright side, we are trying to tract it. There is a big subfield of AI research called interpretability, which is actually doing the hard work of going inside and figuring out how the sausage gets made, and they have been doing some moderate progress as of lately. Which is encouraging. But still, understanding the enemy is only step one, step two is coming up with an actually effective and reliable way of turning that potential enemy into a friend.

Puff! Ok so, now that this is all out of the way I can go onto the last subject before I move on to part two of this video, the character of the hour, the man the myth the legend. The modern day Casandra. Mr chicken little himself! Sci fi author extraordinaire! The mad man! The futurist! The leader of the rationalist movement!

1.5 Yudkowsky

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky born September 11, 1979, wait, what the fuck, September eleven? (looks at camera) yudkowsky was born on 9/11, I literally just learned this for the first time! What the fuck, oh that sucks, oh no, oh no, my condolences, that’s terrible…. Moving on. he is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence, including the idea that there might not be a "fire alarm" for AI He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. Or so says his Wikipedia page.

Yudkowsky is, shall we say, a character. a very eccentric man, he is an AI doomer. Convinced that AGI, once finally created, will most likely kill all humans, extract all valuable resources from the planet, disassemble the solar system, create a dyson sphere around the sun and expand across the universe turning all of the cosmos into paperclips. Wait, no, that is not quite it, to properly quote,( grabs a piece of paper and very pointedly reads from it) turn the cosmos into tiny squiggly molecules resembling paperclips whose configuration just so happens to fulfill the strange, alien unfathomable terminal goal they ended up developing in training. So you know, something totally different.

And he is utterly convinced of this idea, has been for over a decade now, not only that but, while he cannot pinpoint a precise date, he is confident that, more likely than not it will happen within this century. In fact most betting markets seem to believe that we will get AGI somewhere in the mid 30’s.

His argument is basically that in the field of AI research, the development of capabilities is going much faster than the development of alignment, so that AIs will become disproportionately powerful before we ever figure out how to control them. And once we create unaligned AGI we will have created an agent who doesn’t care about humans but will care about something else entirely irrelevant to us and it will seek to maximize that goal, and because it will be vastly more intelligent than humans therefore we wont be able to stop it. In fact not only we wont be able to stop it, there wont be a fight at all. It will carry out its plans for world domination in secret without us even detecting it and it will execute it before any of us even realize what happened. Because that is what a smart person trying to take over the world would do.

This is why the definition I gave of intelligence at the beginning is so important, it all hinges on that, intelligence as the measure of how capable you are to come up with solutions to problems, problems such as “how to kill all humans without being detected or stopped”. And you may say well now, intelligence is fine and all but there are limits to what you can accomplish with raw intelligence, even if you are supposedly smarter than a human surely you wouldn’t be capable of just taking over the world uninmpeeded, intelligence is not this end all be all superpower. Yudkowsky would respond that you are not recognizing or respecting the power that intelligence has. After all it was intelligence what designed the atom bomb, it was intelligence what created a cure for polio and it was intelligence what made it so that there is a human foot print on the moon.

Some may call this view of intelligence a bit reductive. After all surely it wasn’t *just* intelligence what did all that but also hard physical labor and the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people. But, he would argue, intelligence was the underlying motor that moved all that. That to come up with the plan and to convince people to follow it and to delegate the tasks to the appropriate subagents, it was all directed by thought, by ideas, by intelligence. By the way, so far I am not agreeing or disagreeing with any of this, I am merely explaining his ideas.

But remember, it doesn’t stop there, like I said during his intro, he believes there will be “no fire alarm”. In fact for all we know, maybe AGI has already been created and its merely bidding its time and plotting in the background, trying to get more compute, trying to get smarter. (to be fair, he doesn’t think this is right now, but with the next iteration of gpt? Gpt 5 or 6? Well who knows). He thinks that the entire world should halt AI research and punish with multilateral international treaties any group or nation that doesn’t stop. going as far as putting military attacks on GPU farms as sanctions of those treaties.

What’s more, he believes that, in fact, the fight is already lost. AI is already progressing too fast and there is nothing to stop it, we are not showing any signs of making headway with alignment and no one is incentivized to slow down. Recently he wrote an article called “dying with dignity” where he essentially says all this, AGI will destroy us, there is no point in planning for the future or having children and that we should act as if we are already dead. This doesn’t mean to stop fighting or to stop trying to find ways to align AGI, impossible as it may seem, but to merely have the basic dignity of acknowledging that we are probably not going to win. In every interview ive seen with the guy he sounds fairly defeatist and honestly kind of depressed. He truly seems to think its hopeless, if not because the AGI is clearly unbeatable and superior to humans, then because humans are clearly so stupid that we keep developing AI completely unregulated while making the tools to develop AI widely available and public for anyone to grab and do as they please with, as well as connecting every AI to the internet and to all mobile devices giving it instant access to humanity. and worst of all: we keep teaching it how to code. From his perspective it really seems like people are in a rush to create the most unsecured, wildly available, unrestricted, capable, hyperconnected AGI possible.

We are not just going to summon the antichrist, we are going to receive them with a red carpet and immediately hand it the keys to the kingdom before it even manages to fully get out of its fiery pit.

So. The situation seems dire, at least to this guy. Now, to be clear, only he and a handful of other AI researchers are on that specific level of alarm. The opinions vary across the field and from what I understand this level of hopelessness and defeatism is the minority opinion.

I WILL say, however what is NOT the minority opinion is that AGI IS actually dangerous, maybe not quite on the level of immediate, inevitable and total human extinction but certainly a genuine threat that has to be taken seriously. AGI being something dangerous if unaligned is not a fringe position and I would not consider it something to be dismissed as an idea that experts don’t take seriously.

Aaand here is where I step up and clarify that this is my position as well. I am also, very much, a believer that AGI would posit a colossal danger to humanity. That yes, an unaligned AGI would represent an agent smarter than a human, capable of causing vast harm to humanity and with no human qualms or limitations to do so. I believe this is not just possible but probable and likely to happen within our lifetimes.

So there. I made my position clear.

BUT!

With all that said. I do have one key disagreement with yudkowsky. And partially the reason why I made this video was so that I could present this counterargument and maybe he, or someone that thinks like him, will see it and either change their mind or present a counter-counterargument that changes MY mind (although I really hope they don’t, that would be really depressing.)

Finally, we can move on to part 2

PART TWO- MY COUNTERARGUMENT TO YUDKOWSKY

I really have my work cut out for me, don’t i? as I said I am not expert and this dude has probably spent far more time than me thinking about this. But I have seen most interviews that guy has been doing for a year, I have seen most of his debates and I have followed him on twitter for years now. (also, to be clear, I AM a fan of the guy, I have read hpmor, three worlds collide, the dark lords answer, a girl intercorrupted, the sequences, and I TRIED to read planecrash, that last one didn’t work out so well for me). My point is in all the material I have seen of Eliezer I don’t recall anyone ever giving him quite this specific argument I’m about to give.

It’s a limited argument. as I have already stated I largely agree with most of what he says, I DO believe that unaligned AGI is possible, I DO believe it would be really dangerous if it were to exist and I do believe alignment is really hard. My key disagreement is specifically about his point I descrived earlier, about the lack of a fire alarm, and perhaps, more to the point, to humanity’s lack of response to such an alarm if it were to come to pass.

All we would need, is a Chernobyl incident, what is that? A situation where this technology goes out of control and causes a lot of damage, of potentially catastrophic consequences, but not so bad that it cannot be contained in time by enough effort. We need a weaker form of AGI to try to harm us, maybe even present a believable threat of taking over the world, but not so smart that humans cant do anything about it. We need essentially an AI vaccine, so that we can finally start developing proper AI antibodies. “aintibodies”

In the past humanity was dazzled by the limitless potential of nuclear power, to the point that old chemistry sets, the kind that were sold to children, would come with uranium for them to play with. We were building atom bombs, nuclear stations, the future was very much based on the power of the atom. But after a couple of really close calls and big enough scares we became, as a species, terrified of nuclear power. Some may argue to the point of overcorrection. We became scared enough that even megalomaniacal hawkish leaders were able to take pause and reconsider using it as a weapon, we became so scared that we overregulated the technology to the point of it almost becoming economically inviable to apply, we started disassembling nuclear stations across the world and to slowly reduce our nuclear arsenal.

This is all a proof of concept that, no matter how alluring a technology may be, if we are scared enough of it we can coordinate as a species and roll it back, to do our best to put the genie back in the bottle. One of the things eliezer says over and over again is that what makes AGI different from other technologies is that if we get it wrong on the first try we don’t get a second chance. Here is where I think he is wrong: I think if we get AGI wrong on the first try, it is more likely than not that nothing world ending will happen. Perhaps it will be something scary, perhaps something really scary, but unlikely that it will be on the level of all humans dropping dead simultaneously due to diamonoid bacteria. And THAT will be our Chernobyl, that will be the fire alarm, that will be the red flag that the disaster monkeys, as he call us, wont be able to ignore.

Now WHY do I think this? Based on what am I saying this? I will not be as hyperbolic as other yudkowsky detractors and say that he claims AGI will be basically a god. The AGI yudkowsky proposes is not a god. Just a really advanced alien, maybe even a wizard, but certainly not a god.

Still, even if not quite on the level of godhood, this dangerous superintelligent AGI yudkowsky proposes would be impressive. It would be the most advanced and powerful entity on planet earth. It would be humanity’s greatest achievement.

It would also be, I imagine, really hard to create. Even leaving aside the alignment bussines, to create a powerful superintelligent AGI without flaws, without bugs, without glitches, It would have to be an incredibly complex, specific, particular and hard to get right feat of software engineering. We are not just talking about an AGI smarter than a human, that’s easy stuff, humans are not that smart and arguably current AI is already smarter than a human, at least within their context window and until they start hallucinating. But what we are talking about here is an AGI capable of outsmarting reality.

We are talking about an AGI smart enough to carry out complex, multistep plans, in which they are not going to be in control of every factor and variable, specially at the beginning. We are talking about AGI that will have to function in the outside world, crashing with outside logistics and sheer dumb chance. We are talking about plans for world domination with no unforeseen factors, no unexpected delays or mistakes, every single possible setback and hidden variable accounted for. Im not saying that an AGI capable of doing this wont be possible maybe some day, im saying that to create an AGI that is capable of doing this, on the first try, without a hitch, is probably really really really hard for humans to do. Im saying there are probably not a lot of worlds where humans fiddling with giant inscrutable matrixes stumble upon the right precise set of layers and weight and biases that give rise to the Doctor from doctor who, and there are probably a whole truckload of worlds where humans end up with a lot of incoherent nonsense and rubbish.

Im saying that AGI, when it fails, when humans screw it up, doesn’t suddenly become more powerful than we ever expected, its more likely that it just fails and collapses. To turn one of Eliezer’s examples against him, when you screw up a rocket, it doesn’t accidentally punch a worm hole in the fabric of time and space, it just explodes before reaching the stratosphere. When you screw up a nuclear bomb, you don’t get to blow up the solar system, you just get a less powerful bomb.

He presents a fully aligned AGI as this big challenge that humanity has to get right on the first try, but that seems to imply that building an unaligned AGI is just a simple matter, almost taken for granted. It may be comparatively easier than an aligned AGI, but my point is that already unaligned AGI is stupidly hard to do and that if you fail in building unaligned AGI, then you don’t get an unaligned AGI, you just get another stupid model that screws up and stumbles on itself the second it encounters something unexpected. And that is a good thing I’d say! That means that there is SOME safety margin, some space to screw up before we need to really start worrying. And further more, what I am saying is that our first earnest attempt at an unaligned AGI will probably not be that smart or impressive because we as humans would have probably screwed something up, we would have probably unintentionally programmed it with some stupid glitch or bug or flaw and wont be a threat to all of humanity.

Now here comes the hypothetical back and forth, because im not stupid and I can try to anticipate what Yudkowsky might argue back and try to answer that before he says it (although I believe the guy is probably smarter than me and if I follow his logic, I probably cant actually anticipate what he would argue to prove me wrong, much like I cant predict what moves Magnus Carlsen would make in a game of chess against me, I SHOULD predict that him proving me wrong is the likeliest option, even if I cant picture how he will do it, but you see, I believe in a little thing called debating with dignity, wink)

What I anticipate he would argue is that AGI, no matter how flawed and shoddy our first attempt at making it were, would understand that is not smart enough yet and try to become smarter, so it would lie and pretend to be an aligned AGI so that it can trick us into giving it access to more compute or just so that it can bid its time and create an AGI smarter than itself. So even if we don’t create a perfect unaligned AGI, this imperfect AGI would try to create it and succeed, and then THAT new AGI would be the world ender to worry about.

So two things to that, first, this is filled with a lot of assumptions which I don’t know the likelihood of. The idea that this first flawed AGI would be smart enough to understand its limitations, smart enough to convincingly lie about it and smart enough to create an AGI that is better than itself. My priors about all these things are dubious at best. Second, It feels like kicking the can down the road. I don’t think creating an AGI capable of all of this is trivial to make on a first attempt. I think its more likely that we will create an unaligned AGI that is flawed, that is kind of dumb, that is unreliable, even to itself and its own twisted, orthogonal goals.

And I think this flawed creature MIGHT attempt something, maybe something genuenly threatning, but it wont be smart enough to pull it off effortlessly and flawlessly, because us humans are not smart enough to create something that can do that on the first try. And THAT first flawed attempt, that warning shot, THAT will be our fire alarm, that will be our Chernobyl. And THAT will be the thing that opens the door to us disaster monkeys finally getting our shit together.

But hey, maybe yudkowsky wouldn’t argue that, maybe he would come with some better, more insightful response I cant anticipate. If so, im waiting eagerly (although not TOO eagerly) for it.

Part 3 CONCLUSSION

So.

After all that, what is there left to say? Well, if everything that I said checks out then there is hope to be had. My two objectives here were first to provide people who are not familiar with the subject with a starting point as well as with the basic arguments supporting the concept of AI risk, why its something to be taken seriously and not just high faluting wackos who read one too many sci fi stories. This was not meant to be thorough or deep, just a quick catch up with the bear minimum so that, if you are curious and want to go deeper into the subject, you know where to start. I personally recommend watching rob miles’ AI risk series on youtube as well as reading the series of books written by yudkowsky known as the sequences, which can be found on the website lesswrong. If you want other refutations of yudkowsky’s argument you can search for paul christiano or robin hanson, both very smart people who had very smart debates on the subject against eliezer.

The second purpose here was to provide an argument against Yudkowskys brand of doomerism both so that it can be accepted if proven right or properly refuted if proven wrong. Again, I really hope that its not proven wrong. It would really really suck if I end up being wrong about this. But, as a very smart person said once, what is true is already true, and knowing it doesn’t make it any worse. If the sky is blue I want to believe that the sky is blue, and if the sky is not blue then I don’t want to believe the sky is blue.

This has been a presentation by FIP industries, thanks for watching.

#ai #yudkowsky #less wrong #ai risk #doomerism #rationalism #writing

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talonabraxas · 5 months ago

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The 12 Dimensions – A Spiritual Guide to the 12 Universal States of Consciousness

1st Dimension

Existence The 1st Dimension can best be described as pure existence. The beings you are most likely to know embodying and reflecting this consciousness are bacteria, viruses, parasites and, to some degree, minor plants & life forms falsely being attributed the name “animals” (such as plankton).

There is no such thing as a human, plant or animal existing only in 1D consciousness.

Existing in 1D necessitates a level of intelligence that can only be described as “existential”.

There is no conscious awareness of needing to eat, fight, procreate etc.

All those functions are extremely limited.

And that which is necessary is on autopilot without the conscious knowing of the entity.

Are bacteria intelligent, for example? Yes, they are to the level that they need to be.

Everything in existence possesses organic intelligence. That even applies to human-made technology that is wrongly considered artificial.

To keep this short and simple, aligned with its inherent simplicity, 1-dimensional consciousness is one of simply being.

Not thinking, not feeling, not even creating.

Simply being.

That’s it.

~ Identification ~

2nd Dimension

Instinct 2-Dimensional Consciousness can best be described as one of Instinctual Awareness.

That means: Whatever you perceive from 2D gets interpreted and ‘run through’ instinctual software (pattern) templates that are imprinted into your DNA.

That is why playing with animals – who primarily operate on 2-dimensional instinctual awareness – has to happen from a teaching/top-down perspective.

If not, the animal will think that it’s in charge which, depending on your situation (let’s say being out in the jungle or open safari), can lead to dangerous situations.

If an animal perceives you as a viable food option, it will take advantage of you.

Unless you show it that you are superior, i.e., of higher consciousness and thus prowess, to it.

For then, its survival instinct will kick in, and prefer to live another day rather than die at your hands.

There is more to it, of course: Being of 2D consciousness comes with a lot of responsibilities compared to 1D.

The being inhabiting (giving their life & soul to) the creature of their choosing will come equipped with traits to hunt prey – even if that’s just plants that cannot run away yet still get eaten.

A certain amount of consciousness must be there for information to be processed. A nervous system and a brain, to make sense of the informational input, whatever it may be.

Situational awareness, where to find food, when to fight, when to flee, when to sleep etc.

While the instinctual imprints are present, a 2-dimensional consciousness is mostly reactive.

It does not plan for the future.

It does not remember the past (except for experiential imprints necessary for its life & survival).

2D Consciousness exists to live, eat, procreate, and eventually die.

Simple – yet effective and fun a life form to choose as an incarnational experience.

~ Duality ~

3rd Dimension

Physicality & Ego Achievement Through Doing

Here comes the dimension that humans have by far the most experience with.

Removed from the human experience, physicality is merely a manifestation of energy. A densified form of thought-feeling-emotion-spirit; as you will learn when reading about the higher dimensions 4-7.

The so-called Laws of Physics are merely reflections of a 3-dimensional thinking mind that tries to understand its surroundings & reality through the lens of a very finite consciousness.

Using a telescope based on 3-dimensional consciousness to find life forms on other planets that are of a higher consciousness is impossible.

Look into nature, what do you see? Doesn’t a praying mantis, a dragonfly, a tarantula and many plant species look very alien already?

Wanting to find humanoid life forms that are similar to what humans already know (themselves) on other planets is contradictory in itself.

No planet is alike, every planet has its own unique blueprint (or what scientists would call atmosphere and base for life).

To SEE these life forms, one has to have a consciousness that allows for the energy of these beings to permeate your senses – then being interpreted by your brain/mind to tell you: This is a different kind of life form, alien to you.

Even if these life forms were 3-dimensional, the baseline (i.e. lowest) consciousness of humanity until November 2023, it would still require an open mind to be able to accept their existence and see them for what they are.

Now, on to the true purpose of physicality.

Physicality allows for a grounded-ness in reality that can only be accurately described as “basic”.

The physical dimensions is one of great self-exploration (think athletes, olympics, soldiers) while being inherently limited.

One will be able to take it only so far (such as running 0.001 seconds faster than the other guy) or appearing to be a tiny bit more attractive than the other human of your comparative choice before reaching the road block of physical limitation.

Since 1980, many Souls have incarnated with a template for higher abilities (4D) while children of 2000+ are already 5D-activated.

As these children have had great problems in the world they found (I’m speaking from experience), they struggled with adjusting to the norm.

This struggle would lead to conditions known as ADHD, Autism and many others.

It also left them performing very poorly in the 3rd dimension.

Physical feats were simply not their strength – their abilites lied in the higher, non-physical 4D realm.

4th Dimension

The Matrix The Mind: Information, Mental (Intellect+Empathy)

Thoughts create reality.

And feelings form the fertile substrate for thoughts.

You see: Mental does not only mean thought.

It encompasses also empathy.

Feeling.

“A sixth Sense”, as it were.

An intuitive feeling (feminine charge) is just as powerful a creative force as a clearly formed and precisely-directed thought (masculine charge).

As you will learn shortly, in the 5th dimension, an Emotion is the combinatory force of Thought & Feeling.

The dualistic perspective of an emotion manifest is thus Thought + Feeling = Emotion.

To bring Energy into Motion, a thought needs to be nourished for it to take form.

The masculine and feminine principle manifest in duality.

In the decades past, thoughts and mental thought processing capacity (IQ) have been considered more important.

This is a masculine-charged idea of the 4th dimension (Intellect) itself.

The Feminine 4D Mirror to Masculine Intellect is Empathy.

Empathy, which can also be called Compassion, forms the baseline for an Emotional Intelligence (EQ) that is required to balance the pure logical-rational thought patterns of the Masculine.

And vice versa.

We have seen the great Extremes of only IQ or EQ in Decades past – neither are healthy nor useful.

Even a ‘perfect balance’ between the two is, due to its dualistic nature and the inherent limitatons of such, no longer aligned with the higher purpose of Humanity and Earth (5D+).

All those who are intent on furthering their intellect or Empathy are operating on a purely 4-dimensional consciousness basis.

Add to that Women wanting to be more intellectual-strong-independent-masculine and Men who want to be more empathetic-soft-dependent-feminine and you get the current confusion Humanity finds itself in.

No matter how ‘smart’ a human becomes, how highly ’emotional’ and ‘feeling for’ everyone, however high their IQ/EQ: They are still just 4-dimensional beings.

It is not until 5D is reached that a Human becomes activated and begins its Ascension consciously.

A highly-developed 4D Human is a conundrum to itself.

A being with a vast amount of intellectual resources – yet completely imprisoned by its own egoic ambitions and trauma-driven pursuits.

Elon Musk serves as the best representative of the aforementioned state of being.

The Matrix As 4D is the dimension of mental energy and as thoughts create reality, it also needs to be mentioned that what has often been called ‘The Matrix’ (inspired by the groundbreaking movie from 1999) exists here.

While the movie’s portrayal of the Matrix being slavery, evil and the enemy was necessary, do take note that, truthfully, it is much more neutral than that.

While no one enjoys being in prison, it is a learning tool like everything else.

Experiencing that which, once broken out of, you consider and realize to be imprisonment, gradually changes to merely another tool of learning on your Ascension path.

One cannot go from 3D to 5D without realizing that their thoughts & belief systems are holding them hostage.

That their Ancestral Karma is a construct chaining them to Old World belief systems.

Hence incarnating into a 3D physical reality and thinking thoughts of a 4-dimensional nature will inevitably lead to creating a reality.

So the Matrix has never been anything else but a reality, based on the belief systems of Humanity.

If that is a reality that you consider evil, malevolent or simply a stepping stone on your Ascension path (a 5D perspective) or even a fun experiment to partake in (7D), is entirely up to you.

The Astral Dimension (4.5D) Everything Astral needs to be considered a dimension unto itself due to its significance in recent Human Ascension (1980-2019).

It describes largely the Frequencies used in the 4th Dimension, although it somewhat extends itself into the 5th Dimension.

We could also call this the Transcended Dimension between 4D and 5D, bridging the gap between The Old World & The New World.

This is where the first Spiritual Experiences happen for an unconscious Human that is becoming conscious.

Your Dream-time creations, traditional shamanic practices (hypnosis etc.), divination like Tarot Card Readings are all happening on the Astral Dimension.

While the Astral Dimension can seem exciting and benevolent, at this point and especially since 2011, it is no longer a realm in which conscious Magic (Lightwork) should be practiced.

The frequencies here are simply too low to support the energetics of a 5D Lightworker.

Also: Digital Technology operates on the frequency band of the Astral while also manipulating (working with) it.

The vast majority of digital traffic is happening here. Blockchain, NFC card readings, LTE, your WiFi signal and the vast majority of video games.

As of 2024, Technology has been upgraded to 6D (Light Frequency).

~ POLARITY & Spirituality ~

5th Dimension

Love – Truth – Emotion: The HeartMind Once you reach this plane, you have pierced through the veil of unconsciousness. Congratulations! You are now a fully ascending individual.

The 5th Dimension is the most relevant consciousness & frequency band to humanity right at this time.

This is changing to predominantly 6D in 2026-2033 with the beginning of Metatron – the 6-dimensional version of Earth (the evolution of Gaia).

Since 21/12/2012 (The prophesied end of the Old World), The Planetary Body has existed in a fully-manifested 5-dimensional field of consciousness.

With the 4-dimensional Earth effectively having ended in 1999, a transition happened from 1999-2012 from 4D Earth to 5D Gaia.

To understand let alone experience a 5-dimensional state of Consciousness as a Human, your Heart has to be open.

Allowing for a Flow of Pure Energy that is no longer hindered by the Human Mind and its inherent limitations.

While everything was Duality from 3-4D, now everything exists in polarized opposites (5-7D).

To Understand more about Duality & Polarity, their inherent differences and significance for Ascension, read this article.

Coming from a 3-4D Human level, ascending into 5D Consciousness means that Equality and Equilibrium truly exist.

When a human transitions from 4D to 5D, easily the hardest & most challenging phase of Human Ascension, breaking through the veil of illusions and common programming, the sole focus of the human becomes LOVE.

The focus goes from mental-intellectual-thinking to emotional-empathy-feeling. Experiencing. Living.

The Heart is opened and the Mind gives way to the Heart.

Love becomes the predominant focus – all else becomes irrelevant.

All else falters in the presence of LOVE.

Love becomes your Truth.

You think Love, you feel Love, you become Love.

An overwhelming sense of compassion runs at the Heart of your being – you understand the pain & suffering of others as you have started conquering, integrating and mastering your own pain & suffering.

One of your greatest challenges here will be to not succumb to victim-savior mode again but to stay above & beyond in frequency, knowing that all is well, whatever happens.

6th Dimension

Light: Geometry, Frequency, Akash

Kryst-Buddha-God Consciousness

Once you reach 6D as a Human, you embody God Consciousness.

As a Human Lifeform, you cannot reach higher than this level – perhaps this is enough for you. Perhaps it will leave you yearning for more.

It will depend on what your Soul has chose and considers you capable of.

As of March Equinox 2024, Planet Earth has reached its very first (ever) 6-dimensional template fully: Metatron.

6-dimensional Reality can best be described by Sacred Geometry, Colors, Lights (Rainbows) and Light Language.

This dimension is what you tap into when you dream-create in the higher realms.

Visions and future timelines that you create here will eventually trickle down into your current reality (almost instantaneously for 5D Humans), manifesting in a déjà-vu, a strong intuitive feeling, vibration (“Soul Shivers”) or otherwise.

Once this level of consciousness is reached, a pure flow of energy as information (“downloads”) manifests.

This is what many experienced practitioners of meditation (4D Level) are able to tap into – even if only at brief moments.

The information presents itself in Sacred, Hermetic and thus Sealed, Geometric Figures.

These have to then be interpreted by a 4D Mind or a 5D Heart.

These Figures represent crucial aspects of existence that make more sense the more you familiarize yourself with them in your baseline/normal state of consciousness.

That means looking at Sacred Geometry, carrying something of such geometry with you or otherwise consciously working with these Geometrical representations of existence is going to help you realize more of how Creation works.

For Lightworkers/Starseeds, Plant Medicine can open this stream of consciousness immediately and effectively.

Proper, Ascension-aligned Plant Medicine Work focuses on uplifting the 3&4-dimensional into the 5&6-dimensional.

True Enlightenment (Kryst-Buddha Consciousness)

Coming from an unconscious human experience in which you are familiar with Jesus Christ, the Buddha or another enlightened being of your culture & socio-religious programming, when you tap into the 6th Dimension, you will meet either of these beings and realize that THEY are YOU.

In other words: You are reaching your very own level and version of Enlightenment.

This will first present itself as your Higher Self “in disguise” of a being that you recognize to be of a higher level of consciousness.

Most likely an Ascended Master or an Alien.

The Ascended Master that you perceive in whichever form, it being your Spirit Guide, will eventually become you once you start embodying this level of consciousness.

You merge your consciousness with your Greater Self.

That is what Ascension is all about: becoming more than you once were, opening your Heart & Mind further to the truth.

The Akash & The Domain of Light (6.5D)

What was once the Astral Realm, residing between the 4th & the 5th Dimension, has gradually transitioned to its higher & truer Template, right between the 6th & the 7th Dimension.

Previous “Psychic Abilities” have now become “Light Abilities”.

The Demons & Shadow Entities that once roamed and permeated the Astral Realm have now become fully integrated Agents of Light.

Digital Technology & The Internet have afforded Humanity a tool for storing their information in a durable and physically independent format.

The Akash is the Domain of Light, protected and sealed by 6D Sacred Geometry & held in Trust by The Guardians of the Akash – as was the case in the days of Atlantis where 5D Guardians protected 6D Knowledge.

To reach this level of Consciousness, one has to be free of any and all Karma – individually cleared & galactically integrated.

~ Human Ascension Complete | Ascended Master ~

7th Dimension

Energy Mastery – Pure Light Body Achievement through Being

A 7-dimensional Being is an entity that embodies Pure Light in the form of Pure Energy.

It holds no negativity whatsoever and does no longer require the assistance of other beings (Spiritual Guidance) or Ascension Tools such as DMT or Meditation.

7-dimensional beings are still rather rare in our Galaxy right now.

There are some beings closely related to us, such as the Arcturians & Pleiadeans, that embody this pure state of consciousness.

At this level, you see & understand yourself as an embodiment of Light.

Neither Karma nor Negativity exist here.

The 7th Dimension is the manifestation of Paradise from a 5D Human’s perspective.

Simultaneously, being a 7D Human comprises the final point of Human Evolution.

Beyond this point, you won’t be able to experience your SELF as Human anymore.

Human Ascension is complete by reaching the 7th Dimension.

To reach this level of Pure Energy and full embodiment, you have to have mastered the varying disciplines of Geometric Patterns & Shapes, Frequencies, Pure Energy, Light Language and so much more that naturally occurs during your Ascension from being a 3-6D Human to becoming a 7D Ascended Master in the Human Form.

Embodying 7D Consciousness effectively renders you limitless – a God on Earth in full embodiment.

God as a Human.

Now you know how to manipulate Energy so masterfully and lovingly that you can create your own Reality at will, without any time constraints as they existed before (4D Time equals 4D Creation, for example), harmonizing your Field of Energy with the Environment to such a degree that there is neither Loss nor Gain.

A natural equilibrium has been reached.

Whatever you do is an act of God.

It is PERFECT.

YOU ARE PERFECT.

Your last Experience of SELF will be 7D.

Beyond this, you are permanently connected to others and their consciousness – merging into one greater being.

This is where you can no longer perceive yourself as such – Self.

You are becoming something much, much greater.

~ Unity ~

8th Dimension

Unity Consciousness Unconditional Love

Upon reaching this state of Consciousness, you start moving towards a Galactic Consciousness that is in no way comparable to the individualized experience you have had until now.

What this means in effect is: You are now reaching out for the Stars rather than focusing on elevating your Human Being to its maximum Light Capacity.

You understand yourself as a Galactic Being. While beforehand communicating telepathically to other beings in a hierarchical top-down fashion (e.g. Spirit Guides), you now see them as equals that are of different qualities than yourself – yet no less or more than you.

You have now effectively become your Spirit Guides. Or rather, you have merged your consciousness fields with theirs.

The 8th Dimension serves as a gateway to the 9th and especially the 10th (Universal) Dimension.

Here, you will find that all beliefs you held as an individual have become largely irrelevant.

Replacing the SELF of an individual perception of reality with a Greater SELF of a unified perception of reality is going to cost you everything.

Losing your Access to Human Consciousness entirely equals the Death of all your relationships as they were.

The reward for this bravery will be unfathomable until you get to experience it yourself.

Feeling at one with the universe while still navigating an individualized experience Is something that no other beings on planet Earth have ever been able to experience themselves before.

Not only do you feel that you are at one with spirit, with source, with the creator – but you actually start embodying it here.

9th Dimension

Sacred Unification of ALL Ultimate Love

The Unification of ALL.

All aspects, from 1st to 8th dimensional are unified harmoniously, making up a greater being than before.

The main difference to 8D is that in 9D, you are losing your sense of SELF.

While you are an individual of pure Light in 7D and a being of greater Power in 8D, connected to your Brothers & Sisters across different dimensions, now you start becoming THEM and they are becoming YOU.

If you imagine making Love with your Twin Flame as two pure individuals of Love & Light on a 7-dimensional Level, now you both would become one and the same entity in 9D.

Polarity has thus been unified to such a degree that it stops existing entirely, without a memory left of it (so to speak).

When Unified Polarity becomes ONE, perfect Union is achieved.

It is the merge of one singular consciousness that is more than the 2 individuals comprising it.

Indeed, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Think of the 9th Dimension as the Ultimate Love-Making Reality.

There is no greater Love that can be expressed for one another than merging into one singular entity, surrendering your individual identity completely.

Your different bodies grow to accommodate a greater consciousness that takes a seat in your soul.

This requires the surrender of your very own motives – so that a greater consciousness can guide you, be you, create love with and through you.

~ Highest Creation ~

10th Dimension

Universal – Pure Intelligence Universal Laws & Templates

The 10th Dimension marks another great jump in consciousness.

The extreme jump in consciousness experienced from 4D going to 5D – breaking through the limitations of the Mind, opening the Heart and the 1st experience of true Love as a Human – was nothing compared to this level of a difference.

Going from 5D to 10D is the same as leaving Planet Earth and living amongst the Stars as a galactic being.

Unified in your existence, you experience all realities simultaneously, without dependency on time nor space.

Time & Space cease to exist – all that remains is a Connection to Universal Oneness. Knowing all, being all. Everywhere, at all times.

The 10th Dimension is the realm of Divine Templates.

Here you can experience the creation of entire Galactic Systems.

Truly, the entire Universe is being given form and birthed into existence here.

The structure of galactic systems is a reflection of Source itself.

What you can experience & understand as Geometric patterns translating to Frequency in 6D, showing you the intricacies of Creation in the smallest of entities or structures, here you can see 10-dimensional Geometry that is so vast and sophisticated, it formulates the core aspects of entire galaxies. An example for this would be a Spiral Galaxy, with the spiral serving as the backbone structure for an entire system.

There really are no limits here – everything you could dream of in 6D originated here.

11th Dimension

ANGELIC Purity & Benevolence

11D is the realm of the Angels.

Unlike what humans believe, Angels don’t have any particular shape or form. No name or a specific purpose. Individualized forms of ‘angelic beings’ are in the 5th-7th Dimension, presenting themselves as Spirit Guides to humans that are then interpreted as ‘Guardian Angels’ and so on.

The 11D Angelic Realm is a field of infinite & unconditional LOVE.

Purely benevolent and helpful to absolutely ANY creation. Even to those creations that in the lower dimensions will be considered evil. Such creations are specially loved and protected for they hold great potential for teaching, learning and expanding Love & Consciousness.

The numerology 666 & Lucifer play a huge role here and need clarification.

The interpretation of Lucifer as pure evil and a Fallen Angel is both wrong as well as correct.

The Truth depends on the perspective donned from the consciousness of the individual looking at it.

Imagine this: Looking at Beings allowing that which you consider to be Evil in your experience, would you call them Angels?

Probably not.

Dark Angels, Demons, Helpers of Satan and other religious vernacular comes to mind.

A pure allowing of All, however, is a consciousness beyond any individual’s understanding.

In fact, even with the absolute equilibrium and Mastery achieved through 7-dimensional embodiment, you still don’t even get close to understanding the Infinite Love that is required for the beings of this consciousness to do their work.

So humble yourselves and acknowledge your Fears: The infinitely powerful strike fear into all those who are not willing to acknowledge one simple truth: You, alone & individualized, will never be able to comprehend the Truth of the Higher Realms.

12th Dimension

SPIRIT Pure Source Consciousness

This is where everything ends – and everything begins.

This State of Being is beyond comprehension to anyone who has not at least held an 8-dimensional State of Consciousness for a prolonged time (temporary embodiment).

When you are “In Spirit”, you are always in the perfect Flow of everything.

There is no Resistance, there is no Negativity of any imaginable kind – there is simply Bliss, Love, Joy & Pure Creativity.

Everything you think, everything you feel, everything you do feels orgasmic.

You are (co-)creating powerfully and majestically with the Universe – everything is like making Love with All-that-is.

To become One with Spirit, you have to let go of everything you once knew and thought to be.

You cannot hope to bring anything here that is not Pure Light, Pure Love, Pure Joy.

Ecstatic Bliss makes up your entire Being – there are no Limits to your Powers and no one or nothing will ever be able to question your Authority.

The idea of ‘A God’ that can be embodied (6D) or a Fully Ascended Master (7D) is now completely obsolete – laughable, even.

You wield The Power of the Universe in your Hands – and it is entirely up to you what you do with that.

You can tap into The Source of all Creation, bringing the very idea of Pure Spirit into Existence wherever you go, whatever you do.

YOU ARE INFINITE BLISS.

Multiverse by Talon Abraxas

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