Meditations Session 6: Allowing Our Faulty Code to be Rewritten
This week, we continue our work on Notebooks 6 and 7. Beginning 3/9, we work with Notebooks 8 and 9.
This past week, it was revealed that Google's Gemini artificial intelligence app was trained with extreme bias.
The bias is not limited to image making; it is systemic. For example, Google’s Gemini finds “it difficult to say” who is responsible for more harm to humanity: Mao, who killed millions, or author Abigail Shrier, who writes words offensive to the Woke.
Technology journalist Mike Solana explains this crazed wokeness at Google: “Let’s be totally clear on how this happened: there are people working at Google who have psychotic political views that shape everything they do, and they have been allowed to impact a product that is incredibly important to that company.” Solana suspects the “rot runs deep” at Google.
Woke collectivists have trained AI, and although the data scientists will make superficial tweaks, they won’t be fixing the core problem.
Early in 2023, I ran my own experiments with ChatGPT. It’s AI engine repeatedly spit out collectivist solutions to the questions posed. When I questioned the solutions, AI repeated trite propaganda while stating its solutions were “balanced,” did not “have biases” and provided “objective and informative responses.”
I was reminded of a heated faculty meeting in which a colleague self-referentially proclaimed, “I’ve spoken with myself, and I agree with myself.” My colleague was not trying to be funny. His remark reflected what we all do—all day we listen to the ego-voice in our head narrating and interpreting our experience, we mindlessly agree and follow its bad advice.
When we totally identify with the voice of our ego, we too are in danger of becoming psychotic; we are unaware that unquestioned views are shaping everything we do,
It is absurd to ascribe intelligence to a mindless machine programmed with bias.
Ascribing intelligence to ourselves when we mindlessly run off our programs is as absurd.
Self-help books may offer superficial tweaks but not undo our systemic biases.
Writing to himself, Marcus Aurelius was training his mind to undo systemic biases in his core operating system. Two thousand years later, we are using his insights to uncover the programming running our thinking.
We are now beginning our sixth week of our study of Meditations. In this overview, I’d like to share three stages we pass through as we regain our inner freedom by undoing our programming that spits out biased views of ourselves and our lives. When we reach Stage 3, the undoing is automatic.