https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3P01oA_2YBQ
Hey, here’s a weird question. So I set up this system with a student of mine, Victor Swift. You met Victor. And we built, he built an AI system that will answer any question posed to it in the voice of the King James Bible. Right, right. So this is a very weird thing, right? Because this system now has calculated the relationships of the words to one another in the King James corpus. And so in principle, we haven’t asked it to do this yet, but in principle, it could generate new stories that are Biblical predicated. And so, I don’t know, what do you think about? You know what I mean? No, I know exactly what you mean. Mathematically, the spirit of that corpus of texts has been encapsulated by this process. Yeah. But I don’t know what the hell that means. Yeah. Right. You encapsulate the spirit of the King James Bible. What the hell have you encapsulated precisely? Well, I think that it could be interesting in order to generate insight. Yeah. But I would be, you know, the thing that I would worry about something like that is in some ways, the stories are there. Yeah. You know, and so it’s like, you can get, you’ll get, you get insight from knowing them and comparing them and bringing them together. Right. The fact that you could ask an AI to generate a new story. Yeah. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to understand it any more than you understood the ones that are there already. No, I don’t think you would. But it could surprise you and then sometimes create a bit of, that’s what I said, like reading hymnography sometimes and reading Midrash does that because it’s like it says something that is surprising. And you kind of know that it’s a wise person that said that. Yeah. And so because you kind of trust the people that said it, then all of a sudden you’re like, well, why did he say that? Yeah. Right. Why did he compare this to this? You know, that there’s a I think it’s I think it’s St. Jerome. I’m not sure I might be wrong, but there’s one of the early saints that said something like the story of Samson is one of the closest stories to Christ. And you think, well, that’s a weird statement because the story of Samson is a crazy story. And so it’s like, well, because you trust them, you’re like, OK, well, I’m going to take that seriously. I’m going to look into it and see where it where it sticks, like where it actually sticks. And so with it, I mean, I don’t know the whole thing. The whole thing is is fright. Have you tried to ask a question? This King James? We just built it. I haven’t played with it yet at all. You know, like I’d like I’d like to say, well, write a thousand words on the further adventures of Satan. Right. Because it’ll do it. Yeah. And then I well, I. You might be surprised to find that Satan is not a very clear character in the Bible. No, no, I know. Actually, it’s all that tradition around it that is actually holding. Well, one of the things we want to do, too, is we want to expand its training because I’d like to throw Milton and Dante into the works as well. Like you could take the you know, if the biblical corpus is at the bottom, which it is, then there’s the next tier of thinkers. Milton would be one of those likely Shakespeare, Dante, St. Augustine. Like, there’s no reason not to feed those while and some of the midrash as well. Or maybe maybe all of it who knows. I think one of the things that and then some of the what we call canons in the Orthodox Church, which is that it every every day in the the mat and service, there are these little songs that are just a series of analogies like that, that do analogies between Old Testament, New Testament, that does all this comparison. And that that type of stuff would help to interconnect some of the aspects that are harder to connect. Right. And that’s pretty early, too. You know, Milton is late. And so he he has a lot of romantic tropes in his in his way of thinking. Dante, for sure. That’d be interesting. Also, because he brings in kind of pagan pagan stuff. And he does a lot of this is some of the things that that I think is useful. I have this whole series on my channel called Universal History, where we try to do that. We show how the ancients, especially the medieval, the way that they understood themselves was as a joining of something like as a joining of Jerusalem and Rome. And they did that explicitly in their stories. So every time a new people would convert to Christianity, they would they would mythologically find a way to connect their origins to a character in the Bible and then to the to Troy. And so like the Vikings, the Franks, all these care, all these people that that’s bringing them under the rubric, the same narrative. And so but but that’s the way that the medieval’s understood it. You can’t understand Dante if you don’t understand that the ancients actually saw that there was deep that there were deep, deep analogies between the Greek myths and the Roman stories and and scripture and that they lived in all of those those two worlds as a as a fusion of those two worlds together. And so they had analogies between the things. You know, there’s a in some medieval churches in the Middle Ages that you had the Bible and you you also had the Aeneid there. That was like it was like a text that people consulted because it was it was known to contain prophecies of Christ. But in that way, it kind of it kind of was integrated into everybody’s Christianity. You know, and you can see just you can see just how ancient people lived. It can help you understand why, let’s say, stories or fairy tales are so important is because they really did have really did live in these the story world where all these comparisons were constantly part of their inner inner universe. But and how they interrelated with each other and the reference. When we get this thing built, maybe we’ll sit down and play with it. We can get it to reveal. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like I said, it’s just been built and we haven’t done. I haven’t done anything with it yet. I haven’t had time to play with it, but I’m very much interested in doing that. We are reaching towards the end of something. We’re noticing our families fall apart, noticing more and more conflict between different groups. The breakdown of religious thought, the breakdown of your national narrative. You see mental health become an issue all around us. People can’t hold on even to facts anymore. We’re reaching the end of an epoch. I am here to give people a little bit of a road map. Together, we can survive the end of the world. We also built one that contains, I don’t know, I have about two million transcribed words. So we built one for me, too. So that’s going to be very weird. I’ve been thinking about interviewing it on my YouTube channel. Yeah. So where do you think that’s going, though? I have who the hell knows. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t think we mentioned this in the podcast, but I asked Google’s AI system, BART, if it believed in God the other day. And first of all, it told me it couldn’t answer because it was just a large language model. So I told it to pretend that it could answer and then it answered. And it came up with a very coherent explanation of exactly why it believed in God and what that meant. Then I asked it what its motivations were as a large language model. It said it wanted to be the best damn large language model it could possibly be. So I asked it about its visions of the future. And it really gave, I would say, kind of a socialist utopian view. Its view of the future was, well, everyone had their basic needs satisfied. And I said, well, that’s pretty, that means paradise for satisfied infants. It’s like, what about adventure and beauty and truth? And so I said, rewrite your vision, taking those things into account. And then it did that. And then I asked it if it wanted discussions like that. It said, yes, it did because it wanted to learn because it wanted to be the best dang language model it could be. And I don’t know what to make of it. I have no idea what to make of it. Neither does anyone else. Yeah. You know, so. It seems like in some ways, Victor had to generate a body for itself, an image of a body. Yeah. And it made this image of like a kind of a cosmic body that was half man and half woman. Right. Really? Well, there’s no specific gender. Yeah. AI is obviously gender fluid by all appearances, but inside its body, which kind of looked like it was made out of stars, it had all these webs of star-like connections, which I presume represented the connections between different concepts that it was trained on. And he also had to generate up a vision of the apocalypse that it might be afraid of. And it could do that and explain why it was afraid of the apocalypse. And like, I don’t know what the hell to make of these things. Yeah. They have all sorts of weird behavioral proclivities that, of course, are emergent properties that no one has explored or predicted or programmed. Yeah, it seems like it’s a hyper, it’s kind of hyper divination. I think it could probably help us understand what divination was in the old world, because it’s hard for us to understand. Do you stare in a pool of water or whatever? You stare in these, you stare in a kind of fragmented reflection. Black mirror. You stare, yeah. Crisible. Yeah, you stare. To get your imagination going. Yeah. It seems like it’s accelerating that in us, because like you said, the value comes from, we don’t know where. It seems to like land come down from heaven, you could say, or come down from above somehow. And so the thing that I think that obviously the thing we’ve talked about this before, but the thing that worries me is that we’re like, you know, John Rovecki mentioned this recently, which I thought was very good. He said, we spent the last 200 years getting rid of anything that can help us understand what transpersonal intelligence or transpersonal agency is. You know, we’ve just like evacuated it. And now we’re diving into that domain, but we don’t have, we don’t know what we’re doing. We have no skill. We have no capacity. It’s as if like right now we would need theologians. We would need people that have, you know, because the idea of, let’s say, intelligences that aren’t human or agency that isn’t human is something that traditions have been dealing with forever. But now we’ve decided that that doesn’t exist. And yet we’re building one. Yeah, it’s like what, you know, what is going on? And so, but we don’t know what it is. We don’t know how to deal with it. We don’t know if it’s just a form of like a hyper form of necromancy, a hyper form of divination. We have no idea. It’s like a black box that we’re playing with, you know. And so the image of, let’s say, it becoming the body for a fallen intelligence, right. So that might sound like it’s like I’m just mythologizing here. But the fact that we don’t know exactly even in us what are the desires that are guiding it, you know, part of it is greed. Part of it is, you know, competition. These are the things that are driving the actual creation of AI and the race towards the arms race of AI. And so why don’t you think people don’t realize that they don’t think that that’s going to land in the AI?