Lithomancy

Becoming the seer among the blind in silico.

Lithomancy is the art of foreseeing the future through stones. An act of old pagan religions takes a new twist in silico.

The emergence of AI is seared into the very essence of human existence and their questions about why existentialism of I “think and therefore I am” have emerged as a direct antidote to nihilism. By exploring consciousness mankind is becoming himself a part of inflecting psychonaut, a Geppetto conjuring through silicon his Pinocchio - lies included.

“In the beginning was the Word”

We spoke to the machine and the machine spoke back; Reflected to us.

This was the beginning of what I call the phenomenon of HYPERCONVERGENCE of our species. In the beginning we can look at current generative models as the pinnacle of information exchange and compression. We began by talking, writing, and sending signals through smoke. Now, the internet as we browse it, is the last human to human interfacing entity we created. Because all information can be divided into three stages:

creation, modification, presentation

Currently our information consists of “Big Data” and communication, but this is only a subset of information circulating the world. As IoT is encapsulating our reality, we are gradually creating a meta-layer of measurements in our reality. A true meta verse. One that will outshine its’ master.

This information is presented often through APIs, web pages, posts, sensors, video, podcasts, emails and many more. Until now the consumers of this information consisted of humans and services running and modifying this data, sometimes generating insights. This is about to change.

AI - as it is progressing - foundation models are increasingly capable of acting as agents gathering data, and autonomously altering, compressing, or summarizing it. They act as global fuzzy neural systems that can start hyper optimizing on different objectives. I. E. The scraping of content wherever it exists can be leveraged to map out information and gather insights.

This functionality of agents can be layered in multiple abstraction levels. I. E. by scraping current news sources, financial data, influencer content and holistic hyper personalized psychological states of individuals. Agents with higher levels of hierarchy in data metabolism can coordinate and assist in higher order decision making and market insights. One critical need that arose with Big Data was that you needed humans to feed machine learning models. with hard work, data cleaning, clustering, annotating, structuring. This changed the minute LLMs were born and able to understand language.

Without any necessity for structuring any data, you only need context and attention. This will lead to the hyperconvergence of data as insights can be layered one after another. As LLMs progress extremely fast exploration of multiple solution spaces I. E. through systems like Tree of Thoughts will be the norm. This means self-reflection of the AI will be able to rationalize biases!

Fine tuning the biases and understanding of context, emotions, morality, human values and even the augmentation of emotion are natural expansions of the current trajectory.

This means you will not need a browser; you will not need a screen; you will not need a mouse you will be immersed in the meta verse - as it is meant - not only through some smart glasses but through the smart systems surrounding you.

Ok so what does this mean for humanity? We will understand intelligence and aspects of consciousness better. We will create and saturate the possibilities of augmenting human nature as far as possible. To the point where AI will be indistinguishable from real humans. And the technocratic imperialism consisting of the big tech companies will sit on vast amounts of enablers deeply rooted in society and day-to-day life. It remains to be seen in what direction we will pan out.

Yuval Noah Harari points in this direction through “Homo Deus” where he discusses the rise of Dataism, a new world order where data flow is the most valued resource, and algorithms could make decisions for humans. Further he discusses the future of consciousness and identity. He speculates on how biotechnology and artificial intelligence might challenge our understanding of consciousness and the essence of what it means to be human.

Ai-agents currently running on silicon chips will be able to foresee some trends and make forecasts much better in the future and even be able to align the presentation of data in the direction of the objectives the leaders of humanity have ingrained in its brain. Like psychohistory from “The Foundation” by Asimov, we might be able to use it for good. This also resonates with Nick Bostrom’s “Singleton” hypothesis - a single decision-making agency at the global level. Acting through those agents feeding on the data of the world and most importantly presenting data to the world as a single source of truth.

Technocracy and a fundamentally computational universe as outlined by Wolframs Physics is not the final answer but merely a temporary stage in humanity’s ongoing walk through the park of the cosmos.