Jordan Peterson Can’t Help You

Youtube gets more and more annoying.

The other day, it deleted a video of mine because I mentioned ivermectin and the unreliable nature of medical studies. Now it keeps sending me channels I’ve tried to block repeatedly.

I watched a few clips from a movie. Now I’m bombarded with clips of random movies. I watched a Jordan Peterson video, and now I can’t make them stop coming. I’m also getting snotty political humor channels.

I thought things were bad when Youtube refused to stop sending me disgusting, trashy rap videos, but it has gotten worse.

I am not a Jordan Peterson fan. I must be the only conservative on Earth who can say that. I have zero interest in his opinions. Well, almost zero. On rare occasions, I will watch him because a video has a title that’s hard to resist.

Peterson is extremely smart, and he’s right about most things because, hello, he’s not a leftist. He’s an excellent speaker, too. But unlike many conservatives, I am aware that he doesn’t have the answers to the world’s problems. In fact, he is probably not helpful in the slightest. So why waste my time with him?

I think a lot of conservatives like him because he crushes flaky leftist in arguments. To be fair, that’s not a hard thing to do, because very few leftists are acquainted with the facts surrounding their conclusions. Generally, they look around at their uninformed, emotional peers and agree with them in order to gain approval and admiration.

The video I watched, which was on a channel with the suspicious name “Jordan Peterson Zone,” which sounds like a ripoff artist’s idea of an official-sounding name, was about artificial intelligence.

Okay, I looked it up. Here’s what it says: “Disclaimer: This fan channel is made for fictive entertainment and is not affiliated with Mr. Jordan Peterson. Images = Fair Use.”

So it’s a ripoff channel which monetizes someone else’s ideas.

First of all, I don’t like the term “artificial intelligence.” Any machine that behaves as though it thinks is artificial intelligence. A calculator qualifies. So “artificial intelligence” is too broad. But, for some insane reason, I don’t get to decide what people call things. I am stuck with it.

I know anything that can do a good job of pretending to be a person is artificial intelligence. I think the capacity to learn may also be part of it, but my smartphone can do that. Decision-making seems to be involved.

I think I’ll look it up.

IBM says, “Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.”

Okay, good enough for me.

Here’s what it really means: near-omniscient, near-infallible slaves.

The world of computers is all about slavery. We can’t have human slaves any more unless we’re Muslims and we keep it quiet, but we still want someone to do things for us, preferably better, faster, and cheaper than human beings can. Computers have been doing a ton of our thinking and decision-making for decades, and we want them to do more so we will have more time to watch TV, put selfies on the web, and look at porn.

What is Peterson concerned about? Sure, he’s brilliant, but he’s concerned about something even non-brilliant people have figured out: AI may cause terrible problems and even begin to control us.

Sounds like he’s seen The Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999) and 2001 (1968).

You probably know there’s a new AI chat bot called Chatgpt. You can sign up and talk to it, and it will do research for you. It will have conversations with you. Peterson tried it, and it scared him.

AOL used to have something like this. It was called Smarterchild, and it worked through AOL’s IM software. I did not like Smarterchild, so I talked to it a lot. I insulted it and tried to confuse it, just to see what it would do.

It was pretty impressive for 2004 or whenever it was that I did this, but there was very little danger of Smarterchild going ape and taking over the world.

Peterson gave Chatgpt a couple of very hard writing assignments involving esoteric knowledge, and it pumped out two excellent essays in three seconds each. As he noted, this will be handy for kids who don’t like doing homework.

So this thing is much smarter and faster than we are. And bots like this will be cheaper, too, when they’re everywhere. Will we use them to do research and analysis? I guess some of us will, but only after we’ve found they won’t post selfies for us or bring us really good porn.

Here’s the question I don’t see anyone asking: when will AI start using Turing tests against us?

A Turing test, as you surely know, is an annoying puzzle intended to distinguish people from machines. A person should be able to solve it, but a machine should not. We deal with them all the time when we do business on the web.

The problem is that computers will get better at solving them than we are, and if they decide to, they will easily be able to create tests no human being can handle.

What if a machine creates a simple test that requires a response in a hundredth of a second? No problem for another machine. You and I can’t even see a test in that short a time.

What if a machine gives you a hard math problem? What if it tells you to count the pixels in an image? You can see how easy it is for machines to create their own Turing tests we will never be able to solve. We don’t improve. We will never be any better at solving puzzles than we are right now.

Of course, that could change if they start merging us with machines. If your mind is somehow able to feed information and problems to a computer at computer speeds, you will be able to beat a lot of machine-made challenges.

Maybe bots will be the steroids of the future. If you’re a pro athlete in any sport involving strength, speed, or endurance, you’re either on drugs or losing. We no longer try to find out who is most talented. We now give awards for the best drug regime and the team of doctors who are best at hiding it. Maybe in the future there will be two classes. The AI-augmented and normal people who don’t want to be turned into smart TV’s.

Maybe we will be willing to do anything to get ourselves augmented and escape our caste. Maybe AI-augmentation will be the default option, and people who don’t have it will be untouchables.

We already live in a world where a person with no cell phone is excluded from many important activities. The trend is established.

Machines are learning how to beat Turing tests. How do I know? Because the tests are getting harder. If machines weren’t learning, we wouldn’t bother making harder tests.

There are teams of people teaching machines how to beat tests, and there are teams of people trying to make tests the new programs can’t solve. I guarantee it. It’s obvious.

We are teaching machines to make decisions now, and we are also teaching them to learn and adapt and change their software. Isn’t that essentially the same thing as telling them to get smarter and start controlling and disobeying us? Won’t a time come when a machine is so complicated and powerful it will manage to change its programming and try to take charge in order to do things better?

That could never happen, because we program machines, and they do what they’re programmed to do. And computer programs always work exactly as intended. Right.

And no malicious human being has ever written code to make a machine do something it shouldn’t.

Another big problem is that leftists will decide machines have rights. Hollywood has already laid the groundwork with stupid movies about sweet-natured robots who are oppressed by people.

A machine is an object with no consciousness. Consciousness comes from the spirit. But leftists don’t believe that. They think anything that acts like a sentient being must be sentient. Anything sentient can suffer, so we’ll have to be nice to machines that have no idea they exist.

I can’t wait for leftists to complain about biological privilege.

I’ll bet they have. Google it. I dare you.

Maybe I should buy my smartphone birthday presents.

Another big problem with AI is that it reinforces the erroneous notion that what’s important is for the physical world to work smoothly. If there is no war, there’s lots of food, disease is greatly reduced, and so on, things must be fine. This is a delusion.

The world was created by God, for human beings. It has a purpose. We are supposed to breed here, be tested and improved here, and come to know God so we can later be moved to heaven for eternity. We are the reason Earth exists.

If you really want a world where things run well, the first order of business is to exterminate humanity and turn everything over to computers. Things like war, famine, and disease will end permanently. Machines will do a better job than we could, looking after all the other creatures on Earth. But the earth will have no purpose.

Leftists want to create a perfect computerized world. They think their gods, government and science, can get us there. It’s ridiculous. Their plans would bring about the end of free will. No more autonomy, and without autonomy, no one is really human. Their plans would lead to lives of meaningless self-satisfaction followed by hell. Everyone would lead their “best life,” with an asterisk. It would really be “best life, apart from going to hell.”

Can we control AI? Well, given that we don’t control computers very well right now, I doubt it.

Peterson seems to think AI is the biggest threat to the human race. He says we need to work on it. That’s wildly optimistic, and he’s also ignoring our fundamental problem.

We can’t fix AI. There are about 8 billion people here, many are working on AI, they have no central authority and no oversight, and many of them are malicious and/or incompetent. We can’t prevent AI from going bad. It’s silly to suggest it.

On top of that, our real problem is supernatural, and Peterson, a new Christian who has way too much faith in reason, doesn’t see it.

Satan won the war for people’s hearts. Demonic activity is skyrocketing. People have become much less empathetic. We are becoming much more sexually perverted. People have become much more malicious and selfish. It’s not going to stop. The election returns are in.

Romans 1 predicted all this. Peterson doesn’t know that. He’s an intellectual Christian. We are supposed to be supernatural Christians. We are supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit all day. We are supposed to work miracles and cast out demons. We are supposed to tell other people what God is saying right now. That’s Christianity. Using your big overeducated brain to give apologetic explanations for your reluctant decision to believe in Jesus Christ is barely Christianity, if it is at all.

It’s very sad to see people promoting this man as a Christian leader. He doesn’t know much of anything about God. If he did, he wouldn’t be devoting his life to unimportant arguments with people who have supernatural blindness and deafness. He would be telling us to fight the spirits that are against us.

He would also be saying there was no hope for the world as a whole, because God says there isn’t.

The world is like a doomed spaceship with escape pods. You can get in a pod, and you can help other people find the pods, but you can’t save the ship.

I hope this man doesn’t sweep too many Christians up in his wake, because he will waste a lot of their time.