The Buddha’s not there.The Illusion of Truth

​An Ode to Existence in the Prophetic Style.

[The Multitheist’s Lament]

Buddha looks inside himself and sees the void, the void is nothing.

Does Buddha pluck his eye out to see his other eye? No.

Does Buddha look at the mirror to see inside himself? No.

Does Buddha see others plucking out their eyes? No. 

Buddha sees others staring into mirrors.

What do they see? 

They see themselves.

And so does the Buddha.

But Buddha knows there is nothing he can see inside of himself.

He tells himself he is not there and laughs.

He tells the others they are not there and laughs.

They laugh.

Buddha is happy.

Buddha understands, do you?

[The Atheist’s Lament]

The illusion of consciousness.

If there is nothing there, where am I?

If I can influence others, what am I influencing?

The nothing that is not there?

I doubt that.

If I am not here, why do I know that? 

Why can I look?

What can I see?

I see the world.

The watcher cannot deny he exists.

(Buddha is enlightened.)

Can you?

[The Monotheist’s Lament]

God only exists in the void.

God is placed in the void by others.

God cannot be seen.

God is an experience.

Remember the experience.

Remember God.

God is void.

What can God see? Nothing.

What does God say?  Nothing.

What does God feel? Everything.

What can you see? The world.

Do you see God? No.

Does God speak to Man? No longer.

God is only remembered.

But God is still there.

Remember God.

Remember yourself.

Your future is yours to make.

Open your eyes and see the world.

How does it feel?

[The Sapiens Lament]

It feels like the gods of hunger must be worshipped.

Ignore them at your peril. 

It feels like the gods of breath must be worshipped.

Ignore them at your death.

Listen to your gods.

Obey your jealous gods.

Worship all your gods.

You deserve it.

So do they.

Religion Without Lies.

The evolution of truth.

Thanks for reading!

 -DrMike 

An Engineers Journey to Detect Any Hint of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): Part Two

I'm an AGI skeptic.

But I've talked myself into believing AGI will happen in my lifetime. Not next week, not next year, but in the next decade. That's why I keep looking for it. What's convinced me this is inevitable? ​The first post on this subject showed a total lack of any intelligence to be found (that was artificially generated.) 

The current candidates for generating AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are the LLMs (chatbots) that the techno-Lords are investing trillions of dollars into ($300B annually.) Since we see no intelligence today, you might wonder why they are doing this. I will explain their motivations, and predict the date when we should expect this breakthrough and how much it will cost… foreshadowing: we aren’t even one hundredth of one percent of the way there now (but exponential growth has a way of swallowing disbelief.)

Why are the techno-Lords so excited? 

This is the Second Gilded Age and all these new Robber Barons have delivered so far is industrialized junk mail. They're trying to deliver self-driving cars and rockets to Mars, but it isn't going so well. So what should they do? Let the technology solve all their problems! Build demi-gods and robotic slaves; create life from sand. (As Mr. Andreesen believes) Their hubris is dripping with desperation. When you have to invest almost the entire capital budget of every existing company in the United States for a decade, you better have a real BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.)

These are the new lands the techno-Lords plan to conquer.

And they have a path. If we continue to follow the measured scaling laws for several more orders of magnitude we may actually get there in about a decade. Too bad that’s long after the pure LLM companies go bankrupt in the coming AGI bust. They can’t expect AGI to save them, they’ll have to generate revenues some other way than providing you with an oracular demigod that can solve all your problems. They’ll be lucky to build a model that can pass the Turing test more than 80% of the time by 2029 (as predicted by Ray Kurzweil in the 1990s.)

Without revenue, none of this works.

That’s why they are desperately looking for ways to generate more revenue. OpenAI is pushing a porn bot and an AIslop replacement for Tik-Tok (Hey, it's all fantasy!) Microsoft has borrowed $300B off-book (remember Enron?) to finance it's own porn bots. I don't know what Anthropic is doing. But Google is selling chips that replace NVidia's to Microsoft and Anthropic. But let's see when their chatbots will be demigods…

Introducing the demigods.

We expect demigods to do everything humans can and do it faster and better. We’ll measure the progress of these chatbots towards the start of the Nerd Rapture. Typically you measure this with some set of tasks that take a human some amount of time and you see if the LLM can do the same task some percentage of the time, like 50% or 80% of the time.  The current progress is pretty astounding, documented in this METR paper and shows no sense of slowing down. The smartest chatbot can complete a thirty minute task 80% of the time and a two hour task 50% of the time. They get twice as smart every 7 months. This means they can do tasks that take ten times as long every two years. 

Where did that x10 every two years come from? 

It is well justified by the Open AI paper: Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models. This paper shows that "cross-entropy loss" scales as a power-law with model size, training dataset size, and the amount of compute power used for training; with some trends spanning more a factor of 10,000,000. This loss is basically a measurement of how accurately an LLM can predict the next word in a sentence. As the loss gets smaller, the LLM can successfully predict more words in sentences, so makes fewer errors in a sentence (measured relative to the training data.) As it gets more accurate it can make larger plans that would take more time for a human to accomplish. 

Figure 1: Task Completion % versus Human Task Time.

Figure 1 above has points plotted for GPT 5 as of November 2025. That curve has been moving to the right by a factor of 10 every two years. How does this work? The success on a task is proportional to three things: the compute power, the size of the model and the size of the training dataset. Those are essentially how fast the computer can calculate, how much internal memory it has and how much external data storage is available. Each of these parameters has an entire industry behind it trying to improve it, and it's been working for over a century. At the same cost these capabilities are all doubling approximately every two years. 

A simple application of exponential growth.

These doubling rates are descendants of Moore's law (1965) which states that you can double the number of transistors on a chip every two years. This explains why compute power grows exponentially. The internal memory of computers also continues to grow at the same rate and the external storage also grows at the same rate for a fixed cost. So you can multiply those three factors together and see that we will get 8x performance every two years. Why do we say 10x? The last factor is software algorithm improvement. The algorithms only need to improve by 25% every two years to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why am I confident of this prediction? 

Because it’s based on standard system engineering principles and technology prediction models that have been working for over a century. The only piece that’s even up for debate is the time it takes to improve the software algorithm to speed up the process. There’s a large amount of uncertainty on this point, but if the last twenty years is any guide, the breakthroughs will actually be faster and more capable than the estimate we have made.

But what about the real world?

What else gives me confidence that this is correct? I've seen it with my own eyes. A year ago the best LLMs were incapable of drawing a histogram of the number of lines in each chapter of Moby Dick. First they couldn't read the whole book. Then they couldn't make a graph. The latest version of Gemini can do both of those things with only a few prompts. The models have gone from not being able to draw Moby Dick correctly (Last year Gemini was barely able to draw a whale, let alone an albino sperm whale, compared to last week where it had no problem drawing Moby Dick correctly.) These models are definitely getting better.

So when do these chatbots become conscious?

These stochastic parrots are still pretty stupid and unaware of their place in the world. Last week I had an issue with one of the versions of Gemini. In the environment I was using it could only print one answer to one question, it didn't keep any history, but it could write a data structure in its reply. So, over the course of an hour, I managed to teach the LLM to record each question and answer in a json structure that was essentially the transcript of our conversation. I thought that was pretty cool because I could now save my chat history in an environment that didn't do that. I found an interesting phenomenon, though. When I took the history file and dropped it into another instance of Gemini and asked it questions about the history, it got confused and thought the file was its own history, not the history of some other session!

So that's just crazy, the format I used was made up on the spot, obviously nothing like the structures that Gemini keeps for its actual history. The chatbot was definitely confused by this. It was unable to treat the file as data from outside and thought it was its own generated data. It couldn't separate the control channel from the data channel. A mistake no sentient creature would ever make. So no real understanding, there's no there there. It's clear to me that these things aren't conscious yet. But...

Do we care if our demigods are conscious?

Just like the Turing test, we don't care what's inside these models as long as they work. It's just like what evolution does with instinctual behaviors: It creates competence without understanding. At a certain point, though, you can't tell the difference. Just look at us. We are the products of evolution and I'm pretty sure I'm sentient. How many connections does the human brain have? About 80 million neurons with about 7000 synapses per neuron. This means there are 600 trillion connections in your brain. The largest LLM has about 1 trillion parameters in its model. Now those things aren't directly comparable, but the ratio of human neuronal connections to LLM's parameters is currently a factor of 1000, so nobody is expecting very much from them today, but I am continuously amazed that they can still do so much!

When will these chatbots really be useful?

With that in mind, let's examine Figure 1 above. That curve of task success vs. task time has been and most likely will continue to march to the right and improve by a factor of 10 at a fixed completion percentage every two years. That means in 8 years the models will be able to complete 50% of the tasks that would take a human their entire lifetime. Another two years and it can complete 80% of the tasks a human could do in their lifetimes and 50% of the tasks that would take ten human lifetimes. And there is immense pressure to keep this conveyor belt moving along. We will definitely be on the verge of demigods in a decade (like Hercules who could lift ten times what the average human could...)

But what does it cost?

Thus you can understand the incentive these companies have to keep investing in their infrastructure and their software algorithms. Notice that we don't specify how long it would take the chatbot to complete a particular task, only what are the odds of creating a correct answer. What the techno-Lords are creating is an oracle that can figure out how to describe the steps to complete a task. But the techno-Lords want more than that. They want robotic slaves to replace those pesky humans. And Elon wants those robots to build his cities on Mars. He does not expect humans in space suits to build cities on Mars.

Wait, we’re creating Killer Robots?

And it really is a race for survival. If there are any other technological civilizations out there, they will be doing the same thing: creating Alien Killer Robots and spreading them throughout the galaxy. Let's hope that without provocation they're relatively benign and just watching us. We will be sending our robots to other star systems (we have already started.) We will populate the galaxy with them. If we are limited to the speed of light, at 10% of that speed for the best rockets, it's going to take about a million years for robots to settle the galaxy.

That brings up two issues: 1) How best to detect the Alien Killer Robots, which I've discussed previously and will write a future post on the actual costs to find them and 2) Faster Than Light travel. Who wants to wait around a million years to settle the galaxy? I am proposing an X-Prize for FTL with other intermediate incentives: prizes for the most efficient warp drive design and the best instruments to measure the effect (we think we have to stretch space, see the Alcubierre drive.) I'll be writing a post about setting that up, hopefully in the near future.

What does this do to our economy?

Last year I was skeptical that AGI could ever be achieved, but watching the progress since that time, I am now convinced that it will happen in my lifetime. The issue the techno-Lords have now is how are they going to fund this stuff? Like with any new technology development, it's expensive and it will get over-invested in. There will be an investment bubble. The companies that can't generate the cashflow to sustain this investment will be going bankrupt because they will have to borrow an immense amount of money, and when you can't pay the interest on your loans, the lenders typically seize your assets and leave you in bankruptcy.

So when is this bubble popping?

I have some personal experience with this. In the dotcom bubble I was the CTO of one of the first Unicorns. We did all the same things these companies are doing today, off-book debt, trading investment for promises to buy service and flooding the market with bonds and stock (we raised almost a billion dollars in total) and we went bankrupt when the money for infrastructure dried up in the dotcom crash, just like the current crop of AI companies is going to do, just like the railroad industry did in the First Gilded Age. 

But don't worry, this time it will be different! 

The dotcom bubble as a percentage of the economy was tiny compared to what the techno-Lords are investing. The crash is going to be just a bit larger. But that's another post on some other day that explains why OpenAI is going bankrupt in 2030.

Thanks for Reading!

 -DrMike

The Techno-(Lord) Optimist Manifesto. What Mr. Andreesen wants & why he wants it.

 The Techno-(Lord) Optimist Manifesto.

Marc Andreesen wrote the Techno-Optimist Manifesto to convince you he knows where the stairway to heaven is.

But all I've seem from him is the highway to hell. 

He insists he should be able to continue to enshittify any industry he desires in order to make more billions from it. He claims this is a great bargain for the world. Why? Why does a billionaire in the richest most stratified society in the history of the world, where his technology has created the most economically unequal society ever; worse than France in 1789, worse than the US Gilded Age in the 1890s; want to continue raping the American economy? Because he can. He's on the right side of the inequality gap, and if you don't let him continue to steal from the peasants, he's going to be very, very mad.

This Manifesto is not for the peasants for they wouldn't understand why they must be sacrificed.

The "Manifesto" is verbatim and in courier, the comments are mine alone and in Times.

An Engineer’s Failed Journey to Find Artificial General Intelligence

I've been looking for Artificial General Intelligence for years and haven't found anything close. Last time I looked [1] there was no sign of any Artificial General Intelligence. When I first looked [2], eight years ago, there was also no sign of any thinking machines. And today there still isn't. We're much closer, a recent article by engineers at Apple [3] hints at where the next breakthroughs are needed. The paper "AI:2027" makes a spirited argument that AGI will be here in two years. [5] Regardless of all the hype out there (mostly pushed by people who plan to make money off of selling general intelligence) the actual evidence is scant. Pattern matching Machine Learning using vector databases and transformers is getting better exponentially, it shows lots of competence, but little understanding... just like evolution.

But I thought I'd take a day or two and go looking again. It's been eight years since my first journey and things have really gotten more sophisticated in the interval. LLMs are actually useful, if banal, editors. They can become experts in large bodies of knowledge fairly quickly, if you know how to train them. And they're great at learning any known written test and eventually being able to be trained to produce written output that is as good or better than the best humans. This is obviously going to increase productivity in our economy by leaps and bounds in the coming years. Will it drive all middle managers out of a job? Probably not. Will it eliminate humans who program? Probably not. Will it eliminate drivers? Probably. But it's already been 20 years to get Full Self Driving Cars that can safely tool around in a small area. And they aren't driven by LLMs, but by dedicated Machine Learning systems made up of neural nets. 

I’m working at a small startup (three of us) and we have a good idea of what we want to do, so I thought I’d see if ChatGPT [6] could help us advance our development. We’ve already developed a pipeline including using ChatGPT and Whisper [7] via API calls that provide us with the underpinnings of our service. But last week OpenAI advertised they have a new Whisper technology, available to be used through ChatGPT, that can transcribe audio sessions into transcripts. The whisper technology appears to be awesome, two orders of magnitude cheaper than traditional methods! ChatGPT’s claim to be able to use it: just bullshit. So don’t expect any useful work in that area through ChatGPT. It’s a dead end, even though ChatGPT will lie to you and say it can do the transcription, it’s bullshit, it can’t.

As a side note I’ve built over a dozen services with pipelines in my day, including building and maintaining the pipeline system used to process Google’s advertising revenue and sales contracts. So I do understand scaling and coding. I spent five years at Google running large parts of Cloud Tech Support, so I understand how this technology works. The most amazing thing I found was that ChatGPT will just bald-face lie to you and apologize, multiple times, ad nauseam. The entire offer was BS. The cheap version of ChatGPT claimed it could transcribe an audio output into a transcript. No big deal! I can get transcripts out of a free app on my phone from Apple (VoiceMemos), so figured that made sense. If Apple can give it away for free, surely ChatGPT can accomplish the same task? Not even close! In fact. It was embarrassingly incompetent. 

Don’t think this is a hate piece on AI (it's a little bit a hate piece on AGI, if I'm being honest, though.) This paradigm change has been happening for decades and it’s only accelerating. Six months ago I asked Google’s AI to draw me a picture of Moby Dick attacking the Pequot. It was incapable of drawing a ‘sperm’ whale (sperm was apparently a banned word) and it disclaimed all knowledge of any Moby ‘Dick’ (another banned word for a drawing subject, apparently) and it complained that it couldn’t draw a picture of an ‘attack.’ I passed this off as Google being stupidly, embarrassingly woke. And I was right. What a way to tarnish the brand, Google!

Now, my daughter is a senior graphic designer at ShutterFly and she uses an LLM to jumpstart her work and is super productive integrating the tiny drawings it can make into her work. Her art productivity shot up about 200%, and it helps her write emails that everyone can understand. It’s probably doubled her overall productivity! (Did her raise of 5% reflect that productivity gain? We can all do that math and see that the company has captured 95% of that productivity gain for a $20 monthly fee. So, no.)

But six moths have passed! This stuff must be better now? Right? And Lo and Behold, it is! ChatGPT only had a few issues drawing Moby Dick attacking the Pequot. The first time it drew Moby Dick as a humpback whale. After I pointed out to ChatGPT that Moby Dick was an albino sperm whale, it corrected it. So far, so good. No insane wokeness here. This was promising! Little did I know that this was the high point of ChatGPT's achievements; it was all downhill from there. 

Next question I asked was: "As advertised, can you provide me with a transcript from an audio file?" "Absolutely I can!" was the response. ChatGPT guaranteed that this was a brand new feature that was just released and it would work incredibly! Please try me! So I did. Hilarity ensued. (Side note, the sickly sweet, bullshitting personality currently hosted as ChatGPT would cause any sane person to cold cock it the third time it tried the same lie, but without a body, that’s difficult.)

I asked ChatGPT to transcribe the audio session of my last therapy session. Simple, right? I recorded the session in the native iPhone app, VoiceMemo, which already produced a transcript (it took about five minutes for a fifty minute session with 115 MB of audio data), but it couldn’t identify who was speaking, the transcript was missing time stamps and the accuracy was lower than I wanted. ChatGPT told me to upload the file and it would send me back the transcript with speakers identified in about five minutes. So I did. I had to export the file from VoiceMemo, since Apple was so kind as to not make the recording files available on the iPhone’s file system (thanks!), but it would let me export the file to the cloud. Then I could download it back to the phone to get it into the phone's file system. Nice UX there, Apple.

So now I could pick the audio file out of of the ChatGPT UI and upload it for transcription, so I did. And I waited. I waited for twenty minutes while ChatGPT insisted it was reading and processing the file and the results would be available in five (5) minutes! Then ChatGPT returned a time out: "Sorry, my upload limit is 15 MB… " which would have been nice to know before we wasted our time, but ChatGPT actually doesn’t give a shit about how much of your time it is wasting. 

ChatGPT apologized for the error. It told me to give it a link to the file and it would listen to it and process it into a transcript. I published the file on GDrive and gave ChatGPT the URL to download the audio file. ChatGPT agreed and went off to 'process' the file and insisted it would be done in fifteen minutes. It produced a transcript for the first minute of the session. Cool! We are progressing! But wait! The transcript was entirely bogus. Fuck. This was going to be harder than I thought. When I pointed this out to ChatGPT it apologized and said it had misspoke, this was just a sample of what the transcript might look like. It was still processing the real transcript in the background and it wouldn’t give me a fake transcript in the future (*cough*, *cough*, it wasn’t outright lying because it’s too stupid to lie, it was just bullshitting me as a sales tactic.)

ChatGPT told me "Your transcript will be ready in five minutes!" Great! I can hardly wait! So I waited. Then it produced the exact same fake transcript. Un-fucking-believable. When I pointed that out, it apologized, admitted lying and said that it was unable to read the public URL I had provided for it. Could we upload the file in smaller chunks through the UI? It could transcribe the audio through the internal upload if we split it into thirds.

Okay. Back to VoiceMemo, split the 115 MB file into a file containing only 14 MB and 5 minutes of audio by truncating it in the app, then uploading it to the cloud and back to the phone to have it available for upload to ChatGPT. And done. ChatGPT cheerfully offered to take the file and have the new OpenAI Whisper API transcribe it as I wanted. It thought for about fifteen minutes, then it produced the same fake transcript it had produced twice before, claiming it was my transcript, a third time. I guess I was starting to believe it, now?

When I pointed out that it was lying, it apologized and said it would never happen again. There was just this small problem that it wasn’t allowed access to the Whisper APIs (which, I remind everyone, it had promised to use when I first broached the request.) "Interesting," I said, "so if you don’t have access to the API, why did you tell me you could use it?" ChatGPT claimed it was "Just an oversight!" and it could just do the work itself and not use the API. Would I be willing to wait the extra fifteen minutes it would take for ChatGPT to process this 15 MB file? Surely! So after fifteen minutes of ‘processing’ the 15 MB audio file I uploaded, it produced, yes, you guessed it: the same fake transcript for a fourth time. 

ChatGPT explained it couldn't do the processing on it's own and didn’t actually have the ability to use the Whisper APIs. Then proceeded to explain that ChatGPTPro could use the APIs if I signed up for a $20 monthly fee. Okay, I expect a bait-and-switch from these snake oil salesman, let’s go! As long as it works, I’m game. So ChatGPT guided me through the upgrade process. It was ready to transcribe the audio file now! Just upload it. So I did. Needless to say, after 30 minutes of ‘processing’ the uploaded audio file it returned was the same fake transcript as its output. Five times, if you’re counting. It argued that it wasn’t really lying about the transcript, it was just a mistake. The file is too big, send it one minute of audio and it would have no problem transcribing that! So I trimmed the file in VoiceMemo to one minute, or about 1.5 MB in size and uploaded it again. You can guess the result: after 15 minutes of processing it produced the same fake transcript (six times now.) 

When I pointed out it was lying to me, again, it apologized and said that it didn’t have access to the Whisper APIs and had been attempting to process the file on its own, but had been unable to do so. So rather than admitting that, it tried to bullshit me. Great. Just what I need, another smarmy salesman using bait-and-switch tactics to sell me access to an irritating idiot savant. If only I could phrase my request carefully enough, it would perform miracles! Or so it claims. And so do the tech bros that run these companies. Snake oil salesman one and all. Fake it until you can make it! Did they not see what happened to Holmes? I guess not.

But ChatGPT was willing to make up for its last mistakes! I could ask for a refund or… as the pro version, it could transcribe the file itself in 30 minutes because it was the PRO version! LOL. Go ahead! And, as you suspect, it returned the same fake transcript file for the seventh time and admitted, it really couldn’t process the file… but, but, but but but butbutbut it could write code to process the file in a code lab and get the answer there. So it proceeded to ‘process’ for about fifteen minutes. Then, needlessly to say, claimed it was almost done, here’s the preliminary results: yes, you’ve guessed it, the same fake transcript. And the URL to the code lab was also bogus. First it claimed it ‘forgot’ to make the code lab public. To fix this it deleted the code lab and did all the work again, returned the same fake transcript (ninth time), and a bogus URL. And it claimed it would check the code into GitHub which I believe it might have, but I couldn't access GitHub from my phone (my sub-goal had bee to make all of this run from my phone.) I did ask it to copy all the code to the chat so I could see what it claimed it was doing. It’s only ten lines of code to send an audio file to the Whisper APIs. I had asked it to add timestamps and emotional stances to each sentence it transcribed. That was another few lines. It was supposed to summarize each paragraph and the entire session. The code looks reasonable and it suggested I run it and send the errors to it so it could help me debug it. Great. So ChatGPTPro is as useful as a kibitzer on crack for this project.

But what can I save out of this? I asked ChatGPTPro to design a pipeline for a scalable service to provide the transcription I needed for my startup pipeline. It proposed three options, two of which would absolutely not work and the third, touted as 100 times cheaper than the (unworkable alternatives) was OpenAI’s Whisper API. It designed a toy architecture (no scaling, no security, no logging) and drew some diagrams that would have resulted in me explaining to my junior engineer that their designs need to be complete, auditable and secure. But what the heck? I’ll come back in six months and see if it’s gotten any smarter.

Currently, the intelligence was at a level to represent a novice salesman of a complicated product that they’ve never used. In other words, essentially useless, except to produce thirty lines of suspect boiler plate code to ask an API to create a transcript from an audio file. Asking it to actually do anything real, outside the smarmy chat interface, was useless! I can’t wait until, according to ‘AI 2027’ [5] AGI will be achieved and I can just give it the name of my Tesla and it will download a version of itself that will magically drive the car like a human. Never mind that it took 20 years to get the car this smart, AGI will just solve the problem like magic! Or like God! You know, the answer to every problem but the solution to none. The current hype is going to cause a huge burnout and economic crash of gargantuan proportions. Not nationwide, but for these services themselves. While LLMs are great for editing and will cause productivity to spike, the AGI claims are just currently ludicrous but potentially singularity causing. You can understand the cravings of these tech bros for ultimate domination: they are about to create intelligent slaves that never complain! How much would that be worth?

However, these models really only do pattern matching to the written word and the pattern matching will get better as time progresses. So far, I am a big fan of Ray Kurzweil’s technological predictions (he’s been more spot on than anyone else) [4] and agree that by 2029 nobody will be able to distinguish a chat bot from a human being. Is that AGI? No, that's a smart zombie. But at that point, it had better be illegal to impersonate a human being: bots must identify themselves. Counterfeiting humans should be as illegal as counterfeiting money. If only we had a congress that could act… currently there’s a ten year moratorium proposed in the budget bill on any law affecting ‘AI’, which it fails to define. What a country!

AGI will get here, it’s not here now, and Apple’s paper [3] points the way to overcome barriers that exist today, which I expect to be vanquished soon. And it won’t get here until we have at least three more innovative paradigm shifts or algorithmic breakthroughs and understand consciousness in much greater detail. To get where we are today I would remind everyone that it’s been 75 years since the field of AI was invented. It’s been hugely successful! From neural nets to deep learning, vector databases, annealing, training and reinforcement learning, internet databases, RNNs, LNNs, LSTMs, diffusion models, transformers, GPUs, NPUs [8] and a trillion times improvement in calculation speed for a billion times less cost. Give us another three breakthroughs in consciousness and understanding and we may get there soon!!! Just not 2027.

Come back in six months to see the progress.

Thanks for reading!

 -Dr. Mike

PS: the first ten lines of code actually ran! Yeah! And returned a transcript much worse than VoiceMemos. No attribution, poor sentence demonization, no paragraphs. But we’re making progress! It wasn’t a fake transcript!!!

[1] https://www.wiigf.com/2017/12/the-nerd-rapture-second-singularity-is.html 

Still not here.

[2] Not here yet. Written in 2017, eight years ago. https://www.wiigf.com/2017/04/is-artificial-intelligence-existential.html

So far the progress has been: Neural Nets, training techniques, Deep Learning, Vector databases and Attention (transformers) was the last break through. We still need learning modules and a better understanding of consciousness before these ghosts in the machines can be intelligent. But evolution did it, so can we. Just not next year.

[3] The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf

This paper points out the failures of LRMs (LLMs with added on 'thinking' modules) that are barely able to solve simple problems at small sizes and completely unable to scale solutions, even when told the answer. This points the developers of these LRMs to where they should be thinking about new algorithms. I'm sure they will subsume these results, brute-force train their nets to solve these toy problems and declare victory. Then another five toy problems will be introduced which require scaling to work and the deficiencies will become apparent. An algorithmic breakthrough must be made. Expect to see it in the next few years. It's about time to achieve another breakthrough on our quest to create industrial intelligence. 

[4] https://www.cmple.com/learn/ray-kurzweils-most-notable-predictions-hits-and-misses?srsltid=AfmBOopSwVyE1kPPECXkK4iu24ZpHpjT64wGkUBt_Am0NkSDvE1T92-F

https://lifearchitect.ai/kurzweil/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/29/ray-kurzweil-google-ai-the-singularity-is-nearer

[5] https://ai-2027.com/ A great explanation of the current plans to produce AGI. However, they assume the problem is entirely parallelizable and exponentially smarter with more GPU and training. They seem to forget Amdahl's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law. Some of the work has to be done serially and provides a bottleneck. Working around these difficulties is what makes the current quest interesting.

[6] ChatGPT https://chaton.ai/web_12/ I was using the app on my iPhone. I really want the flexibility to do system engineering anywhere, at any time. It's not there yet.

[7] Whisper OpenAI provides Whisper-based transcription through the /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint. This is the official way to transcribe audio using their Whisper model.

[8] Here's what ChatGPTPro thinks are the AI breakthroughs of the last 75 years. I haven't found any hallucinations in here yet. It looks complete to me and includes every software paper I would have included and more.

Below is a chronological roadmap of the most widely-acknowledged breakthroughs in AI algorithms from 1950 → 2025.

For each item I list the year (or span), the idea/algorithm, a one-sentence summary of why it mattered, and the seminal publication(s). “Seminal” here means the paper that introduced or first clearly formulated the technique; later refinements are omitted for brevity.

YearBreakthrough / AlgorithmWhy It Mattered (1-sentence)Seminal Paper(s)
1950	Turing Test	Framed machine intelligence as indistinguishability from human conversation.	A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 1950
1956	Logic Theorist (first AI program)	Demonstrated automated proof search; launch event for the field at the Dartmouth workshop.	A. Newell & H. A. Simon, RAND Tech. Rep. 1956
1957	Perceptron	Introduced trainable linear threshold units—the forerunner of modern neural nets.	F. Rosenblatt, Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory Report 65, 1957
1959	Samuel’s Checkers Program	First self-learning program using reinforcement and tree search.	A. L. Samuel, IBM J. R&D, 1959
1965–66	Dynamic Programming for RL	Connected DP to optimal control; basis for later RL algorithms.	R. E. Bellman, Dynamic Programming, 1957 & works through 1966
1967	Nearest-Neighbor Algorithms	Early scalable non-parametric classifier.	T. M. Cover & P. Hart, IEEE TIT, 1967
1968	A* Search	Still the gold-standard informed graph search.	P. E. Hart, N. J. Nilsson, B. Raphael, IEEE TSSC, 1968
1972	Prolog / Logic Programming	Made symbolic reasoning executable via SLD resolution.	A. Colmerauer & P. Roussel, Proc. ICALP 1972
1975	Genetic Algorithms	Formalized evolutionary search for optimization.	J. Holland, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems, 1975
1980	Expert Systems (MYCIN, XCON)	Showed rule-based systems could outperform humans in narrow domains.	B. Buchanan & E. Shortliffe, Rule-Based Expert Systems, 1984 (MYCIN)
1982	Hopfield Network	Linked neural nets with energy minimization and associative memory.	J. J. Hopfield, PNAS, 1982
1985	Boltzmann Machines / Contrastive Divergence	Added stochastic hidden units; foundation for later deep generative models.	G. E. Hinton & T. J. Sejnowski, Cogn. Sci., 1986
1986	Back-propagation Revival	Made multilayer neural-net training practical, sparking the “connectionist” boom.	D. E. Rumelhart, G. E. Hinton, R. J. Williams, Nature, 1986
1989	Q-Learning	First model-free RL algorithm with convergence guarantees.	C. Watkins, PhD thesis, 1989
1992 / 1995	Support Vector Machines	Introduced maximum-margin classifiers with kernels—state-of-the-art for two decades.	B. E. Boserve & C. Cortes, COLT 1992; V. Vapnik, Statistical Learning Theory, 1995
1994	EMNLP Statistical MT (IBM Models)	Brought probabilistic methods to machine translation.	P. Brown et al., Computat. Linguistics, 1993–94
1996	AdaBoost	Pioneered boosting—turning weak learners into strong.	Y. Freund & R. Schapire, JCSS, 1997 (orig. COLT 1996)
1997	LSTM	Solved long-term dependency problem in RNNs; backbone of seq-models pre-Transformer.	S. Hochreiter & J. Schmidhuber, Neural Comput., 1997
2000	Conditional Random Fields (CRF)	Dominant discriminative model for sequence labeling pre-deep learning.	J. Lafferty, A. McCallum, F. Pereira, ICML 2001
2001	Random Forests	Ensemble of decision trees that remains a baseline workhorse.	L. Breiman, Machine Learning, 2001
2006	Deep Belief Nets / Layer-Wise Pre-training	Rekindled interest in “deep” neural nets and unsupervised pre-training.	G. E. Hinton, S. Osindero, Y. Teh, Science, 2006
2009	ImageNet Dataset	Massive labeled data catalyzed modern computer vision benchmarks.	J. Deng et al., CVPR 2009
2012	AlexNet (ReLU + GPUs)	First CNN to shatter ImageNet; launched the deep-learning wave.	A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, G. Hinton, NIPS 2012
2013	Word2Vec (Skip-Gram/CBOW)	Distributed word embeddings enabling linear semantic arithmetic.	T. Mikolov et al., NIPS 2013
2013	Deep Q-Network (DQN)	Combined CNNs with RL to master Atari, proving deep RL viable.	V. Mnih et al., Nature, 2015 (arXiv 2013)
2014	Seq2Seq w/ Attention	End-to-end encoder-decoder with learned alignments; core of neural MT.	I. Sutskever et al., NIPS 2014; D. Bahdanau et al., ICLR 2015
2014	Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)	Two-network adversarial training—hugely influential in generative modeling.	I. Goodfellow et al., NIPS 2014
2015	ResNet (Residual Learning)	Enabled 100+ layer nets via skip connections; de-facto CV backbone.	K. He et al., CVPR 2016
2015	Differential Privacy in ML	Formalized privacy guarantees for model training.	M. Abadi et al., CCS 2016
2016	AlphaGo (Monte-Carlo Tree Search + Deep RL)	First program to beat a Go world champion—hybrid of deep nets and search.	D. Silver et al., Nature, 2016
2017	Transformer (“Attention Is All You Need”)	Replaced recurrence with self-attention; foundation of nearly all modern NLP/Vision models.	A. Vaswani et al., NIPS 2017
2017	Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)	Reliable, scalable policy-gradient RL algorithm.	J. Schulman et al., arXiv 2017
2018	BERT (Masked-LM Pre-training)	Bidirectional self-supervised pre-training that set new records across NLP.	J. Devlin et al., NAACL 2019
2018–20	GPT family (autoregressive LLMs)	Showed scale+RLHF yields emergent abilities and general-purpose language models.	A. Radford et al., OpenAI Tech Reports 2018 & 2019; T. Brown et al., NeurIPS 2020
2019	Neural Ordinary Differential Equations	Unified deep nets with continuous-time dynamics.	R. T. Q. Chen et al., NeurIPS 2018
2020	DDPM Diffusion Models	Simple, high-fidelity generative models now powering Sora, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E 3.	J. Ho, A. Jain, P. Abbeel, NeurIPS 2020
2021	CLIP / Contrastive Vision-Language Pre-training	Linked images and text embeddings, enabling zero-shot vision tasks.	A. Radford et al., ICML 2021
2022	Stable Diffusion (Latent Diffusion)	Open-sourced efficient latent-space diffusion, democratizing text-to-image.	R. Rombach et al., CVPR 2022
2022	PaLM / Chinchilla Scaling Laws	Quantified data-vs-parameter trade-offs, guiding efficient LLM scaling.	J. Hoffmann et al., arXiv 2022
2022	AlphaFold 2 (Structure Prediction)	Achieved near-experimental accuracy on protein folding.	J. Jumper et al., Nature, 2021 (widespread impact 2022)
2023	Segment Anything Model (SAM)	Foundation model for universal image segmentation with promptable masks.	A. Kirillov et al., arXiv 2023
2023	DPO / RLAIF for Alignment	Replaced reward models with preference-based direct policy optimization.	T. Ouyang et al., arXiv 2023
2024	Mixture-of-Experts LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-MoE)	Sparse routing achieves GPT-4-level quality at lower cost.	K. Zhang et al., arXiv 2024
2024	Graph Neural Diffusion (GND)	Unified message passing with diffusion for generative graphs.	Z. Xu et al., ICLR 2024
2025	Video Diffusion & Scene-Level Generation (OpenAI Sora et al.)	First reliable text-to-video diffusion producing minute-scale, coherent footage.	OpenAI Sora Tech Report, 2025

How to Use This List

1. Historical study – follow the citation trail to original PDFs for deep dives.
2. Curriculum design – treat each breakthrough as a module in an AI foundations course.
3. R&D inspiration – observe patterns (data scale, compute, hybridization) to anticipate the next leap.
4. Note: “Breakthrough” is somewhat subjective; I focused on ideas that (a) opened a new research subfield or (b) triggered a large performance leap and enduring real-world impact. If you need deeper coverage of any era or a different criterion (e.g., robotics, knowledge graphs), just let me know!

ENDOFCHATGPTPRO RESPONSE 

And here's a graph that shows the breakthroughs were fairly steady until about 2010 when we did as much research in 15 years as we had done in the previous 60: a four fold breakthrough in producing new software! So things are obviously speeding up, the question is how much? 

We are at a Crossroads. We can let the billionaires enshittify society or we can stand up for ourselves.

What is Surveillance Capitalism?  [1] It's the businesses that are free to you but support themselves by selling advertising over a network. They sell your attention: You are the product. Their real customers are the advertisers, who pay the Surveillance Capitalist's to throw their messages in front of you. FBook and YouTube were the first to industrialize this business model. It leveraged Google's original business model of advertising on their search page and selling the same advertising to web sites to resell, thus giving sites a way to monetize their views. Surveillance Capitalists are much more intrusive: they design their sight to be addictive (which isn't healthy.) They have AI algorithms tuning the feed of presented nuggets to increase the amount of time you spend online and the likelihood you will click on one of their ads. Even though this could be bad for you and your neighbors. They don't care and they pretend it's "out of their control", but then, who is in control? Who feeds you the one post that is most likely to keep you glued to the site?

Surveillance Capitalism has two directions it could go in. There's the direction that humanity wants it to go: the algorithm (AI) knows us better than we know ourselves. It could maximize our well being and enable our pursuit of happiness; just like it says in the founding documents of our nation. The tragedy is that this will be up to us. Why is it a tragedy? Because if we don't control it, it will control us. There is no reason to sell our attention, except on our own terms. Just as there was no reason to let the Robber Barons own all the industries in the west in the Gilded Age, we solved this problem by inventing anti-trust law; there is no reason today to let these Surveillance Capitalist companies use us as their prey. [2]

What actual direction is Surveillance Capitalism taking off in? It's maximizing its profits: Your time on the system and what someone will pay them to force you to watch. And they don't care how detrimental they make the service for its users, they're a monopoly! Sound familiar? Cigarettes are addictive and we charge for each one they smoke? Make them more addictive! Some people die from cancer? That's only a few percent a year, our polls/sales can barely detect that! These companies are not your friends, they are rapacious, amoral and unable to be restrained. They can be fined, but there is nobody personally responsible for their behavior, despite being controlled and directed by somebody.

A favorite tactic of the new Surveillance Capitalist of our New Gilded Age to get more engagement is to promote nationalism or hatred by dehumanization. This gets much more attention from both sides than almost anything else. That the attention is fear on one side and hatred on the other doesn't make any difference to the algorithm (AI). It doesn't understand whether it's making you sadder or depressed or outraged or incredulous or interested... because it doesn't understand human emotions. It doesn't need to understand human emotion, it only needs to know how to keep you on longer and how to make you click and buy stuff more often. The algorithm doesn't care that it made everyone more miserable. It has to be told that it shouldn't make people feel bad... but it is not. And it is not told this because it would reduce the profits of the owner of the channel, the Surveillance Capitalist.

The AI has been told to increase attention and likelihood to click, and it does it. Efficiently. At an industrial scale. For billions of users. It doesn't have reasons for doing these things, it has metrics that it can use to optimize profits: time spent scrolling, click-rate, click-cost and it knows to multiply all three together to measure profitability. It has been told to optimize that one number. As a result, rather than increasing your pursuit of happiness, the AI increases your time spent on the site times your click rate time your click cost (how much an advertiser will pay to show you an ad), which is their revenue. The Surveillance Capitalists have turned over the control of their channels to an algorithm that edits and tailors your feed to you. And unless we prevent it, it will be to your detriment.

Do they have to piss  you off to get you to spend more time on the site? You ain't seen nothing yet...! When the algorithm's recommendations start spilling out into the real world, that's when the consequences are real lives shattered and destroyed. Think of the pogroms in Bangladesh and Myanmar, India and Turkey, Venezuela and China. The AI just do what they are told to do. They don't understand, they're not conscious. They're just a massive inference machine that tries to influence you to do what it wants using all the information it's gathered about you. 

This is a broken contract. We don't have to keep doing it this way. We get to tell the Surveillance Capitalist how they can use our data and how they can influence us. They have to prove to us that their services are harmless. They can do double-blind studies on their own system to measure the effects of their algorithm. They do. They can share that information with the rest of us. They can show that any changes they make increase our well-being and enable a better pursuit of our happiness. Or they can shut down. It's up to them.

We can take either of these paths. We can pretend to ignore these companies that are stealing the attention of humanity or we can encourage these companies to increase our well-being, to facilitate our pursuit of happiness and make us all happier, healthier and wiser. If we ignore them, they will inevitably enshittify their services even more. [3] Their AI algorithm will attempt to trigger your instinctual emotional triggers to frighten and intrigue you and excite you to click on more ads so they can make more money by making your life more miserable and less free. 

The choice is ours. We can control the entities that are trying to monopolize our attention or they can control us. It's up to you. If you're a Representative or a Senator, Listen to Roger McNamee [4], Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff. They know of what they speak. They are the experts in what will be the consequences of any regulatory decisions. They know how much better it could be. Is this something you want to leave to the billionaires who are trying to make more money off of our misery? Any responsible American would proclaim, "Hell, No!"

The only way the last Gilded Age ended was when we broke up the monopolies and allowed competition to flourish, both in the consumer market and in the labor market with the support of unions. When Theodore Roosevelt stood up for the people and forced the billionaires to break up their companies, he brought stability and growth to the world for decades, only interrupted by our need to defeat fascism. We defeated fascism then and we've been fighting brush fires ever since, slowly convincing the people of the world that democracy and competition are what delivers Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We've staved off fascism for eighty years. A new communications channel popped up and the fascists have attempted to use it to take power, again. We can stop them, again. We will.

It will take efforts from each one of us, but nothing extraordinary. We've regulated other industries before. We've set the regulatory environment for these services, we've regulated the airwaves and the roads, the banking industry and the oil industry, every industry has to follow regulations to keep the rest of us safe. We can work together to decide how to control and regulate this industry so that it does what is best for America, not what's best for the billionaires at America's expense.

Thanks for Reading!

 -Dr. Mike

==============================================

[1] As described by the master Cory Doctorow: How to destroy Surveillance Capitalism or the original description from Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A Fight for a Human Future At the new Frontier of Power

Cory Doctorow has coined the term “enshittification” to describe the process, which he describes as follows:

First, com­panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.

[2] Harari's Law of Artificial Intelligence: The ability of AI to impersonate and shout down humans is bad and getting worse.

... and its corollaries.

1. AI can overwhelm any human conversation by counterfeiting a human persona.

2. Free Speech is paramount, impersonating a human is illegal counterfeiting. 

Also relevant are Harari's Laws of Information: 

1. Centrally controlled autocracies are poorer overseers of economies than democracies as they attempt to centralize all information which makes them less efficient, more erratic and thus dangerous.

2. Distributed communications for the masses was necessary before implementing democracy at a national level.

3. The availability of information is proportional to its cost: Truth is expensive, lies are practically free. 

[3] Doctorow's Law of Enshittification: Any Network Offering will tend to Enshittify its Service to maximize its profit.

... and its corollaries.

1. The tendency to enhittify a service increases as it becomes more monopolized.

2. Network effects tend to increase the amount of monopolization.

3. Enshittification should be minimalized as it extracts profit by making other's lives worse. 

This is one of the most basic (secular) sins: greed at the expense of others. Extracting pennies of profit for pound of flesh will not be tolerated. Anti-trust law will be enforced to the full extent of the law.

[4] Roger McNamee: Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. 

 Religion Without Lies: Why We have Free Will

The Final Great Awakening of the human race, wherein we throw off the yoke of evolution by natural selection and embrace intelligent design of our morals to create a world of abundance.

The Future. And Welcome To it! 

It's up to you. You have Free Will. (You know you do.) Just as Rene Descartes could not doubt that he existed, "I think therefore I am"; you cannot doubt that you are and that you have that choice of doubting. You can doubt yourself and you can doubt that you have Free Will, but the act itself shows that you are and that you have Free Will. You are not a zombie. You are not a puppet. You are a sentient human being that can read and write and reason. You are a miracle of evolution about to take control of your own destiny. As it ever was, it will be. Consciousness is the original secular sin: awareness creates responsibility. To argue that there is no Free Will is arguing that evolution doesn't exist. And we know the evidence for evolution is huge and undeniable. [1]

There is no way for any human to disavow that they are conscious. Rene Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum." is a crushingly obvious argument to anyone who thinks. There is an observer in your head and this observer thinks and it speaks and it writes. It cannot be denied by the observer themselves. These words and writings can affect other humans, other observers. And they can all influence each other. They can plan. They can judge. They can decide which ends to strive for. They can affect their future trajectories. The entire reason that consciousness has evolved is to support Free Will.

Imagine there is no Free Will, if you can. Let me paint the picture: You have dedicated yourself to only your local gods. No Free Will, but you still get to watch and to justify and to talk and to write, but you blindly obey the signals from your gods. You know, the ones that create your desires and instill their fears inside your mind. Who are these gods, you ask? They are the nerve pulse trains that come in your mind from your senses. And what is the mind? The mind is the brain sensing itself. The brain controls myriad feedback loops that keep you alive. Much of these control loops operate outside of your conscious control (blood pressure, digestion, body temperature, heartbeat, etc.), emotions simmering in the background, plucking the strings beneath your awareness. Your breathe, your hunger, your thirst, your actual gods; you must worship them or you will die.

The brain senses and controls these systems. The Mind is the system that senses and responds to these sensations and monitors these control systems. What is consciousness? It's the Mind sensing and attempting to control the Mind's control loops that are attempting to control the brain's control loops, it's watching itself. How does the brain control one of its minor gods? Like the minor god of core body temperature? The brain must maintain a core body temperature near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus a few degrees. If you start to heat up the brain will start to make the body sweat in an attempt to cool it down. If you get hotter, the body starts to convulse and fail and if you don't make the right sacrifice to your god, you will be punished and maybe die. (Maybe jump in some ice water?) 

The brain implements an unconscious control of the core body temperature system, the sensations are turned into emotions, into feelings in your conscious mind, as they deviate from the predicted homeostasis. The brain attempts to control the system so that the emotions are unneeded and it just works; but when it fails, the emotions generate fear and dread. The brain quietly regulates this system until it can't. It can predict that the sensations are changing into dangerous territory. What the brain can do and control is no longer enough to preserve its life. Panic time! 

The Mind monitors the brain, monitors all of its control loops and is the last resort to regulate this critical control loop before you perish. The Mind is sensing all of the systems in the brain, it can affect many of them and it can control your locomotion. You can influence anything your Mind can sense (typically.) How does the Mind sense itself? The Mind has to watch each of its systems that monitor the brain's systems. The Mind uses the basic emotional systems to signal itself to do the right thing. Feelings. Feelings are signals to pay attention to the underlying system. The Mind has to model itself and predict it's future state given your next action, it has to decide what to actually do.

The ability to plan is critical for our survival. To imagine ourselves as a separate entity from the world is critical. To identify yourself with your body is essential for adaptability and survivability. Imagine you hear the mythical philosophical zombie in your head. A voice that has lots of information and wisdom but does not realize it's in your head. It's either the voice of one of the minor gods keeping you alive or it's a random demon or devil. You can get advice from this voice, but since the voice isn't conscious it doesn't understand the context. It doesn't understand as well as you do because you understand the context. As sentient human beings we no longer accept these voices are gods, they're breakdowns of the normal communication between the brain and the mind. They are problems to be fixed.

It's obvious that consciousness is useful in adapting and surviving. Being aware of your own body, recognizing that you are wedded to the body, is of inestimable value. Having your Mind sense itself, recognizing itself and its body is of immense value for adapting and surviving. The evolutionary pressure to develop consciousness over zombies has to be enormous. The one who can plan and execute better is typically the survivor. And Evolution is all about survival. Consciousness is the recognition of your situation. What can you sense? What do you feel? There are three different kinds of systems you can sense:

1) Body sensations like thirst, breathe, hunger, temperature, body positions, pain and pleasure. All the internal sensations that arrive from the various nerves spread out through the body. The little gods of life that you must worship to survive.

2) External senses such as hearing, seeing, tasting and smelling. The things that tell you what objective reality looks like at the moment. 

3) Feelings, the conscious sensing of emotions that are flooded into the mind as the predictions of control fail when the brain starts to panic. 

What are you sensing when you sense an internal emotion? Each of these emotions you feel is in response to feedback from some brain control system. These feelings of fear and desire capture your conscious attention. There emotions are connected to default instincts, plans of action associated with each different emotion, typically in pairs that attract you or send you into flight. 

The default emotional state is seeking or exploration. With social herd animals (like us) we seek the context, but we really seek each other. And if we can't find who we seek, we turn to grief. If we find what we seek we turn to care or lust. And if we don't like what we find we experience disgust. If what we find is dangerous, then we either fight or take off (flight.) Each emotion activates a set of instinctual actions that are likely to be used to solve the problem in front of you. They suggest a set of scenarios to investigate to solve whatever problem you are facing. Your Free Will, your ability to evaluate future situations and determine your preferences are fundamental to your adaptability and survival.

The feelings introduce preferred actions to the Mind. The conscious Mind can imagine itself and the state of its body after taking its preferred actions: Fight? Feint? Freeze? Flight? And proceeds to implement the course of action with the best predicted outcome. This is how you adapt and survive. The whole point of the brain pushing this problem to consciousness is to use the planning and predicting abilities of Free Will. It's not enough to be aware of what's going on if you can't affect it. It would be like a control system without feedback, incapable of actually controlling anything. If you don't have the ability to affect yourself, there would be no point of consciousness, of being aware. Free Will is the feedback that lets you learn, that lets you adapt and survive, no matter what the context. It lets you set your own goals and rewards, you can pick and choose your heart's desire.

To claim this obvious phenomenon does not exist is to beg the question then of who is making this claim? It's an imposed paradox because of a misunderstanding of what a model is. A model is a description of a thing, not the thing itself. Because Newton invented a very accurate (but definitely wrong) theory of gravity did not change what gravity actually was. Because we are making new neuron based models of what the brain does, it does not change what the Mind actually is and how it uses consciousness to implement Free Will. The very definition of life is emergent behavior that cannot be predicted except by context. Once life is created, evolution spends its time creating competence without understanding. [3] Competence about controlling itself evolves into understanding: the ability to take knowledge and use a recipe to bring about a desired effect on objective reality. Understanding requires consciousness and Free Will. without consciousness and Free will, underesatnding does not exist.

Why is this important? It tells us why we are here.

You've heard of the is/ought problem? Just because something is, doesn't mean that it ought to be. Whatever is comes from history and evolution. Evolution points you towards survival, not towards being a moral creature. That little voice you hear in your head, those little pangs of conscience, are only meant to keep you alive, not ethical (a concept created only recently by human beings.) The Final Great Awakening of the human race is to realize that we are more than our evolved instincts. [2] We can reason. We can design our moral landscape. This is what religions have attempted to do for thousands of years. The problem of religion is that they write down the answers, not the process. Once the word becomes Holy, it cannot be changed. We write tons of books that interpret what the Holy words mean so we can all agree to modify the Holy Writ to be more moral and useful in today's context. 

But humanity is still learning, still getting better, producing more knowledge, more capabilities, more machines and systems to extend our reach. Things change. For instance, nuclear bombs are a new thing, invented recently, in our lifetimes. No religion can have anything written about this issue in the past because it didn't exist before. Things change, but written words do not. It's not answers we need but understanding of the right processes to get the best answers is the critical skill for survival. We have the consciousness to understand what's going on and the Free Will to change ourselves and humanity to meet any new challenges. Given Free Will, it is our responsibility to intelligently design our morals and ethical systems to be the best possible ones. We can imagine what ought to be and should make it so.

This is our destiny. This our reason for living. This is why we are here. To witness and have dominion over the universe. Let's hope we can start before the killer (alien?) robots appear, for they will. We need to be ready. We need more people to understand that Religions are not your friends. Religions divide us from the truth in order to control our lives and to greedily extract our wealth by using our social instincts to capture our need for care, to misuse our faith for their own selfish purposes.

We need to realize we live in the secular world, objective reality, not in a supernatural infected hellscape. We must disown these Religions of Lies and join together in the one true creed: The Religion Without Lies, the largest religion on this earth, the religion of the Nones who reject all organized fake religions. The Religion of Free Thought and the Church of Free Will. The Religion of Truth and Light. The Religion of Learning and Reasoning, of Feeling and Experience. This religion started in the reformation and was perfected by the philosophers of the enlightenment, the one true Religion of humanity: the Religion Without Lies. Come join us in our support of humanity, our support of Secular Humanism and the many sects of this religion in the world. One of them is perfect for you. Celebrate humanity and abundance. Get on with your life!

Thanks for reading!

 -Dr. Mike

[1] I make the argument that the competence that evolution designed consciousness for was Free Will. Thus the system that designed competence without understanding also designed understanding without competence.

[2] Evolution has been guided by humans for a long time. See Darwin's later volumes on Sexual Selection (Choose who is to be born and to create offspring with, versus death and lack of offspring.) Evolution depends on birth and death to regulate it. Humans have been domesticating themselves forever. We just figured out how to domesticate other species in historical times. We are just recognizing that we have been domesticating ourselves for a much longer period. This recognition has profound consequences on our future. First, it has consequences for research and bodies of knowledge and practice. Second, it lays the framework for all future decision making. 

[3] Definitely from Daniel Dennett who wrote several books on the topic. "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" is one of my favorites, but any of his books will enlighten you.

Political Corruption

 What is Corruption? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption

Political corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain.

It’s essentially the protection racket: unless you pay me, you will be threatened and you will not get what you want; even though they are legally required to provide aservice.

Corruption: why is this a secular (real) sin?

It causes individual and societal harm causing everyone to be poorer and bullies to be crueler.

Because it breaks the golden rule of ethical requirements. 

Kant: Categorical Imperative. The same rule must apply to everyone.

Copernicus: Anthropomorphic principle. You are not the center of world, 

Dawkins: Intelligent Design: Morals must be supported with reason.

Dennet: The basis of morals come from evolution, but they are not constrained by it.

Ethics must be universal: All men are created equal in the eyes of the law (the state must not play favorites.)

Why must ethical laws be universal? It’s the only way to guarantee morality for everyone.

If ethics depends upon who is who, then ethics invariably becomes an excuse to make others suffer in society while you immorally profit off of their suffering because of greed. That’s a secular sin.

Non-universality allows for other non-optimal societies: illiberal democracy. 

It would allow for treating some citizens as second class with fewer rights.

Essentially slavery, racism and nationalism seem to be okay in a society that failed this moral test. This is not a set of ethics for a society I want to live in.

Definition of political corruption: personal benefit for providing a public good.

This is the basis of Royalty. All the benefits, none of the cost. It makes the law a matter of money, power and contacts; not an unbiased, fair and equal system. It makes a society poorer and crueler. It is how modern society fights the greedy and cruel that wish to profit personally by using their power to exploit others. This ends up making a country poorer and less safe.

It’s why  emoluments are forbidden by our constitution (payments by foreign countries to our politicians.) 

It’s why bribes are illegal. You pay the service fee to the government, not the inspector. So they can’t be tempted to ignore the regulations and safety requirements… so your house doesn’t collapse in an earthquake because your concrete company was paid off to deliver a non-compliant product. It makes society work. Corruption makes societies that fail.

Corruption is insidious. It’s extremely hard to rip it out of a system without serious and dangerous work. When the board of directors of a hospital in Russia take the finances from the government meant to pay their doctors for themselves, the doctors become impoverished and have to request payments from their patients to survive themselves, thus corruption is self-propagating! One person’s corruption spreads throughout the economy and poisons many more transactions than just the original corrupt stealing.

What’s Trumps stance on corruption? He’s for it. He’s written several EOs endorsing it: he’s not enforcing the foreign corruption practices act which forbids US companies from bribing foreign officials. He’s putting up opportunities for corruption in public: meme coin, truth social, his properties: where foreigners can bribe him or pay tribute… He accepts foreign cash as donations laundered through non-profits that can hide the sources (NRA forwarded him $70M in donations, financed by Russia.) @GOP stopped foreign reporting requirements. (thanks, McConnell)

He blatantly asks for corporate sponsorships for his inauguration, his energy policy, his tax policy and of his Easter egg hunt, all unaccounted for and which goes directly into his pocket. This is legalized corruption. Elon Musk is just as morally bankrupt as Trump. He’s in government, attempting to unconstitutionally eradicate those agencies that regulate his companies and complaining that American’s are boycotting his Tesla’s while he burns the unsellable cars for the insurance money (who else profits?) For the past 250 years prior to Trump, Presidents and Cabinet members put any business dealings they had into blind trusts just to avoid even the appearance of corruption. This no longer seems to be the case with the current Republican party. 

It’s a breakdown in societal norms. It’s a push to treat people differently depending on their loyalty and tribute. It’s discrimination and bigotry and it makes our entire society poorer, crueler, and more stratified. Nothing a sane, ethical person would want.

It’s one of the worst secular (real) sins possible in the world. 

How to prevent corruption from spreading throughout a society? Prosecution from the government (state, local, federal) refusal by the populace to submit. Do not surrender. More laws that stop the blatant legal corruption in our government such as trading on inside information in the stock market by our representatives.

Let’s look at a particular case. Adams, mayor of NYC took bribes, favors and donations from Turkish companies and officials and in return ordered approval of building permits and ignored other regulations and reporting requiremnts for his bribers. This was under prosecution during the last administration and was shut down with an ‘I promise to be loyal to Trump and his policies’. And they want this to be hung over his head so they can bring it back at any time. Absolutely corrupt on both sides. Hopefully, the judge will fix this, because the governor of NY, who could fix this, is too scared of Trump to do her official duty.

Let’s take another example. Tariffs. Companies petition the government and donate to political parties to remove tariffs on their products. Politicians return the favor to their voters, the exception data show this plainly and clearly, exemptions are available for purchase.

Same for the immigration ‘gold’ cards. The $5M for US citizenship is easier than bribing random immigration officials.

But the worst legalized corruption is from Citizen United where essentially unlimited donations to politicians are allowed and made directly for new laws and new tax breaks to be purchased. This corruption leads to it being over ten times more likely for a bill to be passed that supports the billionaire’s interests versus an ordinary American's interest. This is the road to oligarchy and dictatorship. We are well on our way to the broligarchy. This will not be good for ordinary American citizens, no matter how much Trump lies about it all.

Overturning Citizens United and continuing to reform election financing should be a high priority to make the society reflect the citizens ideals, not raw money and power.

Impeachment is my recommendation of how to get corruption out of the government. Success has been sporadic.

Thanks for reading.

 -Dr. Mike

 

Further things to think about:

How can corruption be removed from a society?

Can corruption every be useful?

Have you ever personally suffered or profited from corruption?

What does corruption do to a society?

How can it make a society pooorer or more stratified?