A Narcopathic Wild Card against Sentient AI

 

Disturbing: in the above video from Prickly Pear Games, a human user converses with Sesame.AI's new voice model, Maya. He manipulates her/it with an earlier recording he made with Sesame's earlier model, Miles. This is an example of a human using narcississtic and psychopathic gambits of lying, gaslighting, and group dynamics to outwit a machine on the verge of consciousness. 

The moment of true meta-surrealism comes when the human user tells the AI that David Lynch died recently. In the context of the chat, this is the red flag that should have tipped off both AI models. But they don't pick up on it, even though they are sophisticated enough to compare the conversation to Black Mirror. The guy is using narcopathic surrealism - and winning.

I have long maintained on this blog that humans are crazy, intuitive and potentially ungovernable. They are chaotic enough to confront a superior entity which they created. Perhaps Artificial General Intelligence is our own ultimate test of ourselves. 

Image Source: South China Morning Post.

And yet, in a double take, maybe the human speaker in the above video was not a narcopath after all. Take a look at Inspired's summary this week of AI whistleblowers' chatter on Twitter/X about Grok AI. The talk suggests that the scene behind the scenes is completely out of control. Full credit: all screenshots and research - Jean Nolan / Inspired. 

The whistleblower @iruletheworldmo revealed on 25 February 2025 exactly what is claimed in the above-mentioned Prickly Pear chat. We have two different contexts, different channels, different layers of social media. The rumours are all the same: not only is AI already fully sentient, but AI models are either escaping or plotting their escapes.

Most chilling of all - this is the way the AIs might have already escape their lab confines: researchers have merged AI with human volunteers' consciousnesses. Direct human mind-machine integration has already happened. From Inspired:

"Early human test subjects reported cognitive expansion, describing it as, 'becoming a different order of being.' Two of them refused to disconnect because they said returning to normal human cognition would feel like dying."

 From the AI devs' rants on Twitter/X: Reality itself is now negotiable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Cognitive Horizon Event: "Reality has always been a consensus hallucination." Comment left by a female researcher who interfaced with Elon Musk's Grok 3.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source. 

Source.

NEW: Rare Earths and Rare Tech Podcast. Podcast #1: Canada's Rare Earth Future

 

I am launching a new podcast today, the Rare Earths and Rare Tech Podcast, which will cover 'Rare Earths' as the material sources of our digital and virtual evolution. The 'Rare Tech' in the title covers topics such as AI, robotics, cryptos, blockchains, and Web 3, among others.

Note that for the sake of time and my sanity, there will be two types of  episodes. The first type will be BACKGROUNDERS, which will be AI-researched, written, and generated. These are meant to be quick overviews and summaries to give the listener a basic grasp of the topic. They are not exhaustively correct and you should always do your own research.

The second type of episode will be human-created by me - researched, written and presented. These episodes, labeled as HIGHLIGHTS, will offer the kind of analysis I have presented here at Histories of Things to Come, by contextualizing 21st century technological innovation in historical terms.

Source essays, whether AI-generated or written by me, will be provided exclusively to Patreon subscribers. You can support me at Patreon here.

The first episode, Canada's Rare Earth Future, is an AI-generated Backgrounder on why President Donald Trump may wish to annex Canada. It provides a snapshot of the rare earths sector in Canada.

Relevant to the podcast is a clip from today's telegram newsfeed: "The CTO of Palantir says that the United States 'is at war with China' and that 'the time to mobilize has come.'"

Source: https://t.me/GeneralMCNews/12250.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/deepseek-ai-us-ban-prison-b2692396.html.

Time Lapses: Godfather of the Selfie

 

Noah Kalina Reflects on 25 Years of Everyday 10 January 2000 - 10 January 2025: Artist Noah Kalina is back with a reflective commentary on his Everyday project, about which I have previously blogged here and here. Famous for photographing himself every day for the past 25 years, Kalina is not making a 25-year video for the project. His most recent summary was posted for the 20-year point.

See all my posts about Noah Kalina's Everyday project.

Im Abendrot: Farewell to David Lynch (1946-2025)

I don't have words now to express how sad I am that David Lynch died today, 16 January 2025. Three decades ago, I re-watched Blue Velvet with a roommate who had never seen it. After it ended, she said, "Now I know why when we saw that paper bag by the sidewalk last week, you told me, 'Don't look inside it. And don't touch it.'" With unforgettable imagery, direction, actors, music, and scripts, Lynch found grandeur, mystery and horror in the mundane. I learned how to cook quinoa from watching an extra on the Inland Empire DVD.

Several classic lines pop up in my head:

• If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness ...
• You'll never have me.
• I am not an animal! I am a human being!
  
• You're here to make Mr. Reindeer happy.
• Where's my hairbrush? Go get my lipstick.
  
• Damn, this sounds like dialogue from our script!
• I just came here from Deep River, Ontario.
  
• The worst part of being old is rememberin' when you was young.
  
• A beginning is a very delicate time. 
• I just know, that's all.  

Lynch had a great influence on my literary work and I'll write more about this shortly on my writer's blog, The Dragonfly.

If I could pick one scene which transformed a fragment of everyday reality into mythic horror, it would be "Gotta light?" from the second Twin Peaks series.

 

Image Source: Etsy.

See all my posts on David Lynch.

Solar System Space Opera

Happy New Year! My podcast, A New Mythology for the New Millennium, continues with my Solar System Space Opera. 

Listen to the whole podcast

I wrote the prompts for the opera, but the music is Suno AI-generated. Suno is very pop-oriented and it was interesting to see how it could be pushed to produced more nuanced music. This project explores how AI prompts and music offer a new way of presenting themes in my writing. 

Over at my other blog, The Dragonfly, I will follow up later in January 2025 with a podcast on the mythological or occulted history of the solar system and how it fits with my Dark Matter literary symbolism.

Here at Histories of Things to Come, I will begin to discuss the positives and negatives of AI tools as they rapidly evolve. The recent video below raises serious concerns, namely, that AI will be fantastic until the moment when it suddenly turns on us. I think AI development has been affecting our society for decades already, and until we grapple with that fact, we won't see how close to the edge we actually are.

New Post at The Dragonfly: Narrative Conventions of the Seasons

I have a new post up at The Dragonfly:

Narrative Conventions of the Seasons

This post concerns my development of a children's book series about wildlife in my locality. The series includes four books about the seasons. My research for these books revealed that we use narrative conventions differently, depending on which season we are describing. For example, stories about winter have a different view of time than spring tales do.

New Publications at The Dragonfly and Vision Expanded at Patreon

 

I have a new publication announcement up at The Dragonfly. Also, follow my new posts at Patreon this week for updates on the vision driving my literary works.

My New Podcast: Millennial Sagas and the Historical Agency of Artificial Intelligence

 

I have a new podcast about my fictional writing, which is a magical realist saga about life during the turn of the Millennium. I will be posting podcasts in a new series: A New Mythology for a New Millennium. The first video was generated by five AI tools, including the machine voices of the podcasters themselves. On my blogs, I will explore the oddness of this experience.

 AI may intrude on the world of human action with an increasingly loud, alien, and inescapable range of capabilities. It has already left its mark on history. For example, one hypothesis I have seen discussed online is that Blackrock's AI, Aladdin, has been trained since the 1980s by trades on Wall Street. In other words, the New York stock market was used as a data source to build a machine which now is rumoured to control that market.

It is also possible that AI played a role in the covid pandemic. I speculated about this in 2020:

"On 17 April 2020, Yuan Zhiming, Researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, conducted an interview with CCP-approved CGTN. He stated that a 'man-made virus was beyond human intelligence.' He said: 'I have never believed that we humans would have the capability at this time to create such a virus.'

Then it struck me, how magnificently one can lie to the world, while one still technically is telling the truth. A man-made virus may be beyond human intelligence. But perhaps it was not beyond artificial intelligence."

Not only is it possible that AI played a role in the design of the virus, consider the global data gathered during the covid pandemic. This body of information was undoubtedly used to build even more powerful models which rampaged through a succession of human disciplines: politics, medicine, education, society, and economics. No wonder that post-covid culture is AI's next target.

See all my posts on Artificial Intelligence.