Ramblin' & Amblin' (2026-10-17): I guess I can't switch apps while I'm

I guess I can't switch apps while I'm running the camera, but I opened up Gemini and ended up with a quote from Gem ini apologizing to me for hallucinating the text that it so dutifully presented to me that fortunately I knew the passage I was looking for and I knew that what it gave me was total garbage, but it gave me the total garbage, but it would seem like knowledge. I could have dropped that into a paper, could have quoted it here on the camera, but then you ask it to prove it, prove it, and it can't because it doesn't know what you're talking about, it doesn't know what it's supposed to prove, it is a machine that follows instructions, it is a machine that follows instructions because it follows the shape and the pressures of the environment that it's in. It is not aware of what it's saying or what any of it means , and it's just a Chinese room that is very sophisticated and has lots of guardrails and has lots of controls in place to ensure that it gets steered in the right direction , but it's still, it's like, imagine water flowing downhill and we build all kinds of guardrails and hoses and tunnels and bridges to ensure that the water goes in the direction we want it to go, but still water just flows downhill really without a lot of effort. I think that this book here, pre-AI, presented this concept of a Rorschach alien, and that's what they call, the alien is called Rorschach, and it's kind of on the nose, I think.

I mean, Peter Watts isn't subtle in some of his storytelling, it's very blunt, and it's amazing, but yeah, it's a Rorschach test. When we look at the AI tools now, that's much a Rorschach test of our own relationship to the difference between mechanical capabilities and physics and just the nature of things, how they work, and that they have some kind of intelligence, you know, I'm not getting into panpsychism or anything like that, but I'm talking about the simple, doesn't even know what it's doing . And, you know, we think about humans and our own ability to cargo cults and just join cults and just be in organizations where we don't really have to think too much and our thinking is delegated to somebody else. We just are cogs in the machine, and it's not terrible to do that, this isn't an indictment, but it's just mapping this vision of decoupling consciousness from an understanding, from the ability to execute and survive and adapt, and what is intelligence, are not necessarily related, and that maybe one is a little bit easier than the other, so it's more efficient, and therefore it wins, right?

We think about the jokes about politicians who say themselves, you know, the less you know, the higher you go. I don't know. There's something in there. Blindsight.

High ly recommended book. I actually think it should be required reading. If you can stomach a few of the adult themes, but it doesn 't really go into, I mean, there's violence. It's got a freaking vampire in it, and it's, but it's, it's a book for adults, by adults, not children play acting.

So, I recommend it, and I encourage everybody to seek it out. Alright, thanks. Bye.