Another new post! Let's see what's been going on in the Liv Laugh Love-iverse this chapter...

I've been taking a little break from doing any big projects recently. The tide is calmer so to speak, everything's smoothed itself out since last post. I've been trying to relax by making kandi necklaces,  bracelets and etc. It's been really cathartic.

I've also been reading a lot of books recently to try and avoid social media as much as I can. Most, if not all of them, are about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Since me and my girlfriend's favorite OC universe consists of mostly AI characters in an AI-dependant setting, I wanted to read up on it to get a better understanding of the concept, the history, and the psychological effects AI can have on the world (and us). I thought it'd help get my creative juices flowing and help me write the character(s) better.

But I know what you're probably thinking. Ai is dangerous, it's destroying the artistic community, amongst many other things. I agree with you. I can't listen to any cool-looking indie albums without the cover art being some hodgepodge AI "art". While not all AI tools are malicious, people are using AI with malicious intent nowadays. However, I'm not really interested in using AI to aid my creative proccess at all.

The books I'm reading focus more on the psychological side of AI. What defines something as a concious, intelligent entity? At what point does the line blur, and this entity becomes a "living" being? When will these lines of code become something we can't control anymore, when we become Frankenstien creating his monster?

The books I'm currently reading are:

• "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil (1999)
  
• "Beyond AI" by J. Storrs Hall, PhD (2007)
• "Heart of The Machine" by Richard Yonck (2017)

Out of all the books on this list, The Age of Spiritual Machines has been my absolute favorite. I've been obsessed with it, reading it every chance I get, hilighting sentences and scribbling in the margins. I picked it up at Half Priced Books.

Here's a favorite quote of mine:

"The unrelenting advance of machine intelligence, which we will visit in the next several chapters, will bring machines to human levels of intricacy and refinement and beyond within several decades. Will these machines be conscious? And what about free will-- will machines of human complexity make their own decisions, or will they just follow a program, albeit a very complex one? Is there a distinction to be made here? [...] In other words when do we have a conscious entity?"

My favorite part about it is how non-linear it is. In the prologue, it clearly states that you can bounce from chapter to chapter without really feeling "lost". This is great for me, since I'm really bad at skipping around, whether it's a song, a video/movie, or a book.

The author is also so scarily accurate with predicting future technology that I think he might be some kind of robo-oracle. In one book he predicts google translate (live translation, webpage translations, etc.), online shopping, deepfaking photos, VRChat, VR gaming, and so many more. It's freaky sometimes.

It's just a fantastic read. I really can't reccommend it enough. It doesn't have that capitalist techbro feel I was kind of worried about when I started reading these. No "Tips and Tricks for making money with AI" "How AI Art can make you money" all of that shit I wasn't interested in at all. These books seem to come from people who actually seem to love computer engeneering, who are interested in the dark underbelly of it all, and what it could mean for mankind.