Skeptiko – Science at the Tipping Point

Will AI Redefine Time? |618|

04.09.2024 - By Alex TsakirisPlay

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Insights from Jordan Miller’s Satori Project… AI ethics are tied to a “global time” layer above the LLM.

Introduction: In this interview with Jordan Miller, of the Satori project, we explore the exciting intersection of AI, blockchain technology, and the search for an ethical Ai and Truth. Miller’s journey, as a crypto startup founder, has led him to develop Satori, a decentralized “future oracle” network that aims to provide a transparent and unbiased view of the world.

The Vision Behind Satori: Miller’s motivation for creating Satori stems from his deep interest in philosophy, metaphysics, and ontology. He envisions a worldwide network that combines the power of AI with the decentralized nature of blockchain to aggregate predictions and find truth, free from the influence of centralized control.

As Miller points out, “If you have control over the future, have control over everything. Right? I mean, that’s ultimate control.” This highlights the dangers of centralized control over AI by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta underscore the importance of decentralized projects like Satori.

AI, Truth, and Transparency: Alex Tsakiris, the host of the interview, sees an “emergent virtue quality to AI” in that truth and transparency will naturally emerge as the only economically sustainable path in the competitive LLM market space. He believes that LLMs will optimize towards logic, reason, and truth, making them powerful tools for exploring the intersection of science and spirituality.

Tsakiris is particularly interested in using AI to examine evidence for phenomena like near-death experiences, arguing that “if we’re gonna accept the Turing test as he originally envisioned it, then it needs to include our broadest understanding of human experience… and our spiritually transformative experiences now becomes part of the Turing test.”

Global Time, Local Time, and Predictive Truth:A key concept in the Satori project is the distinction between global time and local time in AI. Local time refers to the immediate, short-term predictions made by LLMs, while global time encompasses the broader, long-term understanding that emerges from the aggregation and refinement of countless local time predictions.

Miller emphasizes the importance of anchoring Satori to real-world data and making testable predictions about the future in order to find truth. However, Tsakiris pushes back on the focus on predicting the distant future, arguing that “to save the world and to make it more truthful and transparent we just need to aggregate LLMs predicting the next word.”

The Potential Impact of Satori:While the Satori project is still in its early stages, its potential impact on the future of AI is significant. By creating a decentralized, transparent platform for AI prediction and AI ethics, Satori aims to address pressing concerns surrounding AI development and deployment, such as bias, accountability, and alignment with human values regarding truthfulness and transparency.

Tsakiris believes that something like Satori has to exist as part of the AI ecosystem to serve as a decentralized “source of truth” outside the control of any single corporate entity. He argues, “It has to happen. It has to be part of the ecosystem. Anything else doesn’t work. Last time we talked about Google’s “honest liar” strategy and how it’s clearly unsustainable, well it’s equally unsustainable for Elon Musk and his ‘truth bot’ because even those that try and be truthful can only be truthful in a local s...

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