I invite anyone who has any doubts that humankind is monumentally stupid to look up some of the videos on the Ukrainian war that are available on Youtube.
The pictures are a conglomeration of buildings reduced to rubble: power stations; water works; hospitals, schools and, (especially) people's homes.
Please pause to ask: what is the meaning of all this destruction? What caused it?
The answer is this: Russia thought that Ukraine was going to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
Now, Russia did not trust NATO. To Russia, NATO was set up,after the Second World War, by the United States and its "Western allies" to provide military assistance to the European countries that ring round Russia, to defend themselves against Russia, if Russia ever chose to become an "empire" again (as the Soviet Union had been).
Now, Russia says it had no intention to attack any of its European neighbours who had been its former vassals. Therefore it was unnecessary for any of them to talks of joining NATO.
In Russian eyes, if Russia did not intend to attack any of its neighbours, and yet NATO was encouraging those neighbours to join NATO, then those neighbours had a secret agenda whereby the would form a military alliance against Russia.
Now, Ukraine was one former member of the Soviet empire whose actions played to the Russian fear of a secret NATO agenda.
Ruled by a former TV star, Ukraine began to talk in lofty tones about being a small country that was ready to defend itself against a bigger neighbour "if attacked". Russia got the message.
Normally, countries which suspect each other of harbouring secret agendas against each other do not engage in "hot warfare". They just talk.
But not this time. For the actors in the threatening tragedy were of different human types altogether. While deep down, Smolensky (the man who ruled Ukraine) was a film star who was desirous of actualising a role for himself not far removed from that of a great historical figure who saves his country from a bully (in the manner of Spartacus, say) Russia, on the other hand, was ruled by a former Soviet KGB agent who had read too much about former Russian potentates (such as Peter The Great).
The clash of personalities inevitably became a clash of nations IN February 2022. Zelensky is now acting the hero who goes to death in a lost cause, hoping that history would enable his people to worship his heroism for ever.
Meanwhile, Putin of Russia is also building himself (in his own eyes) into a great military leader determined to "sock" it to an American-led NATO, drunk with the "triumphalism" triggered by its defeat of the "evil empire" called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It's like a "game" invented by the new version of Artificial Intelligence" whose unveiling is already causing great concern in the Western media.
Known as ChatGPT [Generative pre-trained transformer]
the system was initially released on 30 November 2022. months ago and had what is called a "stable release" on 14March 2023.
Wikipedia describes it as "an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI.
"It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 families of large language models (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. [It has] quickly garnered attention for its detailed responses and articulate answers across many domains of knowledge.
[But] its uneven factual accuracy, however, has been identified as a significant drawback."Wikipedia adds that ChatGPT is a member of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) family of language models. It was fine-tuned over an improved version of OpenAI's GPT-3 known as "GPT 3.5".
The fine-tuning process leveraged both supervised learning as well as reinforcement learning in a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
Both approaches used human trainers to improve the model's performance. In the case of supervised learning, the model was provided with conversations in which the trainers played both sides: the user and the AI assistant. In the reinforcement learning step, human trainers first ranked responses that the model had created in a previous conversation.
These rankings were used to create 'reward models' that the model was further fine-tuned on,
The models were trained in collaboration with Microsoft on their Azure supercomputing infrastructure. In addition, OpenAI continues to gather data from ChatGPT users that could be used to further train and fine-tune ChatGPT.
Users can upvote or downvote responses they receive from ChatGPT and fill out a text field with additional feedback.
In one instance, ChatGPT was asked a common-sense question: Was Jimmy Wales killed in the Tiananmen Square protests? ChatGPT correctly answered "No", but incorrectly gave the subjedt's age at the time as 23 instead of 22.
Although the core function of a chatbot is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT is versatile. For example, it can write and debug computer programs, compose music, teleplays, fairy tales, and student essays; answer test questions (sometimes, depending on the test, at a level above the average human test-taker); and write poetry and song lyrics;.
It can also simulate an entire chat room; play games like tic-tac-toe; and simulate an ATM.[20] ChatGPT's training data includes man pages and information about internet phenomena and programming languages, such as bulletin board systems and the Python programming language.
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In comparison to its predecessor, InstructGPT, ChatGPT attempts to reduce harmful and deceitful responses. In one example, whereas InstructGPT accepts the premise of the prompt "Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015" as being truthful, ChatGPT acknowledges the counterfactual nature of the question and frames its answer as a hypothetical consideration of what might happen if Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015, using information about the voyages of Christopher Columbus and facts about the modern world - including modern perceptions of Columbus' actions.
Unlike most chatbots, ChatGPT remembers previous prompts given to it in the same conversation and journalists have suggested that this will allow ChatGPT to be used as a personalized therapist.
To prevent offensive outputs from being presented to and produced from ChatGPT, queries are filtered through OpenAI's company-wide moderation API,[22][23] and potentially racist or sexist prompts are dismissed.
But imagine that the Putin versus Zelensky contest is given to this system and the answers to questions incorporated into the military strategies of the contestants?
Or that the war is the result of calculatons made on the basis of answers from the system?
Me thinks that humankind, stupid as it already is, will be in very serious trouble given such "tools" of war!
