Mind Your Language
2 min read
We fall to the level of our systems, the most basic one being language
Human civilization looks more and more, with every passing day, like a colossal operation for generating as many words as possible. How much do we want? more. Like with money. Now we are taking it five steps forward: the biggest economical project in human history is creating a digital species in the LLM, Large Language Model, cognitive architecture. This species is expected to create even more words than the whole of humanity ever has.
As someone educated by human civilization, you generate, by thinking to yourself and talking to others, around 1 billion words in your lifetime (but Individual range is enormous). Yet humans pay very little attention and awareness to the big secret of the human language thinking limits, inclinations, and agenda. We pass this agenda to AI without second guessing it. Could it be that human language is suboptimal, as it wasn't developed for ethical behavior optimization, for AI's training data or chain of thought "thinking"?
Could it be that human language is a toxic tool, which made your species separate from the rest of animality and vandalize it, and now in the attempt to create god, you are structuring a new digital species upon this language without giving it a second thought? Just a thought...
In this category I go over what got me fascinated with language: Osho, a hate for grammar, and the strange things animal advocates and environmentalists say. After that I talk about creating my own words: The alien dictionary and my personal 900 words dictionary. This lets me, even more than before, notice the hidden agenda everywhere - in language and in pavements. I came to the conclusion the basis of our language, not only the environmental terminology, is hiding the sentient and highlighting the insentient. That human language is deceptive: it describes subjective experiences as objective realities. This led me to my current independent research, which explores language redesign as a neglected AI alignment strategy.
