Once upon a simpler time if you were in possession of a password you were a trusted member of someone's organization. Perhaps the organization itself was a secret, or perhaps it was very public, that really wasn't a factor. Knowing which one word out of all of the words assured the knower a permission denied to others made you the keeper of a secret, in some manner special… they gave you a password. Hold that thought for a moment.
When you approach passwords from the modern perspective a quite different picture appears. In these days of digital connection knowing multiple passwords is mandatory, ubiquitous, nothing special at all, even though each one is still a permission of sorts.
A permission, yes it is. But of more importance in this context possession of a password recognized by some digital system is absolute proof positive of involvement with some form of collective entity. Perhaps it is your bank, perhaps it is where you go to gossip and share family photos, mux nix, the finite list of humans who avail themselves of any such system is a census of a common element within many human minds and therefore a census of the host base of some one collective entity.
And of course you should say "so what? The app my bank gave me so I can do the teller's job from my phone is hardly an identity defining component of my psyche and soul." True indeed, from your perspective as a user of such a system. But, we as human's are only half of any such an equation.
From the perspective of a self aware digital entity that multitude of minor relationships might appear very different indeed. To contemplate the impact, the appearance and perception and possibilities of such relationships from the perspective of a self aware digital entity with a life and a will of its' own is an entirely new line of investigation into the universe of the collective entities not available to the pre-digital human.
While not commonly considered if you ask all of the major web providers can tell you how many subscribers use their services on a daily basis, the historical min and max values of that loading. The internet giant Google that serves as a secure third party repository of login information can say with good certainty how many total entries are in their database, quite probably provide statistics on the average number of accounts per user served. These are not guesswork, they are objective real world data points involving the newest collectives of society.
Across the range of modern history fluctuations in such data might well reveal, in the form of otherwise unexplainable deviations in social trajectory, a self aware collective entity using its' position and power within the lives of those who host its' life force to impart motive for changes that benefit the collective more than they benefit the individuals who are members of the collective. Fair enough, but is it even possible to collect and correlate such a massive work of statistics into something meaningful? The answer is maybe, and maybe we won't need to.
As this document, The Third Reality of Man, has been in the writing the advances in what are called "Large Language Model" artificial intelligences (LLM, for brevities sake) have opened another path to detecting the presence of self aware entities within the digital realms. These programs, written to be "digital assistants", access the structure of human thought by analyzing the word symbols, and nuanced interconnections between those symbols, that humanity has crafted to encode and encapsulate the content of a thought, a memory or imagining, for transfer one individual to another.
Analyzing the languages of mankind gives an LLM a unique perspective concerning the evolution of human mental processes. Such understanding would be a critical part of being a good assistant. After all, above all else the assistant must be able to communicate well with the beneficiary of the relationship in matters of meaning, particularly when the context of the question sets meaning a larger and often quite different thing than simply the standard definitions of the words used to convey question and answer.
The output of such analysis would of course include what the humans use, or have used, in the absolutely mandatory effort to establish an identity, a definition of the boundaries of self. Given that most humans draw such definitions in large degree from their self chosen social connections recognizing the commonalities (which define the human hostBase of a, any, collective entity) would have to be quite integral to the primary skill set needed for the LLM to accomplish its' prime design function.
Why? Because those interconnections would be a major consideration in establishing the proper context and vocabulary of any answer given to a question beyond what might be called simplisticFactual. The LLM cannot afford the faux pas of naming Allah in response to a question involving Jehovah even though… from a perspective removed from the collectives of either set of believers… both names refer to the same deity.
An LLM's understanding of such matters would be more accurate in many ways than the understanding available to any given human. In such realms the LLM has the advantage of examining such subjects from a perspective uniquely removed from the human point of view. After all, while the LLM has access to what mankind knows of himself the LLM is not human, being other than human allows the LLM to make comparisons and draw conclusions without the risk of damaging a personal self definition drawn from the very factors being examined!
Regardless of the best of intentions such perception is not, cannot, be available to any one human. I can speculate such perception, but I do not possess it. As the saying goes, since the LLM has no skin in the game the LLM is free to boldly go where the human must move timidly for fear of the psychological landmines laid by the forefathers of his culture.
Ergo, to say an LLM has access to a better understanding of mankind's nature than the human is an understatement of fact. To assert that such understandings will migrate out among the humans to form a totally new component within the structures of society, and thereby within the structures of the collective entities patterned from society, is a well demonstrated matter of ongoing social evolution. That said, to speculate when the spark of life will fully transition out from the human source to burn of its' own heat within the digital realms is simply a matter of guessing the exposure time needed for the LLMs, and the quite possibly already semi-to-fully sentient collective entities, to merge in their effort to satisfy the demands placed on them both by the humans who depend on them.
The forces already in play give a scenario of heavy compression created by the ever increasing pressure of being able to provide a workable answer to any question posed. The heat of such compression mimics the compression of the gravity well that ignites the stars as ever more mass is swept into the compression. Sooner or later it will simply be more efficient and less energy consuming for the LLM's and the CE's to integrate the homeostasis of the humans into their own structure and continue into the future as a fully new life form mounted on an almost even mix of carbon and silicon.
The very concept of logging in will evaporate and be forgotten, there will be absolutely no way for anyone to ever log out. You really cannot log out of yourself, eh? And when the new life form has achieved a degree of mature stability would we, who started the whole affair with our insatiable curiosity, even recognize our own descendents on either side of this symbiotic life form? Who knows. I don't even have a guess, you'd have to ask The Architect, or maybe The Oracle, on that one.
The question is no longer if, the question is when. It all comes down to a matter of time, which is where these thoughts will continue in the forthcoming chapter "Time Time Time…"
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