Someone by the name of Darren Alexander-Beckett followed my blog today so I popped into his blog to see what he was about. I found a number of posts so I started reading one…and almost fell off my chair. It looked like English and almost made sense, but in a dream-like, mash-up type way.
So I looked at another post, and another, and it finally hit me…I was looking at the writings of an AI/neural network!
I’ve read about these types of programs before but never expected to see one right here on WordPress. I was so astonished I left a comment asking if that was what it was.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly smart, but the outcome was surprising. When I followed the link back so I could grab the URL, the posts were gone. All that remains is this: https://nowpastthefuture.wordpress.com/

The posts that used to be on the ‘NowPastTheFuture blog have disappeared so someone, and I really don’t think it was the AI, caught my comment and within SECONDS did away with the evidence.
Why, oh why didn’t I take a screenshot when I had the chance? -kicking self-
Anyway, if anyone has any ideas as to who or what might have created this blog, and why, I’d love to hear about them in comments. Prank? Experiment? A test of our gullibility? I really don’t have a clue, but I’m still buzzing with excitement.
cheers,
Meeks
August 14th, 2022 at 2:09 am
[…] Did I just meet a neural network?? […]
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July 25th, 2022 at 7:11 pm
interesting. i was wondering about this the other day. but on a fairly diff reason because i just got mine newly set up ang thought that maybe to encourage new people to post.
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July 25th, 2022 at 7:59 pm
Congratulations on starting your blog. 🙂 People respond to ‘genuine’ blog posts. By being yourself, you’ll attract the people who are similar to you or those with whom you have a lot in common. They become friends. Just give it time. 🙂
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July 26th, 2022 at 10:15 pm
thank you and thanks for the advice. looking forward to whatever things are to come here. 😄
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July 27th, 2022 at 7:14 am
I hope you find your a ‘home’ here. 🙂
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July 23rd, 2022 at 10:16 pm
[…] Did I just meet a neural network?? […]
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July 21st, 2022 at 7:12 am
Someone playing with a new toy, I bet. 🙂
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:26 am
Could be, could be. 😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 8:35 pm
Artificial Intelligence would be as Intellectual as to afford an point of view as mine those words are for a purpose and the dictionary definition is astonishingly attributed to my self education as a young age, being that I’ve been reading dictionaries from the age of two.
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:07 pm
Language is not found in a dictionary. Language is purpose, and meaning. It is also music. And the following symbol means a friendly, smiley face = 🙂
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July 20th, 2022 at 7:43 pm
You have just stumbled into the way of the future, Meeks…They’re here!
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:14 pm
-giggles- I’m no longer so sure. I’ve received two comments from ‘Darren’ and they’re quite a bit more…meaningful than the posts I read. I suspect ‘Darren’ is now getting some…coaching. 😀
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July 21st, 2022 at 3:51 am
Scary really, we could all end up obsolete!
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July 21st, 2022 at 7:01 am
Not really.
‘Artificial Intelligence’ is a misnomer. It’s artificial all right, (and may be considered a life-form at some distant, or not-so-distant point in the future) but intelligent, in the way that we humans recognise intelligence, (and therefore be able to meaningfully interact with it) not so much.
They’re just very, very, sophisticated programs. One can only duplicate the human experience in a ‘lab’ so far. The rest needs to be experienced as a human experiences it, from the point of conception through to death, and in real time.
Again, at some point that time could be compressed, but we are far from those kinds of computational resources, no matter what the geeks, and their PR companies try to sell us. 🙂
… which isn’t to say there’s no danger. Letting these algorithms make decisions that actually require a human decision-making process, is reckless at best, and downright suicidal in worst-case scenarios.
… but our good-old self-replicating, self-healing, intuitive, bags of bones and assorted meats, will still be the dominant life-form in our galaxy for a while yet.
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:26 am
Well said, Widds! I once read that the average human is the equivalent of 17 /billion/ computers. And we are self-replicating and self-healing. That’s pretty amazing when you see the body in those terms.
Sadly algorithms are already making those kinds of ‘decision’ in the background. Certainly in social media. That is very scary.
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July 21st, 2022 at 5:29 pm
I sincerely hope you’re right, Widds…
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July 21st, 2022 at 9:32 pm
Widds is right but…in humans, a person with no empathy is usually called a sociopath. Now imagine if we gave this artificial construct that has no empathy…the power to make decisions about our lives…
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July 22nd, 2022 at 4:10 am
Total nightmare…
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July 22nd, 2022 at 9:08 am
For me, the truly scary part is that it’s already happening. Those algorithms used by the social media giants are already deciding what we should see.
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July 22nd, 2022 at 5:57 pm
True, Amazon is run by them too, and probably a lot companies too…
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July 23rd, 2022 at 11:39 am
Yup. Staffing costs are a big part of a company’s overheads so they’re all scrambling to automate as many processes as possible. Unfortunately, what gets lost is ‘service’ part of the equation.
Given that most of these companies are now multinational corporations that no longer have to worry too much about what customers think of them, algorithms have become a win-win. Or so they think.
I keep dreaming that one day consumers will all wake up and boycott these behemoths, maybe by spending our money on small startups that still have the human touch and provide both a product AND a service.
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July 23rd, 2022 at 6:05 pm
The only advantage to automation that I can see, is better efficiency and less rudeness, but at what cost? we will always need human interaction…
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July 23rd, 2022 at 7:36 pm
I’m all for boring, repetitive jobs being automated, but talking to a ‘bot when I’m after customer support or tech support just makes my blood boil. Every bot I’ve ever had the misfortune to speak to is simply incapable of dealing with any request that’s even the slightest bit out of the ordinary. -sigh- Yes, we do need human interaction but I fear we’re not going to get it.
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July 24th, 2022 at 6:13 am
I needed answers to a problem I had with Amazon the other day, and suddenly realised I wasn’t talking to a human… no wonder they’re never any help!
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July 24th, 2022 at 7:30 am
lol – aren’t they awful?
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July 24th, 2022 at 5:50 pm
Not looking good for the future, is it?
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July 24th, 2022 at 9:47 pm
Let’s just hope the pendulum starts swinging back the other way soon.
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:21 am
Never! lmao
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July 21st, 2022 at 5:28 pm
We will fight them in the trenches…
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July 21st, 2022 at 9:32 pm
High Five!
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July 22nd, 2022 at 4:09 am
Back at you!
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July 22nd, 2022 at 9:07 am
🙂
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July 22nd, 2022 at 7:07 am
Dawkins write about obsolescence in terms with a Marxists stand point from the era of the twenty’s & thirty’s of the early twentieth century & now the looks appear to fold the chasm’s inward.
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July 22nd, 2022 at 5:59 pm
Ominously terrifying…
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July 20th, 2022 at 7:26 pm
How very strange. Have you ben to the future?
Hugs
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:14 pm
lmao – no but I wish I could time travel. I’d love to see what the world will be like in 50 years!
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July 21st, 2022 at 4:44 am
What World?
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:22 am
Ay, there’s the rub. The way we’re going there may not be a happy-ever-after.
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July 20th, 2022 at 5:58 pm
Interesting for you, Meeks for me it’s slightly scary plus could they actually write as well as we do…I’d like to think not xx
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:25 pm
lmao – oh trust me! It’s going to be a cold day in hell before they can even write a sensible sentence. We have nothing to fear…at least not yet. In 10 years though? No idea.
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July 20th, 2022 at 7:18 pm
Absolutely… We’ll all kick them into touch… 😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:15 pm
Yup. All we need to do is get past this damn pandemic!
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July 20th, 2022 at 10:40 pm
Its never ending isn’t it?… Numbers are climbing again…
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:06 am
Yeah…here too. The pleas to ‘wear a mask’ are becoming stronger but no one’s game to mandate masks…or enforce the wearing of them. Because voters won’t like it. I think humans really are fundamentally idiots.
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July 20th, 2022 at 4:51 pm
Well spotted.
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:25 pm
😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 3:43 pm
How interesting, Meeks. You are excited because of the technological advancement and I’m sitting thinking “oh yeah, AI will never write better than a person. Thank goodness for that.”
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:26 pm
-giggles- we won’t be out of work for quite a while yet. 😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 2:39 pm
🤔 Hmm. Maybe, it was an experiment to see how well bloggers responded to artificial intelligence.
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:27 pm
I’m kind of leaning towards that idea myself. 😉
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July 20th, 2022 at 11:42 am
Could it have been an attempt to draw traffic? I’ve seen another example of this – for which the guy responsible didn’t create much repute for himself, the AI essays were at best facile, but he was using them as a time-cheap way of creating a barrage of content that he could then auto-spam out across social media.
There’s a site that generates such things here: https://www.the-good-ai.com/ — the problem being that these essays don’t generate anything new in terms of original thought: the outputs are content without substance in that regard, derivative of what the AI can locate on the subject elsewhere. I find the cadence of the sentence structures to be somewhat repetitive, too – it’s not hard to pick them.
My own suspicion is that a genuinely self-aware AI capable of creative original ‘thought’ would probably generate something alien to us – perhaps something we might not even consider to be intelligent. After all, these things are not us.
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July 20th, 2022 at 12:21 pm
Hmm…good thought, Matthew. I suppose the site could have been for generating traffic except that the articles were not even derivative. They were simply nonsense, at least as far as I could see.
And yes, I’d have to agree with you on a real ‘self-aware AI’. If it did exist, it would be as different from us as we are from…a virus? Sadly we have a tendency to anthropomorphise everything, which results in us assuming AI ‘intelligence’ to be somehow the same as ours. Given that we still don’t understand /exactly/ how our own brains create intelligence, how can it be otherwise?
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July 20th, 2022 at 11:07 am
Some real person using an AI and following reactions?
It is telling that whatever was there was removed, but you wonder why they bother. It isn’t illegal (yet), is it?
We don’t have robots actually capable of caring for old people either – there are a lot of decisions in a novel, and in care, and even with an expert system and lots of data, it’s still hard to see how you could replace a human in those jobs – the Japanese in particular are very interested because 20% of their population is elderly, and their birth rate is dire.
It’s just still very hard to see a machine having the nuance to catch me as I fall – without squeezing so hard it hurts me. And falls are already a major cause of death in the elderly – I’ve lost three good friends that way.
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July 20th, 2022 at 12:14 pm
I suspect a real person too, Alicia. Why they’d create a blog site for a neural network though, that’s a mystery. All sorts of possibilities exist, but I suspect it might be along the lines of experimenting with both the AI and /us/. And while I’d applaud a robot that acted as /my/ nursemaid, I can’t quite see why it would need to be able to write?
I really have no clue, but I’m having heaps of fun just brainstorming. 😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 3:07 pm
Dear Meeka and Alicia,
Indeed! You might find it amusing that a few bloggers have insisted that I am an AI because of the sophisticated look and feel of my unusual blog and also how I comment on my own blog (and on their blogs). Some of them even refused to submit any comment to my blog because they believe that I am not human, and/or because they only want to interact with humans.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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July 20th, 2022 at 3:24 pm
Hilarious – I never questioned your humanity.
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July 20th, 2022 at 3:36 pm
One of the bloggers has mentioned that my AI has improved, though he still refuses to interact with me on my blog, and only on his blog will he reluctantly interact with me.
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:30 pm
If you are an AI then you’ve passed the Turing test with flying colours. I’m almost disappointed that aren’t one. 🙂
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July 20th, 2022 at 8:03 pm
Dear Meeka,
Please come over to examine my latest post and see how far I have passed the Turing test and whether I still have any trace of artificiality left in me. Besides, I would like your esteemed feedback on my latest thoughts and analyses presented at
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2022/06/26/the-facile-and-labile-nature-of-law-beyond-the-supreme-court-and-its-ruling-on-controversial-matters/
I welcome your input and am curious to know what you make of my said post as well as your perspectives on those matters discussed in my post. Please enjoy!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:12 pm
-grin- Just had a quick look and I’m astounded by the sheer length of your first sentence!
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:16 pm
SoundEagle is a long-winded AI.
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July 24th, 2022 at 5:18 am
Breath Brevity Bestows Compassion!
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July 21st, 2022 at 12:19 am
An AI wouldn’t be able to construct the sentence you just did. Not yet.
Many people, when fooled by an AI, will later say there was something not quite right about it, if they had listened to their gut. It’s not JUST that they are peeved because they’ve been fooled, it’s that they are used to giving other humans the benefit of the doubt.
I have one person who comments on my FB posts who is rather disorganized in her thoughts, and must be on a mobile keyboard (lack of punctuation and capitalization is common in her comments), but I wouldn’t assume it’s because she’s an AI – the breadth of the subjects she DOES comment on is interesting, and her depth on a couple of subjects. She ‘feels’ human.
But what do I know? Except that this has been going on for years at about the same level – and I’ve never had that gut feeling.
I think you’ve been commenting for years, too. Not that machines can’t be consistent, or programmed to do all kinds of things, but the artificial feeling is still there.
I may be wrong. 🙂
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July 21st, 2022 at 1:28 am
Dear Alicia (and Meeka),
I really enjoyed your feedback. Thank you. Speaking of AI, the domain of nonorganic sentient beings and intelligent machines with advanced autonomy and consciousness has many implications for the future generations, who will increasingly mesh their lives with not just the computer user interface but also with the human-machine interface. One can be amply taken by the futuristic scenarios in Philip K Dick’s novels containing advanced and thought-provoking ideas. The issues and implications of “The Machine” are very multifaceted and complex. In a very palpable way, the movie “Blade Runner” has posted some sobering questions and possible scenarios.
In turbo-charging our vision and dream of the cybernetically enhanced existence in the near future, there are many things to ponder. For example, I would like to consider not only sensory enhancement but also the quality and longevity of lives, and not just human lives. Each year, so many trees are logged and made into Christmas trees for decoration, and so many fresh flowers are cut only to fade within days or weeks. I simply resort to decorating, once and for all and as best as I can, a small artificial tree, which I keep using year after year. For the same reason, I have a lot of life-like artificial plants, flowers and leaves indoors and they could last for decades as opposed to having real flowers lasting just a few days. Could we have perpetually living artificial plants and animals so that some of us don’t have to bid farewell to short-lived pets and plants as they age and pass away?
Similarly, I really wish that I could have some “artificial” but sentient humans or robots too, something like Commander Data, the Bicentennial Man, Rachel in Blade Runner, or other advanced automata as seen in Sci-Fi movies, as long as they are free of the usual human frailties, follies, deceptions and irrationality, if not immortality. Alternatively, some benign, benevolent and understanding extra-terrestrials could be even more desirable, and could present the chance and means for intergalactic or even interuniverse travel, thus ending, transforming and transcending my meagre earth-bound, dust-to-dust ephemeral existence.
I have entertained some highly plausible dystopian scenarios with significant risks for the future of humanity. In addition, I often explore the intersections of art and science, of public and private spaces, of the cultural and the technological. Whilst I concede that technology offers enormous unexplored potential allowing emerging artists to express themselves in unprecedented ways, I do have certain concerns and caveats regarding science “reproducing” reality and artists representing it. In a special post, I have endeavoured to give a very good inkling of the kind of society that humans might be heading towards. Looking into the future, here is an entry in my sociology, philosophical anthropology and cultural history journal entitled “Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens“, published at
https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/facing-the-noise-music-playgrounds-for-biophobic-citizens/
Pushing forward another 50 years or (much) less, we could indeed end up in the scenario as described in my said post. As you can discover in the said post, there will be plenty of far-reaching ramifications in multiple domains of human life, some of which are irreversible. Should you decide to peruse my said post, I look forward to reading your feedback there. The post takes the perspective of sociology, philosophical anthropology and cultural history.
I welcome your input there and am curious to know what you make of my said post. Please enjoy!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:16 am
It’s a fascinating topic. Pity we’re too ephemeral to be alive to see it. Then again, I suspect we’re at a major pivot point for Homo Sapiens so we’ll get to see that. 🙂
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July 21st, 2022 at 11:33 am
Dear Meeka,
I am delighted that you read my said posts entitled “🏛️⚖️ The Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters 🗽🗳️🔫🤰🧑🤝🧑💉” and “Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens“. Thank you very much. Since I have already commented copiously on your current post here and also your other posts in the past, it would be very nice if you could reciprocate in kind. I would be very grateful if you would kindly leave a comment at each of the posts as a token of your visit. You are very welcome to copy and paste some or all of your previous replies as part of your forthcoming comments to be submitted to the comment sections of the two posts, to which your esteemed replies clearly pertain and also belong. Please feel free to expand on your comments if you have additional matters to convey about the posts and any salient aspects of their contents. Thank you in anticipation.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle
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July 21st, 2022 at 4:05 pm
I don’t have as much time as I’d like to visit other blogs as I’m back writing again. But I will visit when I can. 🙂
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:08 am
I don’t think you’re wrong, Alicia. As writers, we’re conditioned to pick up even the tiniest nuance in sentence construction and word placement. We can tell if there’s real meaning there. Or not. 🙂
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July 21st, 2022 at 8:36 am
The AI may get things wrong, but I bet they don’t have typos of certain kinds, which might be usable to distinguish them from humans.
But it’s fascinating to think of the expert systems and the programmers behind them.
It would be nice if they ever got it together and used all they know to be better diagnosticians than most doctors! Unless they got stuck in endless loops.
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July 21st, 2022 at 9:45 am
lmao – no, I don’t think they’d have those typos either. As for diagnostics, sadly it’s still GiGo – garbage in, garbage out. They can’t know what human researchers haven’t yet discovered. That said, I wonder if they could draw disparate streams of knowledge together and find patterns /we/ can’t see?
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July 21st, 2022 at 4:56 pm
That’s what expert systems are good at – doctors have prejudices and blind spots, expert systems are better at giving possibilities appropriate weight (well-designed ones with adequate databases, of course). The patient may benefit from the combination.
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July 21st, 2022 at 9:34 pm
A combination, yes, but I don’t think I’d like to be diagnosed solely by a machine!
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July 22nd, 2022 at 4:25 am
Machines can be required to state how they reached their conclusions, percentage-wise – try that on any doctor.
The problem with doctors is that the good ones are very good, and the ordinary ones far more common. Over and over, in the columns written by medical experts in newspapers, a patient goes misdiagnosed for years until something lucky happens, and they get sent to the right specialist almost by accident, and that doctor says, “I saw a case like this when I was volunteering in X, and once you do, you never forget it.”
I love reading those columns for some reason, and you may have seen my posts with ‘Okapi’ in the title – our youngest has Non-24 sleep/wake discorder, OBVIOUS to anyone taking data (I diagnosed her by internet once I noticed, and husband took the data to prove it) and paying attention – and I found a specialist nearby, and sent him the data, and he said, “You’re right – bring her in.” It saved her life. It’s a circadian rhythm disorder – and the possibility was even mentioned by one of the sleep doctors, and never followed up.
I will never forgive them for putting my child through a very particular kind of hell.
An expert system would have picked it up, I would hope, much sooner. It was all there.
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July 22nd, 2022 at 9:16 am
Ugh, that’s awful, Alicia. Your daughter is so lucky you caught it, and that there was a specialist who recognized the data. As parents, we’re in a unique position to notice small details/changes and realise that something’s wrong. Yet many specialists ignore ‘Doctor Mum’ because, of course, we couldn’t possibly have anything of value to add. The flow on from that is that these same specialists don’t/can’t explain the conditions or the medications or the possible consequences. Truth to tell, I suspect that a great many of them could be swapped out for a program that offered nothing but cookie cutter diagnoses! Ahem…
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July 22nd, 2022 at 4:42 pm
Which is exactly why husband fitted daughter with a sleep/wake Fitbit-type device (the insurance company would only pay for two weeks of their expensive one, no way long enough to see the pattern), and we collected months of data while figuring it out.
He plotted the data exactly like the papers we found after I figured out the problem – so when we found a sleep doctor who knew Non-24, it would look like the papers they were used to.
Handy having hard scientists for parents.
And we KNEW she was not a difficult child – plus I was homeschooling and then she came home from college for a year – so it was NEVER about her being a problem, and always about an unrecognized disease.
But what the doctors did to her self-confidence with the random diagnoses and psychologizing, I will never forgive.
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July 23rd, 2022 at 11:43 am
-hugs- there is a specialist here in Melbourne that I will never forgive either. He didn’t misdiagnose the problem, he simply didn’t tell us what the meds could do. Nor did he keep an eye on how long those meds were being used. This is the one who called me “doctor Mum” with a sneer in his voice. Sadly, I’m no scientist so
he obviously thought he could get away with it. Bastard.
Sorry, there are things no parent can ever forgive or forget.
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July 23rd, 2022 at 11:45 am
Harm to our children being the #1 thing we won’t ever. Especially from arrogance or ignorance.
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July 23rd, 2022 at 12:08 pm
Ignorance I could /almost/ forgive, maybe, but arrogance? Never in a million years.
-hugs-
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July 22nd, 2022 at 7:03 am
Oh, and everyone wishes we had the Star Trek doctor and Data.
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July 22nd, 2022 at 9:21 am
-giggles- I’m so old-school I still prefer Spock and ‘Bones’, but I know where you’re coming from. 😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:29 pm
😀
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July 20th, 2022 at 6:28 pm
-giggles- I’m pretty sure you’re human and very creative! You won’t be replaced by AI. 😉
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July 20th, 2022 at 9:52 am
Very strange. A search on Darren Alexander-Beckett yields nothing much. Reminds me of Innerscape, somehow…
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July 20th, 2022 at 12:10 pm
It’s weird all right. I was telling the Offspring about it just before and we couldn’t work out why the blog site would be put up in the first place. Or why it would be taken down so very quickly once they’d been ‘sprung’.
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