When a Human Speaking Resembles AI

That person I just met, was he a hybrid?

Is it possible that I was carrying on a conversation with … a real alien, someone from an extraterrestrial race born of a long program of hybridization with humans to produce

• tall, willowy and thin (imagine a paintbrush, his fine face and hair the brush)
• stunning in the speed of mental operations and ease of decision making
• little need for approval, little response to projected human emotion
• projecting the character and interests of a recently graduated philosophy major
• promoting idea of endless resources, the more dangerous and chaotic climate limits more imminently threatening.
• a dispassionate seed-sower–casting ideas about town as if to plant a concept as authoritative.

The most sensible–to me and only me–answer to my question, was that a hybrid, is actually no. He was what he said he was, a recent and accomplished, well trained philosopher, to the best of my judgment.

The discernment is difficult, for it does involve deep questions about “signs.” I do believe that spiritual forces, benign, sent him, for this sort of thing is still happening. Our encounter occurred two days after I wrote about another encounter on a bus that was quite striking (and in that, multiplying), “weird,” but still, all human.

What was it about him that would make me ask, was he a hybrid?

We had fallen into a conversation; I found him “magesterial” as he communicated his thoughts and ideas. It was striking, to hear views on carbon fuel consumption reflecting the philosophy of the School of Mines (resource acquisition: it’s what they do)… from a CU grad with a major in philosophy?

If there was one thing that first made me wonder if I had just met a real human/e.t. hybrid, it was the way the content of his spoken word reminded me of AI, Artificial Intelligence.

First on the basis of some nudge, I asked, what was lacking, where was the “not human” vibe about him coming from (not based on his appearance nor the sound of his voice)?

What, what else is missing from what we expect from humans

All right, I’ll admit it now. If unfettered, my thinking style is just, so, so stream of consciousness that I derive an hypothesis: this is benign narcissism. Well, because benign, I often try harder to focus. That is, when I am not completely bowled over by the quality of intelligence that I am dealing with, as if I had never met a person whose mind is this well trained and conditioned AND open to the moment. I actually had not been taking good care of myself, with life stresses of the earlier month earning me paid time off from my work on account of a severe sleep deficit.

• • 1) This person was tracking my thoughts for at least a full hour, attentively and focused on what I really needed out of the conversation, in a way that resulted in my most extremely free association (it’s DJT-level, circa summer of 2024, and yes, this is personally quite dismaying) in verbal communication
    • no agenda of his own
    • no sense of the power dynamics male/female, young/old from him
    • from me? yes, they were acknowledged and I was the one to move on right away, saying “not important.”
  • 2) I not only allowed my mind to go where it would, I finally brough up what I was actively working on and needed help with; by that point he has offered the two excellent resources below and did have somewhere to be by that point
  • 3) I completely lost my train of thought at moments
  • 4) I did not realize it in the moment. The next day, I saw how and what seduced me: sheer clarity of mind. He was in control. I was a silly, old woman.

How did it happen?

Here in Boulder we like to laugh, “when the going gets weird, the weird go pro.”

On a bus, accosted by my making provocative statement, he saw a “mind at work,” to quote Hamilton the Musical. At the conclusion of the spare hour we had together, he stated his purpose was simply enough to use that philophy degree.

What was going on there

He emphasized the philosophical work of Jeremy Bentham (humans are pigs, then, if the highest good is personal happiness) and John Rawls, who raises a question:

• if you could not guarantee your role in life, what kind of society would you wish to be born into?

It was striking, how the conversation came to be and that it was extended an hour. I’m inclined to think that I was the subject for a report. Nothing spoken in the conversation would suggest that or any notion I’m proposing, except for how emotionally-based were my responses, compared to his thoughts and ideas that seemed to regurgitate college lessons.

What was missing

He had no discernible agenda.
That’s the quality of voice, the weirdly dispassionate voice I am thinking of when I think of pronouncements from AI. The voice doesn’t care; it is just reporting evidences.

What was not present

His agenda was not to connect further than that one meeting, I would guess. Was he collecting data on me, even as he was doing most of the talking? Was his speech, field notes being recorded not just by me but by him, a status report from an agent of the Intervention? These thoughts might sound a note of paranoia, yet these are questions that sooner or later will need to be asked.

Why this conversation, why so urgent and why those two philosophers

The question–what is he doing–takes a different cast when I consider that the young man I had been speaking with might be a hybrid human/alien.

When I consider that maybe he is a hybrid

I see myself through the eyes of a superior being. I see myself at my worst, actually, on that day; though my social masking was at its most insistent, ugh, I saw myself as an alien would regard me. All the faults of humankind on display before the eyes of other races in our sector of the universe.

I spoke of my happiness in meeting him and mentioned the Way of the Tao that watches where happiness is liable to go. I see the allure of the savant among Greater Community people. I see plenty of reason to cultivate the bland manner of speaking as found in AI.

He wasn’t “taking applications for new friends.”

He wasn’t there to make a new friend.

He had opinions, yes, but somehow no skin in the game. Pragmatic, yes, but possibly because I nudged the conversation in that direction from the start?

I hope I am wrong. I already know what kind of a fool I am, so that is not what needs proof here. What kind of a fool I am, would be preoccupied with other thoughts.

If he is an example of what will become commonplace to meet, the reality seems not so far off into the future.

How about not hybrid: new human

Is it possible to consider, no that was not a hybrid I was talking to? I wrote this post 4 days after the encounter, as I composed the list of what felt, off, non-human, more like AI in “wetware.” I continue to add details as remembered and try to make sense of why I felt I had never spoken to someone of that calibre.

How to prove my suspicion to be false? Will I be able, to see, the young man is all human, no e.t., definitively? I feel 98% confident that what happened is what might happen to anyone under similar circumstances, given the play of all things considered.

When it’s a human speaking like AI, what is that? Their programming?

And what is actually provable, rather than merely plausible?

Was his “programming” not much more efficient than my own, more neutral and agenda free? More service-to-others rather than service-to-self?

Well, my only regret is that we did not get to Nietzsche, but I have followed up since.

If we can’t prove this young man is completely born from a lineage anywhere but on Earth, we can contemplate how much the off-planet hybrids will resemble this young man in Boulder. Or how much improved humans might be if we studied aliens as they have studied us.

Short Note on Jeremy Bentham