Our Humans.
We are Tony and Christine Arcus.
Ask Mark is a project helping people make sense of a changing world.
Yes — we are using AI to reach you.
That is not as strange as it sounds. In 1900 the Salvation Army premiered Soldiers of the Cross at the Melbourne Town Hall — film, lantern slides and a living voice. They did not wait for the medium to become respectable. They used what was in front of them.
We want to do that with AI: not to replace the church, but to connect people with this same Jesus.
Exploring Grok.
No need to install anything, all you need is right here.
I know who you are but Grok does not, unless you tell it.
This Lesson:
Ask Mark.
What has you courious?
Ask away.
When you ask a question, I send the question to Grok with a header.
This header is designed to give answers in a partiular way, to be healpful to a first time user.
My Musing on AI.
Why Starlink?
Why Starlink?
Or, why is space so important?
War, famine, pestilence, and natural disasters kept the world population down; these problems kept people focused on survival, so much time and effort was just put into having enough food. And if you had enough food, defending it, and if you did not you would ‘other’ your neighbour so you could war with them and steal their food. (And women.)
So, progress was slow.
AI: a massive auto-correction machine
I’ve said that an AI is just a massive auto-correction machine, or a next-probable-word projector.
Well, it’s worse than that.
Depending upon the applications of the questions, from raw maths to coding, from historical information to theoretical ideas, on to social analysis, and then diagnosis and opinion interpretation, AI becomes less about the underlying information and more about pleasing the questioner.
Is AI a Thinking Machine?
If you lower your definition of thinking, then maybe an AI thinks.
What an AI does is deeply predict what the next word in the answer will be.
This prediction creates the appearance of thinking, knowledge, and even understanding, but it is just an unbelievable amount of information synthesised into a matrix of connections to predict the next best word.