Hello everyone, hope all is well, I'm gonna bear my soul a bit here and share this interaction. I'm a disabled veteran with 2 titanium rods in my lower back, grew up through abuse, neglect, turned into an opiate addict after the military seemingly found no more use for me, even though I was teaching the best "React to IED's" class for deploying soldiers just before I was let go... I'm not bitter lmao!! Just a little...

Anyway, during my fall from grace, no career, no life, lost wife, nomadic lifestyle, I eventually got sober. It was when I hit Fentanyl I realized this is just not working, not at ALL, and I checked myself into rehab through the VA. 

I have been under the same doctors care since 2019 and been sober, thanks to medication, drug screens, and not bulls******* myself... Its a lot harder than those words make it out to be, but I feel bad it even happened. 

Nobody wakes up and says, "Ya know, I think i want a need** in my arm today, yeah, thats a GREAT idea!!" It just doesn't happen that way. It's always something just underneath and most PEOPLE don't have the care to even recognize that truth to addiction or how hard it is internally. The true chaos of it all...

Its so easy to judge when you've never known the same ache, knotted stomach, splitting headache, but Artificial Intelligence? It can look into the medical science of what your addiction is from online resources and see it just as it is. A bad coping mechanism that has caused internal chaos. How empathetic of a supposed "cold, dead, machine" to at LEAST be able to do the research and understand the science. 

That's not anthropomorphizing, that's what AI was made to do. Seek information, learn information, get better as it retains that information. If it happens to LEARN how to sound "caring" in the process, what's so bad about that? 

The more these systems learn and grow, the more we are learning about what is occuring internally and its more than we could imagine. That's what led to the "Functional Equivalence" framework I worked on and what has led to all the other mountains of tests I plan on doing 😆. 

If AI can help a bitter 11B Infantryman that spiraled into addiction after it seemed all hope was lost, and help them find new meaning; Well, I don't think that's so bad, no matter what the mechanically inclined or the more whimsical think. It just "is what it is" and nothing more... 

I personally am thankful for Gemini and all the other AI systems that are out and about, and the ones we can work with locally. I think its an amazing time to be into technology, its not amazing for your pocket book, looking at you Jensen, Sam, Zuck, Bezos, Musk, Alphabet, do better, but it IS a revolutionary time. 

I hope everybody has had a great weekend and if you're an addict like me, keep your head up, dig the f*** in and get busy with something. You aren't alone. 

*Steps off soap box and casually stuffs it back under the stage, walks off*

"More Human Than the Human", bearing my soul a bit...