I’m just sitting here doing some cognitive offloading and having AI tell me what I think.

No, like, really. Here’s what happened…

I woke up at a little before 4am today with a brainstorm for a piece I should write about what John Boyd of OODA loop fame might say about the U.S. war in Iran. (It wouldn’t be good. Sneak peek below.)

I got up, opened my laptop, and started furiously typing down my thoughts.

After I did that, I wondered if maybe there were points to be made that I had missed. So, I went to Open WebUI, where I have a vector database of all my own publications. And asked myself. Self…

How would John Boyd, his followers, and the reformers respond to a war strategy in which a country abandons its allies, preemptively attacks its opponent, and relies on artificial intelligence to destroy as many enemy targets as quickly as possible as its plan for victory?

Response is below and it mirrors my own thinking because…well, it is also my thinking.

I had cognitively offloaded (or maybe more accurately, “uploaded” [see Steven Johnson]) my own relevant, published thoughts related to the question.

This evening I did the same experiment using the /book-to-skill…skill to create “skills” from my book on nonlinear science and warfare (where I have a whole chapter on Boyd) and my book on cybersecurity discourse (where I dissect the rhetorical tactics of doom rhetoric).

I then submitted the same prompt above. The answer followed the same contours but was more detailed.

I then asked it,

How would Lawson respond to people who say that artificial intelligence must be immediately regulated because it is inherently unsafe, that it will escape and engage in destructive cyber attacks?

Hehe. This guy Lawson is nothing if not consistent, because what he would say is exactly what I have been saying here in my posts and notes.

But it also turns out that I would say some things that I haven’t said but agree with and so now I’m wondering if I can say them. Are my thoughts my thoughts if they come from my thoughts and I agree with them? Or do they become not my thoughts because they were “offloaded?”