Tech companies have intensified their drive toward turning our realities into synthetic post-truth simulacra where all is real and nothing is real, where ‘facts’ are merely conveyances of ad-coin, and reality itself is pasteurized into mush serving venture capitalist narratives.
If you also like good red wine (and keep a card file Dewey decimal system index), you are now eligible for membership in the order of the Librarians Temporal.
See "Splendid Apocalypse, the Fall of Old Earth" for details.
Fraud requires a commercial element, not just a fictitious interlocutor. Money must be exchanged or lost due to one party's intentional misrepresentation of value or other material facts in the transaction. AI 'assistants' deployed by the social media industry probably aren't fraudulent. But they are yet another way that MetaXinc harvests the information that you as a human being generate. And you can see how this particular method could be exceedingly powerful, because people will be tempted to engage with AI as if it's a human being. There will be more interaction than one gets from a simple search query. And all of that extra interaction becomes the property of the social media platform, to use and analyze in whatever way the law allows.
So what I'm saying is that it's not a commercial crime it's worse. It's dystopian.
The way I just said it is. Engagement. Bots increase engagement, which increases the amount advertisers pay for the service putting their ads out there. Not sure how I can put it any more plainly. Google any terms you don't understand.
Legally, it can be something akin law evoked for failure to pay royalties/infringement. AI 'assistant' tasked with grabbing attention and holding on the site/page/product as long possible, since if you are here, you can't be watching/buying from their competitor. Like Kindle who pays authors per page read. You're not exactly "strapped and forced" to buy something, but you're still forced into buying something they want you to buy vs. what you might chose left alone.
It is because the advertiser (say, Youtube) is offering a service to ad-creators (say, Ford Motor Company) to put an ad in front of humans, getting paid roughly based upon how many humans view the ad. Then YT programs a bunch of bots to click on those videos which have FMC ads in them, causing the ad-creator (FMC) to believe that humans are seeing their ad, and paying YT more than they otherwise would for the ad space.
Oh, there is always a commercial element to such things, nobody will do it for free. The websites get paid by the information “brokers.” Selling/buying someone’s personal info without the rightful owner’s consent must be outlawed. Now, more and more websites put disclosures and options of how they “use” our information & the “3rd parties,” but far from sufficient.
Federal crimes committed by the Federal government are notoriously difficult to get a Federal prosecutor interested in, much less a conviction in a Federal court.
Future board memberships after going through that good old public/private revolving door, status, money and power?
Besides, he was never supposed to have been elected, he was just helped to get in there to derail any REAL Republican candidate, then the unforseen but obvious error in the public's voting behavior needed to be corrected or at least contained.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for neither of the "Official Candidates(™)" the last 3 times around. But I can still spot a railroad job when it is right in front of my face.
Quite a few people who voted for Trump back then neither thought he WOULD be allowed to win nor liked him. Many of them DID view a vote for Trump as the closest they could personally get to throwing a brick through the oval office window without getting shot.
Right on, but natural idiocy how far is it away from somnolence and zombification? For the moment according a survey in France, 12, 14 and 16 year old spend 12 to 16 hours a day on the internet…TikTok and pornhub. How far are these kids, and the number is growing to a real Pandemic, from a 24/7 auto hypnosis in becoming screen junks, worse than Opiods, Fentanyl or ice? Is this coming generation really AI interested, or even social, emotional and intellectual, not to mention politically committed?
Gee, I hope these AI-generated users will be enabled to act like real people in buying products and services, just like all the humans on the platforms. It would only be fair, with whoever generated them picking up the tab. I'm selling some books you would enjoy, Liv, Carter, and Brian.
People are very inventive in turning things back on their purveyors, like the guy tracking and reporting on the elites' use of private jets while they're promoting the green agenda. I'm guessing lots of people will have fun 'playing with' the AI-generated users (as in your example).
I noted today, when I asked for images on google, I got a lot of AI-generated images even when I asked for photos. Thanks for the hack.
I will risk appearing a bit nutty here. When I went to grad school in the US I was pleased to see that the motto of my school (Caltech) was "The Truth Shall Make You Free." Not that I saw it in a religious context, but I happen to believe in that sentiment. Truth derives from knowledge. And honesty.
It's been a few years now and I have retired and revisited the spiritual aspirations I had before I became a scientist. So I am going to give y'all a hypothesis. What we are seeing here, and in US politics up till this point, is the "Beast of Revelation." (I told you it would seem nutty.) I am not sure who the "antichrist" is but this person will be revealed. We live in a world society in which lies are what govern now what we (are supposed to) believe. Soon it will be impossible to carry out a commercial transaction without a "social credit score." The mark of the beast. The final destruction will come when the beast is given authority to think for our leaders and allowed to decide for itself the fate of the world. And power plants the size of Greenland will needed to provide it with the power it needs to think for all of us.
I told you it is a nutty hypothesis. So if you feel like replying with a "fuck you" then good for you. You need more imagination.
You nailed it, Ham. Very well said. By the way, when I lived in SoCal, I had friends who went to CalTech. I always enjoyed visiting the campus. I saw Francis Collins speak at CalTech, talking about the Human Genome Project and his Christian faith. Now, unfortunately, my opinion on him has changed. And not for the better.
Yeah. I cannot speak for today's Techers, but back then they were special. They probably are still very smart. Just professing a faith doesn't mean it makes sense or is particularly "good" in a moral sense. I reread Revelation and wondered why would we as humans hand over our fundamental strength- to be able to think independently - to a machine?
That last sentence hit home. Many will be deceived by the constant barrage of propaganda from once "trusted" sources. I thought this was a pretty good article. You may want to check it out.
I scanned this and will study it. I don't think that our concerns need to be necessarily religious, but they are if we choose them to be so. The description of the 4 horsemen in Revelation is chilling. They are a model for human interaction that is in play now. We have moved from a model of compassion for each other to contempt. I live like a hermit now to minimize human interaction.
I greatly doubt that a machine can ever really think the way we do. They may be able one day to simulate thought to a degree. But how can we teach a digital brain to think when we don't even have any idea how the human mind does? We haven't even scratched the surface of how the brain thinks.
That doesn't mean AI can't be used for evil ends, of course. But true consciousness? My guess is it's far too complex to ever be duplicated.
Two things bother me about our current situation. One is, as you say, how can we teach a digital brain to think when we don't know how we think? Exactly. If you listen to people like Kier Starmer (UK PM) for example, they are willing and eager to abdicate their responsibility to think, to a machine. And secondly, I am afraid that an AI machine will simply spout back what it is taught to think. Computers are good at that. Even woke dogma aside, we are in the era of the four horsemen. War, bad government, sickness and this time it is on a global scale. The wars that we are seeing now have as their goals complete eradication of a people. Nobody sees the goal, for example, of coexistence between two peoples involved in a conflict. (Maybe Putin does as he seems to just want assurances about NATO. I am afraid that is too late now.)
If you ever saw the British TV series "Dr Who" like 60 years ago, the Daleks were machines that used to roll around the set with their mechanical penises sticking out in front of them yelling "exterminate! exterminate!" and then they would spray lethal fire on their opponents. That is what we should really be selling to Zelensky and Netanyahu to cure their bloody urges. The Z man can already play a piano with his.
To answer your point, yes true consciousness will never be replicated in our lifetimes. But it does not need to be. Our leaders just have to delegate their evil thoughts to a machine. "Exterminate! exterminate!") You gotta see https://youtu.be/RhEUBgu9j5Y for an example.
The book of Revelation is not a book of love. Few people probably read it now. It is a story of people destroying themselves with fire. Just like on the videos from Ukraine seen on the Telegram channel.
Most Christians I knew when I was young and naive had a vague idea of what the antichrist looked like but many tried to attach modern events and data to the writings of people like Daniel and by John in Revelation. I think differently and do not try to connect specific events to prophetic elements. The four horsemen are an example. They are clearly present on the earth and presenting a baseline level of misery and uncertainty that we are all experiencing.
John Hopfield (Nobel prize 2024) devised the Hopfield net as basically a content addressable memory and recognized it was a poor model of the network in a brain. I am not proposing that we will get to machine consciousness. But imagine a scenario where a bright prime minister, call him Keir, decides he will be the first person in history to run a country entirely from the decisions of an artificial network. All issues economic and military decided by the more sociable and intelligent of the two Kiers. The machine.
I always felt that The mark of the beast was a great idea. Not being able to buy and sell without it. It just seems impossible that 2000 years ago somebody saw a vision in which membership of an appreciation society for a beast is a criterion for being able to buy anything. Now imagine a machine that has all of our data including social scores and can decide if we have the right to buy..
Not to dump on your alma mater's motto, but I'm not sanguine that anyone can hope to gain freedom through "Truth." Certainly knowledge will help in gaining freedom, but waiting around for something to be designated indisputably true may take centuries - and that's just for mathematical questions that are utterly open to examination and logic. In the realm of human behaviors, so much of which is intentionally hidden for personal, social or political reasons, the truth may never be known.
The Truth is impartial to the states of enslavement and freedom - it does not judge them it merely describes them. Humans on the other hand, if they act as free entities, must do so on incomplete knowledge and towards an uncertain future. Above all, that requires varying degrees of courage and faith.
The biblical writers, I guess would have used "truth" as religious truth, especially the life and teachings of Jesus in the gospel of John. That is where the phrase come from in John 14, I think. I think I was using "truth" to describe the result of a scientific observation that is repeatable and would survive direct challenges. The problem with our society is that we seem to be willing to take incomplete results and publish them as hard science. Richard Feynman gave a graduation speech in the early 70's that lambasted what he called "cargo cult science" in which scientific principles areignored in the process of reaching scientific conclusions. I will read that talk again. It is relevant. Feynman set the standard for honesty and repeatabilityin data collection.
I thought the "Truth shall make you free" was the CIA motto. Checked on Google which refers to Wiki and there it's written this is the actually unofficial motto of the CIA. I will let you check whether this was AI generated b*****t or whether Caltech is an extension of Langley...
PS honest, I am human and did not use ChatGPT to write this comment. ;)
I didn't know that. You say it is unofficial and back then I was a foreign student, but I had a lot of daily interaction with undergrads there (I was a "grad-turkey" TA) and in those days most students would have been uncomfortable with a Langley connection, I think. I just think the phrase, if taken honestly, is a noble statement of the connection between truth and freedom. And it first appears, as far as I know, in John's Gospel. My original post was an attempt to point out that the direction of our society looks uncannily like a prophesy that was made nearly 2,000 years ago. And it is becoming more so. The writer of Revelation had one heck of an imagination.
Or maybe I really am a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
@Ham…Believe me, I have heard much nuttier. All fbi these conspiracy theorists are everywhere on SS. I do NOT consider you as one sir. Shit, now I’m wondering if it has something to do with AI. 🤷♂️
Good example, the one made about the moon. I hadn’t been too alarmed with it (AI) until I heard that. Reading this sorta overwhelmed me to be honest. You just want to shrug and unplug everything.
I think we might be fine as long we know what we’re getting. Maybe some laws that let the user know in advance what they are seeing? This article is a great tool to share with the masses.
I already have that motto for reading or watching what is known as "main stream media." It's not just that we are lied to. It's that the news is hidden from us. Before the internet I would never have known.
It's not that nutty, given what's been going on. Just remember. People have been seeing signs of the end of time for 2,000 years, and it hasn't happened yet. At least, as I'm writing this. The future you describe is quite possible, but other factors, most of which we don't even know about, may prevent it and send us in another direction. And not necessarily a good one. I think we're in the End Times. The question is, how long do they last?
I am a writer on Substack and other venues. All my content is free. I get by with very modest book sales. I will never place my Internet content behind paywalls. Thanks 👍
With the omnipotent AI surveillance looming, I'm trying to reduce my own "electronic footprint" and it's frustrating & costly. I pay one company to remove my data from tons of sites, who use it without my permission, and I pay another company to clean up whatever the first company couldn't. Some sites want you to contact them directly (basically to validate yourself!), and want you to sign their "terms and conditions" - WTH?! I use VPN and DuckDuckGo not let Google spy on my internet searches, since Google intrusion gets to surreal . Google used to send me an annual "summary" of how many cities I visited (I travel often for work). They send me the photos I took that Google took upon itself to "stylize," or collage or offering me to put on canvas my own photos for $39.99-$99.99. I posted a hotel review like 5 years ago on Google stupidly under my real name, and Google sent me the data of how many thousand people liked my review, and when I jumped in to remove it from Google, it was absolutely impossible...
I suspect that it’s practically impossible to be completely anonymous on the internet. Like a bit of hair or skin left by our presence at a physical site, we leave digital DNA whenever we’re online. Someone with sufficient resources can always find the traces. But that doesn’t mean you have to expose yourself to easy data harvesting by Google et al. Good on you for maintaining a sense of hygiene.
Agreed. We, the people, shed physically and electronically :-) Nothing can be done on DNA shedding (but clean up the crime scene lol) but the electronic shedding is very troubling. I don't use TickTock, Instagram, Telegram, etc, I don't use X under real name, I don't post on FB, just keep my account, in case some old friends try to contact. I do use LinkedIn, though. So to compare to most people, my electronic footprint should be negligible, but still, HUNDREDS sites posted my data...
And Stalin showed back in the 1920s and 30s that it is very easy to manipulate a photo. Especially Trozky disappeard and the new photo was shown in all the media. Even today, the AI is showing photos without him, but we know from history, he was there.
It is easier to deceive the public with fake photos, when the public believes most photos are produced by a camera.
But now, when anyone can produce a photograph of Kim Kardashian shooting a flamethrower at the Hollywood sign, questioning photographic evidence becomes part of the zeitgeist.
So this AI revolution might have the opposite effect from what is intended. The public is already beginning to understand that the only reliable evidence for anything is found in human testimony.
"the only reliable evidence for anything is found in human testimony."
----------
I have some bad news for you about human testimony.
As any lawyer could tell you from experience, human memory is constantly changing.
As a neurologist could tell you from a physical/biological point of view, the physical process of remembering includes something like a re transcription, during which the information can be (and usually IS) altered.
If you have had an important experience or seen something of which details may later be of critical importance, WRITE IT DOWN ASAP.
And keep hard copies of whatever you care about, with a card file index.
Ever noticed watching a documentary filmed during the winter parade that there was no steam coming from the mouth of Stalin standing above the Mausoleum?
Sorry for destroying your story, but this is normal. Steam is there, if there is enough water in the air. For most of the time, in Russia this is not the case. Please look a the videos from Lars from "Survial Russia", he is showing this in Winter in the Taiga.
Well, I lived in Russia's hard climate at some point of my life, so I know what's expected vs. shown. What I referred to was that they had to re-film this parade re.:Stalin, because I think someone who was standing next/among the "leaders" was repressed later on, whatever.
I just love the irony of Simplicius, who practically certainly at least passes his writing through AI for "enhancement", writing about AI slop overrunning Internet. Now, I'm not saying Simplicius' writing is slop, just that it's not fully 100% human-made. If you don't believe me, and want to get *seriously* hammered, just go to the list at the bottom and take a drink whenever you see a word or phrase that comes up a lot in Simplicius' writing: https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b
For 500 years, guns were the ‘balancer’ between citizens and the state, despots and subjects. Now that has shifted decisively to drones backed by computer power.
I guess the first thing they're going to do is ban the sale of drones to end users. But on the one hand, homemade drones can be developed, and secondly AI algorithms can be developed so that they chase other drones.
I think just use a decoy, convince an idiot to do something to give the drone a target to lock onto, and then you a free to engage in your desired activity.
Nope. Fooling a single drone/operator won't cut it going forward.
AI drone swarms with linked, distributed communications are already a thing. One drone sees, they all "know". As long as even one linked drone is within coms range of base/operator, they can know what any or all members of the swarm "know".
I know which SF book you have read. Although this can (and has been) done, the practice can't be scaled up nearly as fast as drones can be mass produced and is a non starter, militarily.
IRL, falconry is an incredibly demanding and time consuming vocation for raising and training even a single bird, more so than training obedience trials dogs (which I've done), you don't have to weigh your dog daily just for a start.
I didn't read any book on it. I used to know a guy who ran a falconry in WA.
Indeed, the art of training raptors did cease after a rifle was invented, and since falconers, who trained the birds, were mostly illiterate and left no training manuals, and nobility who used the birds, and were educated, had no clue of how to train them. But the knowledge was restored in our times, and the birds of prey now are used to catch rodents in organic orchards, etc., or sell to the ME sheiks, who pay a lot of a clever bird. India seems to be training the birds for military purposes
I agree with you; the last repository of verifiable information is books from the 20th century. Curate well!
You aren't nutty at all. I have a Kobo ereader which I enjoy. However, any books that I want to keep and are important I definitely buy hard copy.
Smart move. Drowning us under AI slop is a variation of Fahrenheit 451 burning of books.
@Franny Jean
If you also like good red wine (and keep a card file Dewey decimal system index), you are now eligible for membership in the order of the Librarians Temporal.
See "Splendid Apocalypse, the Fall of Old Earth" for details.
Wouldn't fake AI posts be liable to prosecution for WIRE FRAUD IF USERS THOUGHT THEY WERE REAL PEOPLE? Wire Fraud is a federal crime.
Fraud requires a commercial element, not just a fictitious interlocutor. Money must be exchanged or lost due to one party's intentional misrepresentation of value or other material facts in the transaction. AI 'assistants' deployed by the social media industry probably aren't fraudulent. But they are yet another way that MetaXinc harvests the information that you as a human being generate. And you can see how this particular method could be exceedingly powerful, because people will be tempted to engage with AI as if it's a human being. There will be more interaction than one gets from a simple search query. And all of that extra interaction becomes the property of the social media platform, to use and analyze in whatever way the law allows.
So what I'm saying is that it's not a commercial crime it's worse. It's dystopian.
It is a commercial crime though, since ad revenue is generated by engagement. Which is what these AI bots do.
In what way do you believe a crime is committed regarding ad revenue?
The way I just said it is. Engagement. Bots increase engagement, which increases the amount advertisers pay for the service putting their ads out there. Not sure how I can put it any more plainly. Google any terms you don't understand.
Legally, it can be something akin law evoked for failure to pay royalties/infringement. AI 'assistant' tasked with grabbing attention and holding on the site/page/product as long possible, since if you are here, you can't be watching/buying from their competitor. Like Kindle who pays authors per page read. You're not exactly "strapped and forced" to buy something, but you're still forced into buying something they want you to buy vs. what you might chose left alone.
No.
It is because the advertiser (say, Youtube) is offering a service to ad-creators (say, Ford Motor Company) to put an ad in front of humans, getting paid roughly based upon how many humans view the ad. Then YT programs a bunch of bots to click on those videos which have FMC ads in them, causing the ad-creator (FMC) to believe that humans are seeing their ad, and paying YT more than they otherwise would for the ad space.
Not sure why this is complicated for some.
Oh, there is always a commercial element to such things, nobody will do it for free. The websites get paid by the information “brokers.” Selling/buying someone’s personal info without the rightful owner’s consent must be outlawed. Now, more and more websites put disclosures and options of how they “use” our information & the “3rd parties,” but far from sufficient.
@Homer Terence
Federal crimes committed by the Federal government are notoriously difficult to get a Federal prosecutor interested in, much less a conviction in a Federal court.
Short answer: Effectively, no.
Yet strangely federal prosecutors were interested in prosecuting President Trump, his friends, and associates during his own administration...odd.
@Homer Terence
Future board memberships after going through that good old public/private revolving door, status, money and power?
Besides, he was never supposed to have been elected, he was just helped to get in there to derail any REAL Republican candidate, then the unforseen but obvious error in the public's voting behavior needed to be corrected or at least contained.
Don't get me wrong, I voted for neither of the "Official Candidates(™)" the last 3 times around. But I can still spot a railroad job when it is right in front of my face.
Interesting. I hadn't considered this angle.
Honestly, at the time I thought that Trump was elected in 2016 for "shits and giggles" of the "Boaty McBoatface" generation.
Quite a few people who voted for Trump back then neither thought he WOULD be allowed to win nor liked him. Many of them DID view a vote for Trump as the closest they could personally get to throwing a brick through the oval office window without getting shot.
In a world of high-tech AI, high-touch is precious.
In an economy where our distraction is the product, human presence is our gift.
When we give up our power, we give into AI and more killware.
Reducing blue light can help, as it's the vector of addiction, depleting our dopamine, and destroying our future.
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/daylight
Whoa! Plenty of meaty stuff to chew on there.
Personally I have been chatting quite a lot with AI John Mearsheimer recently.
http://mearsheimer.ai/
I have found him rather useful in bouncing my geo-political ideas off.
And it's not as if I suspect him of spying on me. I know he MUST be spying on me because that's how the next iteration gets trained.
I think AI has potential benefits to offer. Well done, you've found one.
natural idiocy will defeat artificial intelligence.
Right on, but natural idiocy how far is it away from somnolence and zombification? For the moment according a survey in France, 12, 14 and 16 year old spend 12 to 16 hours a day on the internet…TikTok and pornhub. How far are these kids, and the number is growing to a real Pandemic, from a 24/7 auto hypnosis in becoming screen junks, worse than Opiods, Fentanyl or ice? Is this coming generation really AI interested, or even social, emotional and intellectual, not to mention politically committed?
Another good example is the alleged Spotify scam of force feeding AI slop to reduce royalties.
Gee, I hope these AI-generated users will be enabled to act like real people in buying products and services, just like all the humans on the platforms. It would only be fair, with whoever generated them picking up the tab. I'm selling some books you would enjoy, Liv, Carter, and Brian.
People are very inventive in turning things back on their purveyors, like the guy tracking and reporting on the elites' use of private jets while they're promoting the green agenda. I'm guessing lots of people will have fun 'playing with' the AI-generated users (as in your example).
I noted today, when I asked for images on google, I got a lot of AI-generated images even when I asked for photos. Thanks for the hack.
It appears these AI critters will make Meta/Google/X/Instagram completely and utterly useless.
Let the AI win!
I will risk appearing a bit nutty here. When I went to grad school in the US I was pleased to see that the motto of my school (Caltech) was "The Truth Shall Make You Free." Not that I saw it in a religious context, but I happen to believe in that sentiment. Truth derives from knowledge. And honesty.
It's been a few years now and I have retired and revisited the spiritual aspirations I had before I became a scientist. So I am going to give y'all a hypothesis. What we are seeing here, and in US politics up till this point, is the "Beast of Revelation." (I told you it would seem nutty.) I am not sure who the "antichrist" is but this person will be revealed. We live in a world society in which lies are what govern now what we (are supposed to) believe. Soon it will be impossible to carry out a commercial transaction without a "social credit score." The mark of the beast. The final destruction will come when the beast is given authority to think for our leaders and allowed to decide for itself the fate of the world. And power plants the size of Greenland will needed to provide it with the power it needs to think for all of us.
I told you it is a nutty hypothesis. So if you feel like replying with a "fuck you" then good for you. You need more imagination.
You nailed it, Ham. Very well said. By the way, when I lived in SoCal, I had friends who went to CalTech. I always enjoyed visiting the campus. I saw Francis Collins speak at CalTech, talking about the Human Genome Project and his Christian faith. Now, unfortunately, my opinion on him has changed. And not for the better.
Yeah. I cannot speak for today's Techers, but back then they were special. They probably are still very smart. Just professing a faith doesn't mean it makes sense or is particularly "good" in a moral sense. I reread Revelation and wondered why would we as humans hand over our fundamental strength- to be able to think independently - to a machine?
That last sentence hit home. Many will be deceived by the constant barrage of propaganda from once "trusted" sources. I thought this was a pretty good article. You may want to check it out.
https://open.substack.com/pub/raggedlines/p/the-matrix-of-distraction-and-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1ir5nw
I scanned this and will study it. I don't think that our concerns need to be necessarily religious, but they are if we choose them to be so. The description of the 4 horsemen in Revelation is chilling. They are a model for human interaction that is in play now. We have moved from a model of compassion for each other to contempt. I live like a hermit now to minimize human interaction.
Similar, over here on my side of the pond, 42 degrees North, 123 West. Take best care. ❤️🐈⬛
you live in a tree?
I greatly doubt that a machine can ever really think the way we do. They may be able one day to simulate thought to a degree. But how can we teach a digital brain to think when we don't even have any idea how the human mind does? We haven't even scratched the surface of how the brain thinks.
That doesn't mean AI can't be used for evil ends, of course. But true consciousness? My guess is it's far too complex to ever be duplicated.
Two things bother me about our current situation. One is, as you say, how can we teach a digital brain to think when we don't know how we think? Exactly. If you listen to people like Kier Starmer (UK PM) for example, they are willing and eager to abdicate their responsibility to think, to a machine. And secondly, I am afraid that an AI machine will simply spout back what it is taught to think. Computers are good at that. Even woke dogma aside, we are in the era of the four horsemen. War, bad government, sickness and this time it is on a global scale. The wars that we are seeing now have as their goals complete eradication of a people. Nobody sees the goal, for example, of coexistence between two peoples involved in a conflict. (Maybe Putin does as he seems to just want assurances about NATO. I am afraid that is too late now.)
If you ever saw the British TV series "Dr Who" like 60 years ago, the Daleks were machines that used to roll around the set with their mechanical penises sticking out in front of them yelling "exterminate! exterminate!" and then they would spray lethal fire on their opponents. That is what we should really be selling to Zelensky and Netanyahu to cure their bloody urges. The Z man can already play a piano with his.
To answer your point, yes true consciousness will never be replicated in our lifetimes. But it does not need to be. Our leaders just have to delegate their evil thoughts to a machine. "Exterminate! exterminate!") You gotta see https://youtu.be/RhEUBgu9j5Y for an example.
The book of Revelation is not a book of love. Few people probably read it now. It is a story of people destroying themselves with fire. Just like on the videos from Ukraine seen on the Telegram channel.
Most Christians I knew when I was young and naive had a vague idea of what the antichrist looked like but many tried to attach modern events and data to the writings of people like Daniel and by John in Revelation. I think differently and do not try to connect specific events to prophetic elements. The four horsemen are an example. They are clearly present on the earth and presenting a baseline level of misery and uncertainty that we are all experiencing.
John Hopfield (Nobel prize 2024) devised the Hopfield net as basically a content addressable memory and recognized it was a poor model of the network in a brain. I am not proposing that we will get to machine consciousness. But imagine a scenario where a bright prime minister, call him Keir, decides he will be the first person in history to run a country entirely from the decisions of an artificial network. All issues economic and military decided by the more sociable and intelligent of the two Kiers. The machine.
I always felt that The mark of the beast was a great idea. Not being able to buy and sell without it. It just seems impossible that 2000 years ago somebody saw a vision in which membership of an appreciation society for a beast is a criterion for being able to buy anything. Now imagine a machine that has all of our data including social scores and can decide if we have the right to buy..
Not to dump on your alma mater's motto, but I'm not sanguine that anyone can hope to gain freedom through "Truth." Certainly knowledge will help in gaining freedom, but waiting around for something to be designated indisputably true may take centuries - and that's just for mathematical questions that are utterly open to examination and logic. In the realm of human behaviors, so much of which is intentionally hidden for personal, social or political reasons, the truth may never be known.
The Truth is impartial to the states of enslavement and freedom - it does not judge them it merely describes them. Humans on the other hand, if they act as free entities, must do so on incomplete knowledge and towards an uncertain future. Above all, that requires varying degrees of courage and faith.
The biblical writers, I guess would have used "truth" as religious truth, especially the life and teachings of Jesus in the gospel of John. That is where the phrase come from in John 14, I think. I think I was using "truth" to describe the result of a scientific observation that is repeatable and would survive direct challenges. The problem with our society is that we seem to be willing to take incomplete results and publish them as hard science. Richard Feynman gave a graduation speech in the early 70's that lambasted what he called "cargo cult science" in which scientific principles areignored in the process of reaching scientific conclusions. I will read that talk again. It is relevant. Feynman set the standard for honesty and repeatabilityin data collection.
I thought the "Truth shall make you free" was the CIA motto. Checked on Google which refers to Wiki and there it's written this is the actually unofficial motto of the CIA. I will let you check whether this was AI generated b*****t or whether Caltech is an extension of Langley...
PS honest, I am human and did not use ChatGPT to write this comment. ;)
I didn't know that. You say it is unofficial and back then I was a foreign student, but I had a lot of daily interaction with undergrads there (I was a "grad-turkey" TA) and in those days most students would have been uncomfortable with a Langley connection, I think. I just think the phrase, if taken honestly, is a noble statement of the connection between truth and freedom. And it first appears, as far as I know, in John's Gospel. My original post was an attempt to point out that the direction of our society looks uncannily like a prophesy that was made nearly 2,000 years ago. And it is becoming more so. The writer of Revelation had one heck of an imagination.
Or maybe I really am a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
@Ham…Believe me, I have heard much nuttier. All fbi these conspiracy theorists are everywhere on SS. I do NOT consider you as one sir. Shit, now I’m wondering if it has something to do with AI. 🤷♂️
Good example, the one made about the moon. I hadn’t been too alarmed with it (AI) until I heard that. Reading this sorta overwhelmed me to be honest. You just want to shrug and unplug everything.
I think we might be fine as long we know what we’re getting. Maybe some laws that let the user know in advance what they are seeing? This article is a great tool to share with the masses.
Perhaps when we start up a device it should provide a simple message for consideration
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here
D. Ante, Aspiring Hack Writer
I already have that motto for reading or watching what is known as "main stream media." It's not just that we are lied to. It's that the news is hidden from us. Before the internet I would never have known.
And Jesus answered, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by me.”
It's not that nutty, given what's been going on. Just remember. People have been seeing signs of the end of time for 2,000 years, and it hasn't happened yet. At least, as I'm writing this. The future you describe is quite possible, but other factors, most of which we don't even know about, may prevent it and send us in another direction. And not necessarily a good one. I think we're in the End Times. The question is, how long do they last?
I am a writer on Substack and other venues. All my content is free. I get by with very modest book sales. I will never place my Internet content behind paywalls. Thanks 👍
I listened to this article using substacks text to speech AI. And the ai Dasha shilling Chinese lysine was pretty funny.
With the omnipotent AI surveillance looming, I'm trying to reduce my own "electronic footprint" and it's frustrating & costly. I pay one company to remove my data from tons of sites, who use it without my permission, and I pay another company to clean up whatever the first company couldn't. Some sites want you to contact them directly (basically to validate yourself!), and want you to sign their "terms and conditions" - WTH?! I use VPN and DuckDuckGo not let Google spy on my internet searches, since Google intrusion gets to surreal . Google used to send me an annual "summary" of how many cities I visited (I travel often for work). They send me the photos I took that Google took upon itself to "stylize," or collage or offering me to put on canvas my own photos for $39.99-$99.99. I posted a hotel review like 5 years ago on Google stupidly under my real name, and Google sent me the data of how many thousand people liked my review, and when I jumped in to remove it from Google, it was absolutely impossible...
Which companies do you use to clean our public information?
OneRep & Experian.
I suspect that it’s practically impossible to be completely anonymous on the internet. Like a bit of hair or skin left by our presence at a physical site, we leave digital DNA whenever we’re online. Someone with sufficient resources can always find the traces. But that doesn’t mean you have to expose yourself to easy data harvesting by Google et al. Good on you for maintaining a sense of hygiene.
Agreed. We, the people, shed physically and electronically :-) Nothing can be done on DNA shedding (but clean up the crime scene lol) but the electronic shedding is very troubling. I don't use TickTock, Instagram, Telegram, etc, I don't use X under real name, I don't post on FB, just keep my account, in case some old friends try to contact. I do use LinkedIn, though. So to compare to most people, my electronic footprint should be negligible, but still, HUNDREDS sites posted my data...
The future is that there simply is no such thing as reliable photo or video.
Fortunately, human civilization survived for a long time without those things.
And Stalin showed back in the 1920s and 30s that it is very easy to manipulate a photo. Especially Trozky disappeard and the new photo was shown in all the media. Even today, the AI is showing photos without him, but we know from history, he was there.
It is easier to deceive the public with fake photos, when the public believes most photos are produced by a camera.
But now, when anyone can produce a photograph of Kim Kardashian shooting a flamethrower at the Hollywood sign, questioning photographic evidence becomes part of the zeitgeist.
So this AI revolution might have the opposite effect from what is intended. The public is already beginning to understand that the only reliable evidence for anything is found in human testimony.
@The Rogue Roman
(Quote)
"the only reliable evidence for anything is found in human testimony."
----------
I have some bad news for you about human testimony.
As any lawyer could tell you from experience, human memory is constantly changing.
As a neurologist could tell you from a physical/biological point of view, the physical process of remembering includes something like a re transcription, during which the information can be (and usually IS) altered.
If you have had an important experience or seen something of which details may later be of critical importance, WRITE IT DOWN ASAP.
And keep hard copies of whatever you care about, with a card file index.
Ever noticed watching a documentary filmed during the winter parade that there was no steam coming from the mouth of Stalin standing above the Mausoleum?
Sorry for destroying your story, but this is normal. Steam is there, if there is enough water in the air. For most of the time, in Russia this is not the case. Please look a the videos from Lars from "Survial Russia", he is showing this in Winter in the Taiga.
Well, I lived in Russia's hard climate at some point of my life, so I know what's expected vs. shown. What I referred to was that they had to re-film this parade re.:Stalin, because I think someone who was standing next/among the "leaders" was repressed later on, whatever.
We won’t need high paid actors to make movies. It might cause the solid realization that all of Hollywood is fake
I just love the irony of Simplicius, who practically certainly at least passes his writing through AI for "enhancement", writing about AI slop overrunning Internet. Now, I'm not saying Simplicius' writing is slop, just that it's not fully 100% human-made. If you don't believe me, and want to get *seriously* hammered, just go to the list at the bottom and take a drink whenever you see a word or phrase that comes up a lot in Simplicius' writing: https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b
Ok I read that- Simp prove you aren’t a bot
I guess it's a good time to sell drones that attack other drones
For 500 years, guns were the ‘balancer’ between citizens and the state, despots and subjects. Now that has shifted decisively to drones backed by computer power.
I guess the first thing they're going to do is ban the sale of drones to end users. But on the one hand, homemade drones can be developed, and secondly AI algorithms can be developed so that they chase other drones.
I think just use a decoy, convince an idiot to do something to give the drone a target to lock onto, and then you a free to engage in your desired activity.
I suppose that would work with an autonomous one, but not with a FPV drone
@Antipodes
Nope. Fooling a single drone/operator won't cut it going forward.
AI drone swarms with linked, distributed communications are already a thing. One drone sees, they all "know". As long as even one linked drone is within coms range of base/operator, they can know what any or all members of the swarm "know".
They now breed and train eagles to attack drones.
Falconry is going to cease to be an art of the aristocracy
@Hu Veja
It would be lovely if this were a realistic option.
Those aristocrats had full time falconers in their household staff who did the daily training and maintenance work.
Honestly, the thing that most impressed me about RFK Jr. was learning that he had been a falconer, it is a warrior monk level vocation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falconry_training_and_technique
@Angelina
I know which SF book you have read. Although this can (and has been) done, the practice can't be scaled up nearly as fast as drones can be mass produced and is a non starter, militarily.
IRL, falconry is an incredibly demanding and time consuming vocation for raising and training even a single bird, more so than training obedience trials dogs (which I've done), you don't have to weigh your dog daily just for a start.
@ Brevette
I didn't read any book on it. I used to know a guy who ran a falconry in WA.
Indeed, the art of training raptors did cease after a rifle was invented, and since falconers, who trained the birds, were mostly illiterate and left no training manuals, and nobility who used the birds, and were educated, had no clue of how to train them. But the knowledge was restored in our times, and the birds of prey now are used to catch rodents in organic orchards, etc., or sell to the ME sheiks, who pay a lot of a clever bird. India seems to be training the birds for military purposes
https://www.rt.com/india/610796-eagle-squads-indias-cost-effective-drone-defence/
@Angelina
Check out
"Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson.
https://read.amazon.com/sample/B08WLWC6GZ?f=1&l=en_US&r=c3e934b5&rid=GT8XAJ6Y3VXMNMB8YS9S&sid=146-1165571-1161623&cid=A39NJMOJTX1THZ&ref_=litb_m
@Brevette - thanks, looks interesting!