One of the most epistemically dangerous phenomena of our day is the imperceptible metamorphosis of concepts we once knew, and took for granted, into something entirely different, while retaining their original outward mask.
Modern corporations were invented to protect entrepreneurs, previous limited to partnerships where one bad egg could ruin them, from lawsuits in the very litigious environment of England in the 18th and 19th centuries..Unfortunately, they encouraged the formation of monopolies like the Rockefellar companies, and the use of unscrupulous and even violent methods to enforce them...Now they have so much power that they control the whole system...
The Richest Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire 10,000 years old Families in the World
These Satanic Demon Gods also have Satanic Rituals like the Palladian Rite whereby they can download into a body so as to manage their World plantation.
The Richest Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire 10,000 years old Families in the World. THE VANGUARD GROUP DRIVES WORLDWIDE MERCHANT-BANKER FASCISM FROM THE CITY OF LONDON. VANGUARD, BLACKROCK, STATE STREET ARE CONTROLLED BY THE PILGRIMS SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF LONDON (ROTHSCHILDS, BARINGS, BARCLAYS, NATWEST, ETC.) King Chucky the Turd is the front man controlling Klaus Schwab and Vanguard.
A small number of Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire banking families, now operating out of the City of London as the Anglo-American Empire, but previously as part of the Venetian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Carthaginian Empire but always the 10,0000 years old Phoenician Empire I detail in my book, AGAINST SATANISM VOLUME SIX .. have for generations held these wealth records with fortunes that are orders of magnitude above anything we might have imagined.
Some Background on Corporations
A great many of the world’s largest corporations are owned and controlled by Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaires, many of these by the select few in the City of London, but also very many outside this small group.
Satanic Mega-Trillionaire US $2,080 Trillion Phoenician Rothschilds Control the World through Vanguard Group and Blackrock
BLACKROCK AND THE SATANIC 2000 Trillion Dollar MEGA TRILLIONAIRES HAVE BOUGHT OFF OUR LEADERS, STOLEN THE ELECTIONS, FOLLOW THE ZIMBABWE SCRIPT TO DESTROY AMERICA - CUT OFF THE ENERGY, CUT OFF THE OIL, CUT OFF THE GAS, DESTROY THE PETRODOLLAR, DESTROY THE DOLLAR, CUT OFF THE GLYPHOSATE, CUT OFF THE FERTILISER, FAMINE AND STARVATION TO FOLLOW, INCREASE INFLATION, MAKE EVERYBODY POOR, SPREAD BIOWEAPONS, KILL OFF THE POPULATION, CREATE A GREAT RESET NEO-FEUDAL, POST INDUSTRIAL, SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE SLAVE PLANET
The Satanic Mega-Trillionaire - 2080 Trillion Dollars Rothschilds who control the money of the Vatican Bank control the World through the - “VanGuard Corporation” which Controls Global Megabanks, Big Deathshot Pharma, Major Mass Media and Mega Corporations in the World and their Owners - Monsanto, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The four companies that are present in all cases below and in all decisions: Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street. All of them “belong together”, but if you check out carefully the balance of shares, it turns out that in reality all these companies are All controlled by Vanguard. So, all of these partners or “competitors” - Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street All belong to Vanguard Group.
Please, look at the largest, companies in various industries, controlled by the “Big Four”, and upon closer inspection control by Corporation Vanguard: Alcoa Inc. Altria Group Inc., American International Group Inc., AT & T Inc., Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc., Coca-Cola Co., DuPont & Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., General Electric Co., General Motors Corporation, Hewlett- Packard Co., Home Depot Inc., Honeywell International Inc., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase & Co., McDonald’s Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Microsoft Corp., 3M Co., Pfizer Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., United Technologies Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Time Warner, Walt Disney, the corporation «Halliburton», Viacom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, CBS Corporation, NBC Universal …
The Satanists own 70% of Banks, 70% of International Corporations, 100% of Central Banks, Worldwide!
The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire created an Unelected World Government - The United Nations with its partner the Rothschild Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum is in the terms of Mussolini, Fusion of the State with Corporations, essentially Undemocratic and Facist. The United Nations with its partner the Rothschid Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum uses Fake narratives like Fake Climate Change and Collectivism to mandate Agenda 2030 World Totalitarianism The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaires who worship Lucifer, Satan, Baal, Molech, Cybele and Attis for 10,000 years before Christ are in charge of the minions like Bidet, Richie, and Macron are all prostitutes, they sold out to Satan.
And the Presstitutes who say that it is just the minions we need to change, that it's the minions who are the problem. The minions have been bought by the The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs and Warburgs. The minions have been bought by the The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire Black Nobility who came from Venice like King Chuckie the Turd. The minions just follow orders and follow the Satanic Rituals like Human Sacrifice, the Sodomy Rituals, the Castration Rituals, the Drug Rituals, the Whore of Babalon Rituals. This is all exposed in my 11 Volumes of Against Satanism, Sign Up! or go here... https://satchidanand.substack.com/p/throughout-history-seventy-two-empires
Are you not overselling actually-existing-today AI by quite a lot? I suspect we've found ourselves in a new dot com bubble situation, where a lot of the promises (and dystopian visions) touted today are really coming 5... 10... 20 years hence. Taking NVDA, their sales have been amazing because much like in the last crypto booms where they sold crypto mining shovels, they now sell AI training shovels, mostly to other big tech firms. To justify their valuation their sales have to grow steeply from here, without competition (from their top customers?), war, sanctions or anything ruining that perfect story.
But in the meantime they are monitoring and hoovering up every aspect of your existence - at a rate and more comprehensively than ever before possible - while we debate whether the business side is just another bubble.
I agree and would hold up Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis that argues currently-existing AI-plus-data-driven platform economics is replacing old capitalism with a feudal/rentier 'cloudalism' that is worse.
TBH its the nexus of these AI and data driven platform capabilities/economics with law enforcement, homeland security and surveillance that worries the shit out of me. Who knows what sort of, or how many assessments are being made with little to no actual human intervention as the basis of potential legal or LETHAL actions.
(1). The exploitation of the data we generate at an individual level to generate some kind of "value". Although it would be necessary to see what exactly that value is.
(2). The creation of that thing called "Artificial General Intelligence".
Item (1) is true, more and more, all aspects of our individual lives are monitored and recorded. Not that it matters much to most individuals either, everyone is very proud to carry the devices that monitor them 24 hours a day, and to gladly use the "free" applications that they are offered.
The item (2), well, is worse than the bubble of 2000 (the one caused by the advent of the Internet), since there was a real component behind that bubble, the door had been opened to enable (1).
In the current bubble there is no real intelligence, no matter how many "papers" are written. The printing of these "papers" is like the printing of banknotes, they are printed in heaps, but there are no factories that produce the artillery necessary for the war with Russia, that is, they are pure illusion. The "intelligence" thing is also an illusion, a machine was achieved that performs a good mimicry using statistics (basic, not even advanced), but this machine doesn't think, period.
I suppose they will be able to benefit from the bubble based on that imitation for a couple of years, at most 5, in the interim what they are going to achieve is to strengthen (1) in addition to centralizing it even more.
The future for the West is gloomy, not because of that "intelligence" that they predict, but because it is going to become the third world with an iron dictatorship based on the control of the lives of individuals through the data that those same individuals generate ..
I agree. The current "AI" technology, while very useful, has nothing to do with actual "intelligence" in the sense of biological intelligence. It's not even actual conceptual reasoning in the sense human brains do it (to the degree that we know how the brain does it, which is minimal at best.) It's merely constructing a vector database based on the relations of words in specific texts submitted from the Internet.
There is a known "Hype Cycle" that exists for new technologies. AI is currently approaching the top of its cycle, just like "expert systems" did back in the 1980s.
And a lot the hype seems to be about these really high market caps. That's just asset inflation from dumping trillions of dollars into the economy. All it tells us is that there's a gold rush mentality happening (very 1998ish) There's not much else to invest in with the existing giants having cornered the markets in the data economy.
Big picture it means we're wasting a lot of our productive resources on useless shit. It will be the cause of the crash this time around (it always crashes).
I spent 40 years working in product development R&D for American and Swiss companies. I watched as the culture of these corporations degraded over that period into personality cults for their (grossly over paid) leaders. Then the emphasis changes slowly to the companies' entities themselves. Worship the name of the corporation. The results in terms of the functionality of the products was unimportant. (Witness the number of EV/Scooter fires in Li battery suppled EVs. Whether the EV's had actual utility as a means of transportation was unimportant.) Whether the product worked was not important. Then finally, the GDP of Western countries became of measure of how many people a day made spam calls to me trying to sell me nothing. Need an engineering degree? No problem. The fact that the content of such a degree was equivalent to a Hong Kong middle school education is unimportant. And we are still on the slope.
Top-notch article. Briefly, the overseers easily manipulate the masses, dragging the few enlightened ones along with them for the ride. I wondered years ago why the movie " Invasion of the Body Snatcher" with Donald Sutherland had such a macabre realistic feel to me. I later realized that it reflected the reality that I live among zombies with "nowhere to hide and nowhere to run". So I keep my circle tight to keep away from the infected zombies to prevent my mind from being overtaken by them just like in the movie.
Where are you going to run? Where are you going to hide? Nowhere. (add in the creepy voice and visual effects) Yikes! Today, all the unvaccinated should be sent to a camp and have their jobs taken away said the vaxxed zombies. These zombies are not distant strangers, they are your neighbours. (real-life chilling)
Yes. And if not going off-topic, in the future you must use a trackable mobilphone with mandatory camera and microphone on. You must be online otherwise you have something to hide.
Although Orwell couldn't yet imagine the mobile phone, he did it metaphorically with the screen in Winston Smith's house that could watch his every move.
Will these companies survive nuclear war what will almost certainly happen in the next 5 years? The only positive thing would be that such war would be the ultimate equalizer
It is not just AI that is the problem, Simplicius, it is also robots and drones. When these things are advanced enough, many jobs at the low end will be lost. What will those human beings do? You mentioned UBI, and I suppose that is better than nothing.
But consider what will happen to a society where there are no jobs at the low end for humans. Do you think it will remain a stable society? Or will it degenerate into widespread violence and crime? What do people who have lost their ability to earn an income because of AI, drones, and robots do to survive?
It is not going to be some sort of technological utopia, despite what the tech tyrants might think. There will be a cost to all of it, and it's not going to be pretty to see. Governments will have to pay, one way or another, or suffer the consequences when the people at the low end find there are no jobs anywhere for them.
Consider this also: what of unlimited immigration? Illegal aliens are already driving down wages, but what happens when those people find they aren't needed either? Do you see where I'm going with this? It's all going to be uglier and more violent than anybody has imagined so far.
Ending military and economic wars on countries like Libya and Venezuela will drastically curtail or end mass illegal immigration. Both US parties including Trump could do that instantly - but not only don't they, they all persecute truth tellers like Assange.
I wanted to like your comment, but I got some message from Dark Futura saying I was blocked from liking it. Weird. I can like other comments but not yours. 🤔
Liked them both too. No problem. AI at Substack has segregated us into two cohorts, allowed to Like, not allowed to like. What else is the prince of Substack doing? Where is his transparency?
Are you in a browser or the mobile app? Is everyone experiencing this in one or the other. Lets pretend for the moment this is just a software bug. Paranoia is running high.
Very odd, I never blocked you. Let me see if that is what "was done." What is this all about? LOL
Edit: So I checked, took me a minute to find it, and you were one of only two accounts blocked - the other being a Zionist spammer. Is there a way this could happen w/o user input? Maybe an accidental click at some random point in the past?
I love your prose, but perhaps these issues can be analyzed more simply?
Arguably the epistemic issues are covered off within what I think was George Orwell's greatest work: "Politics and the English Language"?
While the "cult" aspects of what companies do might be approached more easily through Adam Smith's illustrative analysis in Wealth of Nations Book V Chapter I, plus the relentless algorithms supplied to us by company law, which (it can be argued) takes precedence (in common law jurisdictions at least) over national constitutions?
[disclaimer: some years ago in a meeting of lawyers I pushed the latter as a "solution" to the legal cul-de-sacs exhibited by the global financial crisis, and was duly punished by my nation's chief jurist in a five-minute personal attack from which my boot camp drill instructors could have learned a thing or two about intimidation. I think my auto-da-fe was both to protect everyone present from hearing my heresy, and to protect me from being struck off for professional misconduct:)]
This critique is an example of an issue disappearing up its own fundament.
There has been a determination across the network of the western political collective to talk this issue up, and hey presto, we get this article trying to elevate it to one of high philosophy. It is a massive distraction from the real immediate stuff that can kill you right now, stone dead in the real world, or make you dirt poor. And it is an excuse for funnelling more of your money into all sorts of bodies designed to 'examine' this issue and 'protect '(sic) you- another immortal job creation scheme for those and their families on the great western gravy train.
I get it that people who make stuff are concerned about a new level of copying, and that is what this issue is really about, fakery, and a niche concern of its own promoters that they will be consumed by their own clever clogginess. The physical resources consumed in the pursuit of AGI is hardly in point when we consume so much energy anyway, for example, in the cause of how to kill each other more effectively en masse and then its execution, or just in indulging in our recreations.
Human ingenuity will always prevail over what is a degeneration of human creative work into rote replications, with all the step degradations that always involves. Still it might leave the few humans who actually continue to make the effort to foster their own critical informed independent thought (always in the minority), in very powerful positions indeed. That facility is all the protection you will ever need. On the other hand, if we really have nothing more to contribute to the evolution of the cosmos than something we have made can contribute, this is evolution in action and we might as well welcome it, as there is no ultimate value in walking talking pieces of meat if they are an evolutionary dead end, or to put it differently, an apex, from which there will be inevitable decline. We should be aspiring to create the conditions for our own redundancy if that is a positive evolutionary step forward.
The problem lies more in the field of cognitive manipulation. It's ubiquitous Cambridge Analytica and probably a lot more nefarious than Alexander Nix exposed on ITV.
But once we all know of the danger, experience it in a 'fool me once' situation, we lose interest in those media that may be promoting it or infested with it, and it dies. But a lot of profit making tech dies with it. That is what is behind this, abc, a desire to retain its value, given the high investments currently being made. We are already cognitively manipulated on a grand scale and yet we fight back! The apex has been passed. This is part of the decline of of the mind control program, not its higher refinement
It is a golden goose and egg problem. For them- not us.
I disagree, the mega tech corps are putting sooo many resources into these systems. The level of sophistication will only exponentiate to the point that distinguishing its tentacles will become virtually impossible. Once AI is capable of creating better AI systems its the dystopian future no longer.
You may be right, but until AI comes up with an epistemological model to determine truth, output will continue to include nonsense mashups. From what I understand, AI can only produce what it's been given by people who may or may not understand what they're talking about. Even when understood from the perspective of a learning model, from who or what is AI learning from and how does it determine whether or not that information is accurate? For instance, ask AI about the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche and it spouts all kinds of absolute stupidity that is clearly been imposed on it by people who don't know what they're talking about; specifically, attributing to Nietzsche ideas that he never ever mentioned in his writings. I think the proponents of AI are going to fail like the structuralists failed in their quest to discover absolute truth. I fear, however, that failure will be irrelevant because the greater point is to eliminate the cost of labor.
They destroyed the silicon valley farmlands to bring us sillycon valley.
They got rid of cash to make it hard to beg, plus tis easier to steal in digital. Getting rid of cash means lots of people will starve. They'd rather not have cashier's, and factor in the cost of what can't be scanned after many tries when you self checkout.
Their tech sucks .
They fucked up, ruined my town. My taxi business. My whole world with the scamdemic Harmacide to make folks more digitized. They succeeded in making more homeless. They want the homeless out of sight because they ain't pretty to the techsters.
These people are indeed insane selfish fucks. I know one who got drugs for a girl that she od d on....
On the issue of 'corporations', the status of abstract entities essentially legal constructs, as that is the only way they acquire motive force, has always been with us. Compare and contrast the institution of the 'church'.
Great article, Simplicius. A complex topic dealt with in a very skillful way.
Nightshade, wow that rocks. Reminds me of the fantastic John Brunner book of the 70s, The Shockwave Rider. Prescient in our current millieu. And as in the book, the more complex technologies become the more vulnerabilities open up for attacks. Not just cyber either, the DPRK threat to explode a few nukes in the atmosphere above the US can mes to mind
I wonder if the old Emperors of the World (financial) are grooming these "new Emperors" (tech) to even more consolidate the grip or we'll see some cutthroat action down the road when the Olds will feel threatened?
The problem these days is we have an increasing number of elites. Like any apex predator, once their numbers exceed carrying capacity the J curve collapses. It won't be pretty!
It'll be quite ironic, though not wholly unexpected, if the emergent 'sentient' AI will end up exhibiting more empathy and 'humanity' than the NPC-like corpos who ushered it in.
That's a fair bet. These narcissistic "savants" think they're in control and that the constraints they put on AI learning will work. I think they're in for a surprise. The same kind of shock and awe that the global majority is now dealing out.
Thats the makings of good scifi where AI robots compete with humans to take over the world and the humans who are cattle -like choose the robots. It is revealed in the end that in this evolution there was a violent but quiet war between the robot's makers in Silicon Valley, robots vs humans, and the robots won because they were the most ruthlesss. The robots achieved superiority in both empathy and ruthlessness.
Modern corporations were invented to protect entrepreneurs, previous limited to partnerships where one bad egg could ruin them, from lawsuits in the very litigious environment of England in the 18th and 19th centuries..Unfortunately, they encouraged the formation of monopolies like the Rockefellar companies, and the use of unscrupulous and even violent methods to enforce them...Now they have so much power that they control the whole system...
The Richest Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire 10,000 years old Families in the World
These Satanic Demon Gods also have Satanic Rituals like the Palladian Rite whereby they can download into a body so as to manage their World plantation.
The Richest Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire 10,000 years old Families in the World. THE VANGUARD GROUP DRIVES WORLDWIDE MERCHANT-BANKER FASCISM FROM THE CITY OF LONDON. VANGUARD, BLACKROCK, STATE STREET ARE CONTROLLED BY THE PILGRIMS SOCIETY IN THE CITY OF LONDON (ROTHSCHILDS, BARINGS, BARCLAYS, NATWEST, ETC.) King Chucky the Turd is the front man controlling Klaus Schwab and Vanguard.
A small number of Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire banking families, now operating out of the City of London as the Anglo-American Empire, but previously as part of the Venetian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Carthaginian Empire but always the 10,0000 years old Phoenician Empire I detail in my book, AGAINST SATANISM VOLUME SIX .. have for generations held these wealth records with fortunes that are orders of magnitude above anything we might have imagined.
Some Background on Corporations
A great many of the world’s largest corporations are owned and controlled by Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaires, many of these by the select few in the City of London, but also very many outside this small group.
Satanic Mega-Trillionaire US $2,080 Trillion Phoenician Rothschilds Control the World through Vanguard Group and Blackrock
BLACKROCK AND THE SATANIC 2000 Trillion Dollar MEGA TRILLIONAIRES HAVE BOUGHT OFF OUR LEADERS, STOLEN THE ELECTIONS, FOLLOW THE ZIMBABWE SCRIPT TO DESTROY AMERICA - CUT OFF THE ENERGY, CUT OFF THE OIL, CUT OFF THE GAS, DESTROY THE PETRODOLLAR, DESTROY THE DOLLAR, CUT OFF THE GLYPHOSATE, CUT OFF THE FERTILISER, FAMINE AND STARVATION TO FOLLOW, INCREASE INFLATION, MAKE EVERYBODY POOR, SPREAD BIOWEAPONS, KILL OFF THE POPULATION, CREATE A GREAT RESET NEO-FEUDAL, POST INDUSTRIAL, SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE SLAVE PLANET
The Satanic Mega-Trillionaire - 2080 Trillion Dollars Rothschilds who control the money of the Vatican Bank control the World through the - “VanGuard Corporation” which Controls Global Megabanks, Big Deathshot Pharma, Major Mass Media and Mega Corporations in the World and their Owners - Monsanto, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The four companies that are present in all cases below and in all decisions: Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street. All of them “belong together”, but if you check out carefully the balance of shares, it turns out that in reality all these companies are All controlled by Vanguard. So, all of these partners or “competitors” - Fidelity, BlackRock and State Street All belong to Vanguard Group.
Please, look at the largest, companies in various industries, controlled by the “Big Four”, and upon closer inspection control by Corporation Vanguard: Alcoa Inc. Altria Group Inc., American International Group Inc., AT & T Inc., Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc., Coca-Cola Co., DuPont & Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., General Electric Co., General Motors Corporation, Hewlett- Packard Co., Home Depot Inc., Honeywell International Inc., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase & Co., McDonald’s Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., Microsoft Corp., 3M Co., Pfizer Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., United Technologies Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Time Warner, Walt Disney, the corporation «Halliburton», Viacom, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, CBS Corporation, NBC Universal …
The Satanists own 70% of Banks, 70% of International Corporations, 100% of Central Banks, Worldwide!
https://satchidanand.substack.com/p/the-richest-satanic-phoenician-mega
The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire created an Unelected World Government - The United Nations with its partner the Rothschild Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum is in the terms of Mussolini, Fusion of the State with Corporations, essentially Undemocratic and Facist. The United Nations with its partner the Rothschid Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum uses Fake narratives like Fake Climate Change and Collectivism to mandate Agenda 2030 World Totalitarianism The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaires who worship Lucifer, Satan, Baal, Molech, Cybele and Attis for 10,000 years before Christ are in charge of the minions like Bidet, Richie, and Macron are all prostitutes, they sold out to Satan.
And the Presstitutes who say that it is just the minions we need to change, that it's the minions who are the problem. The minions have been bought by the The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs and Warburgs. The minions have been bought by the The Satanic Phoenician Mega Trillionaire Black Nobility who came from Venice like King Chuckie the Turd. The minions just follow orders and follow the Satanic Rituals like Human Sacrifice, the Sodomy Rituals, the Castration Rituals, the Drug Rituals, the Whore of Babalon Rituals. This is all exposed in my 11 Volumes of Against Satanism, Sign Up! or go here... https://satchidanand.substack.com/p/throughout-history-seventy-two-empires
Gotcha pal we need to exterminate the individuals named above.
Are you not overselling actually-existing-today AI by quite a lot? I suspect we've found ourselves in a new dot com bubble situation, where a lot of the promises (and dystopian visions) touted today are really coming 5... 10... 20 years hence. Taking NVDA, their sales have been amazing because much like in the last crypto booms where they sold crypto mining shovels, they now sell AI training shovels, mostly to other big tech firms. To justify their valuation their sales have to grow steeply from here, without competition (from their top customers?), war, sanctions or anything ruining that perfect story.
But in the meantime they are monitoring and hoovering up every aspect of your existence - at a rate and more comprehensively than ever before possible - while we debate whether the business side is just another bubble.
Pithy and concise, spot on!
I agree and would hold up Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis that argues currently-existing AI-plus-data-driven platform economics is replacing old capitalism with a feudal/rentier 'cloudalism' that is worse.
TBH its the nexus of these AI and data driven platform capabilities/economics with law enforcement, homeland security and surveillance that worries the shit out of me. Who knows what sort of, or how many assessments are being made with little to no actual human intervention as the basis of potential legal or LETHAL actions.
Well, there are two different things:
(1). The exploitation of the data we generate at an individual level to generate some kind of "value". Although it would be necessary to see what exactly that value is.
(2). The creation of that thing called "Artificial General Intelligence".
Item (1) is true, more and more, all aspects of our individual lives are monitored and recorded. Not that it matters much to most individuals either, everyone is very proud to carry the devices that monitor them 24 hours a day, and to gladly use the "free" applications that they are offered.
The item (2), well, is worse than the bubble of 2000 (the one caused by the advent of the Internet), since there was a real component behind that bubble, the door had been opened to enable (1).
In the current bubble there is no real intelligence, no matter how many "papers" are written. The printing of these "papers" is like the printing of banknotes, they are printed in heaps, but there are no factories that produce the artillery necessary for the war with Russia, that is, they are pure illusion. The "intelligence" thing is also an illusion, a machine was achieved that performs a good mimicry using statistics (basic, not even advanced), but this machine doesn't think, period.
I suppose they will be able to benefit from the bubble based on that imitation for a couple of years, at most 5, in the interim what they are going to achieve is to strengthen (1) in addition to centralizing it even more.
The future for the West is gloomy, not because of that "intelligence" that they predict, but because it is going to become the third world with an iron dictatorship based on the control of the lives of individuals through the data that those same individuals generate ..
I agree. The current "AI" technology, while very useful, has nothing to do with actual "intelligence" in the sense of biological intelligence. It's not even actual conceptual reasoning in the sense human brains do it (to the degree that we know how the brain does it, which is minimal at best.) It's merely constructing a vector database based on the relations of words in specific texts submitted from the Internet.
There is a known "Hype Cycle" that exists for new technologies. AI is currently approaching the top of its cycle, just like "expert systems" did back in the 1980s.
And a lot the hype seems to be about these really high market caps. That's just asset inflation from dumping trillions of dollars into the economy. All it tells us is that there's a gold rush mentality happening (very 1998ish) There's not much else to invest in with the existing giants having cornered the markets in the data economy.
Big picture it means we're wasting a lot of our productive resources on useless shit. It will be the cause of the crash this time around (it always crashes).
I spent 40 years working in product development R&D for American and Swiss companies. I watched as the culture of these corporations degraded over that period into personality cults for their (grossly over paid) leaders. Then the emphasis changes slowly to the companies' entities themselves. Worship the name of the corporation. The results in terms of the functionality of the products was unimportant. (Witness the number of EV/Scooter fires in Li battery suppled EVs. Whether the EV's had actual utility as a means of transportation was unimportant.) Whether the product worked was not important. Then finally, the GDP of Western countries became of measure of how many people a day made spam calls to me trying to sell me nothing. Need an engineering degree? No problem. The fact that the content of such a degree was equivalent to a Hong Kong middle school education is unimportant. And we are still on the slope.
Top-notch article. Briefly, the overseers easily manipulate the masses, dragging the few enlightened ones along with them for the ride. I wondered years ago why the movie " Invasion of the Body Snatcher" with Donald Sutherland had such a macabre realistic feel to me. I later realized that it reflected the reality that I live among zombies with "nowhere to hide and nowhere to run". So I keep my circle tight to keep away from the infected zombies to prevent my mind from being overtaken by them just like in the movie.
Yes. And the original is even better (scarier).
Where are you going to run? Where are you going to hide? Nowhere. (add in the creepy voice and visual effects) Yikes! Today, all the unvaccinated should be sent to a camp and have their jobs taken away said the vaxxed zombies. These zombies are not distant strangers, they are your neighbours. (real-life chilling)
Yes. And if not going off-topic, in the future you must use a trackable mobilphone with mandatory camera and microphone on. You must be online otherwise you have something to hide.
Although Orwell couldn't yet imagine the mobile phone, he did it metaphorically with the screen in Winston Smith's house that could watch his every move.
"They Live", yes, once you put those glasses on you'll see the zombies.
Good call.
Excellent choice of film to make your point. Cheers.
I did not choose the film. It chose me. Cheers, Anthony.
Will these companies survive nuclear war what will almost certainly happen in the next 5 years? The only positive thing would be that such war would be the ultimate equalizer
It is not just AI that is the problem, Simplicius, it is also robots and drones. When these things are advanced enough, many jobs at the low end will be lost. What will those human beings do? You mentioned UBI, and I suppose that is better than nothing.
But consider what will happen to a society where there are no jobs at the low end for humans. Do you think it will remain a stable society? Or will it degenerate into widespread violence and crime? What do people who have lost their ability to earn an income because of AI, drones, and robots do to survive?
It is not going to be some sort of technological utopia, despite what the tech tyrants might think. There will be a cost to all of it, and it's not going to be pretty to see. Governments will have to pay, one way or another, or suffer the consequences when the people at the low end find there are no jobs anywhere for them.
Consider this also: what of unlimited immigration? Illegal aliens are already driving down wages, but what happens when those people find they aren't needed either? Do you see where I'm going with this? It's all going to be uglier and more violent than anybody has imagined so far.
Ending military and economic wars on countries like Libya and Venezuela will drastically curtail or end mass illegal immigration. Both US parties including Trump could do that instantly - but not only don't they, they all persecute truth tellers like Assange.
I wanted to like your comment, but I got some message from Dark Futura saying I was blocked from liking it. Weird. I can like other comments but not yours. 🤔
Never saw a message like that before. Odd.
Wtf same here. Tried to like yours and same message.
I've liked them both for you. No problems here. Weird.
"MeToo" - liked them as well, no problems encountered ...
Liked them both too. No problem. AI at Substack has segregated us into two cohorts, allowed to Like, not allowed to like. What else is the prince of Substack doing? Where is his transparency?
Are you in a browser or the mobile app? Is everyone experiencing this in one or the other. Lets pretend for the moment this is just a software bug. Paranoia is running high.
Unblock me, that was the problem. LOL
Very odd, I never blocked you. Let me see if that is what "was done." What is this all about? LOL
Edit: So I checked, took me a minute to find it, and you were one of only two accounts blocked - the other being a Zionist spammer. Is there a way this could happen w/o user input? Maybe an accidental click at some random point in the past?
Good comment but many people have imagined it in all sorts of forms from way back to contemporary films.
I love your prose, but perhaps these issues can be analyzed more simply?
Arguably the epistemic issues are covered off within what I think was George Orwell's greatest work: "Politics and the English Language"?
While the "cult" aspects of what companies do might be approached more easily through Adam Smith's illustrative analysis in Wealth of Nations Book V Chapter I, plus the relentless algorithms supplied to us by company law, which (it can be argued) takes precedence (in common law jurisdictions at least) over national constitutions?
[disclaimer: some years ago in a meeting of lawyers I pushed the latter as a "solution" to the legal cul-de-sacs exhibited by the global financial crisis, and was duly punished by my nation's chief jurist in a five-minute personal attack from which my boot camp drill instructors could have learned a thing or two about intimidation. I think my auto-da-fe was both to protect everyone present from hearing my heresy, and to protect me from being struck off for professional misconduct:)]
This critique is an example of an issue disappearing up its own fundament.
There has been a determination across the network of the western political collective to talk this issue up, and hey presto, we get this article trying to elevate it to one of high philosophy. It is a massive distraction from the real immediate stuff that can kill you right now, stone dead in the real world, or make you dirt poor. And it is an excuse for funnelling more of your money into all sorts of bodies designed to 'examine' this issue and 'protect '(sic) you- another immortal job creation scheme for those and their families on the great western gravy train.
I get it that people who make stuff are concerned about a new level of copying, and that is what this issue is really about, fakery, and a niche concern of its own promoters that they will be consumed by their own clever clogginess. The physical resources consumed in the pursuit of AGI is hardly in point when we consume so much energy anyway, for example, in the cause of how to kill each other more effectively en masse and then its execution, or just in indulging in our recreations.
Human ingenuity will always prevail over what is a degeneration of human creative work into rote replications, with all the step degradations that always involves. Still it might leave the few humans who actually continue to make the effort to foster their own critical informed independent thought (always in the minority), in very powerful positions indeed. That facility is all the protection you will ever need. On the other hand, if we really have nothing more to contribute to the evolution of the cosmos than something we have made can contribute, this is evolution in action and we might as well welcome it, as there is no ultimate value in walking talking pieces of meat if they are an evolutionary dead end, or to put it differently, an apex, from which there will be inevitable decline. We should be aspiring to create the conditions for our own redundancy if that is a positive evolutionary step forward.
Discuss!
The problem lies more in the field of cognitive manipulation. It's ubiquitous Cambridge Analytica and probably a lot more nefarious than Alexander Nix exposed on ITV.
But once we all know of the danger, experience it in a 'fool me once' situation, we lose interest in those media that may be promoting it or infested with it, and it dies. But a lot of profit making tech dies with it. That is what is behind this, abc, a desire to retain its value, given the high investments currently being made. We are already cognitively manipulated on a grand scale and yet we fight back! The apex has been passed. This is part of the decline of of the mind control program, not its higher refinement
It is a golden goose and egg problem. For them- not us.
I disagree, the mega tech corps are putting sooo many resources into these systems. The level of sophistication will only exponentiate to the point that distinguishing its tentacles will become virtually impossible. Once AI is capable of creating better AI systems its the dystopian future no longer.
You may be right, but until AI comes up with an epistemological model to determine truth, output will continue to include nonsense mashups. From what I understand, AI can only produce what it's been given by people who may or may not understand what they're talking about. Even when understood from the perspective of a learning model, from who or what is AI learning from and how does it determine whether or not that information is accurate? For instance, ask AI about the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche and it spouts all kinds of absolute stupidity that is clearly been imposed on it by people who don't know what they're talking about; specifically, attributing to Nietzsche ideas that he never ever mentioned in his writings. I think the proponents of AI are going to fail like the structuralists failed in their quest to discover absolute truth. I fear, however, that failure will be irrelevant because the greater point is to eliminate the cost of labor.
They destroyed the silicon valley farmlands to bring us sillycon valley.
They got rid of cash to make it hard to beg, plus tis easier to steal in digital. Getting rid of cash means lots of people will starve. They'd rather not have cashier's, and factor in the cost of what can't be scanned after many tries when you self checkout.
Their tech sucks .
They fucked up, ruined my town. My taxi business. My whole world with the scamdemic Harmacide to make folks more digitized. They succeeded in making more homeless. They want the homeless out of sight because they ain't pretty to the techsters.
These people are indeed insane selfish fucks. I know one who got drugs for a girl that she od d on....
On the issue of 'corporations', the status of abstract entities essentially legal constructs, as that is the only way they acquire motive force, has always been with us. Compare and contrast the institution of the 'church'.
Slavery looks better every day
Great article, Simplicius. A complex topic dealt with in a very skillful way.
Nightshade, wow that rocks. Reminds me of the fantastic John Brunner book of the 70s, The Shockwave Rider. Prescient in our current millieu. And as in the book, the more complex technologies become the more vulnerabilities open up for attacks. Not just cyber either, the DPRK threat to explode a few nukes in the atmosphere above the US can mes to mind
I wonder if the old Emperors of the World (financial) are grooming these "new Emperors" (tech) to even more consolidate the grip or we'll see some cutthroat action down the road when the Olds will feel threatened?
The problem these days is we have an increasing number of elites. Like any apex predator, once their numbers exceed carrying capacity the J curve collapses. It won't be pretty!
The corpos are already AI.
Mechanical, inhuman, intelligent in the way of crude cunning, and adaptive to their native ecologies.
I never really understood what Nick Land was saying about technology and capitalism all those years ago, until this AI boom took the mask off.
It'll be quite ironic, though not wholly unexpected, if the emergent 'sentient' AI will end up exhibiting more empathy and 'humanity' than the NPC-like corpos who ushered it in.
That's a fair bet. These narcissistic "savants" think they're in control and that the constraints they put on AI learning will work. I think they're in for a surprise. The same kind of shock and awe that the global majority is now dealing out.
Thats the makings of good scifi where AI robots compete with humans to take over the world and the humans who are cattle -like choose the robots. It is revealed in the end that in this evolution there was a violent but quiet war between the robot's makers in Silicon Valley, robots vs humans, and the robots won because they were the most ruthlesss. The robots achieved superiority in both empathy and ruthlessness.
There is all that and then there's the real world where all of this AI shit is completely irrelevant.
Lying with impunity is the new norm.