AI and Modern Technological Advance

Judging whether current tech directions are good or evil is more complex than it seems

In the recent spate of very proactive steps the new Trump administration has taken, one development stands out and has attracted the ire of sections of the truther community. It seems appropriate, given the topic, to quote an AI search engine summary of what has been one of the key causes of concern for those who aren’t howling about Trans rights or the need for open borders:

“President Donald Trump has announced a $500 billion private sector investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure, known as the Stargate Initiative, which aims to revolutionize U.S. AI infrastructure and maintain America’s technological edge. The project, led by Trump, OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, will start with an immediate $100 billion investment and plans to expand to $500 billion over four years. This initiative has sparked both interest and criticism, with some tech giants like Elon Musk expressing doubts about the funding and others like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella showing support.

• Stargate Initiative: A $500 billion private sector investment in AI infrastructure, aiming to build data centers and create over 100,000 jobs in the United States.

• Key Players: OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Microsoft are among the tech giants involved in the project, with Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison serving as key leaders.

• Criticism and Support: Elon Musk has publicly criticized the project, questioning the funding, while Satya Nadella has expressed support, stating that Microsoft is committed to its partnership with OpenAI.

• Goals and Implications: The Stargate Initiative aims to prevent U.S. reliance on foreign AI infrastructure, maintain America’s technological edge, and create economic growth through private sector investment in domestic infrastructure.”

The quote above is indicative of both the advantages and the problems of AI. I can immediately gain an instant summary of any topic. That’s a useful tool for someone looking for information. But at the same time I get this through the operation of a machine. The machine is programmed by other people and it filters through vast quantities of online content to deliver this summary to me.

I only know if the summary is truly accurate if I have some independent knowledge of my own already. The tool that is useful if I know something already….is potentially dangerous if I don’t know anything. I can’t entirely trust the tool, because I can’t entirely trust the people who developed the tool. As with search engines or social media companies, my understanding can be directed, and potentially by those who really don’t have my best interests at heart. There are design instructions operating of which I am unaware, and algorithms determining what information is presented to me.

With search engines and with social media companies we already know this malignant manipulation occurred, and in some ways was the purpose of the creation of new technologies. Anyone who investigates these matters to any extent knows a few key facts:

1. Many recent tech innovations ultimately derived from DARPA grants and military funding. What we think of as independently created breakthroughs were often State funded and to some extent State controlled all along. In the West with Facebook or Google or Twitter these origins and links were partly disguised. In China there was no need for such disguise since Party power was already absolute. China quite openly controls Tik Tok and uses it for CCP information gathering. All Chinese companies are legally required to act as adjuncts of CCP State spying, surveillance, information gathering, psy-ops propaganda and industrial espionage as and when it suits the CCP (which is constantly and always).

2. As well as creating or funding the tech or being undeclared early patrons of its development, intelligence and security alphabet agencies in particular were quick to spot the possibilities of things like search engines and social media companies. Controlling these new technologies meant a technologically aided control of the flow of information that previous tyrannies could only dream of. You could bury information, if these and legacy media (which was also following orders) were the main sources and you controlled them. That was what was attempted with a range of things, from COVID commentary to the Hunter Biden laptop.

   Or you could invent information, spread it everywhere, and pretend it was authoritative and accurate. You could portray propaganda as established fact, which is of course why so many articles are written from a certain perspective on climate change, the need for Net Zero, or even why eating insects is a good idea and why Elon Musk must be a Nazi. You could tell people that an entirely novel gene therapy that they had little urgent reason to take (unless they were very elderly with multiple co-morbidities) was safe and effective. You could even have your outsourced censorship complex supplied with another set of companies you owned and directed called ‘fact checkers’ and have them sweeping up and denying whatever truths got past your other mechanisms of control.

   Only the explosion of alternative media and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter prevented all US news content, for instance, all public discourse and reportage in the USA being effectively controlled by the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. If you think that’s an exaggeration, it really isn’t. And it applied to both traditional legacy media and news content AND the ability of private individuals to publicly share their thoughts and words with others.

3. At the same time, these new technologies offered the State and its security apparatus an unprecedented opportunity to monitor and surveil the populace, to harvest information on every social media and search engine user, to compile psychological profiles both individually and collectively, to understand public attitudes and to get to work altering or manipulating them through the same technological mediums. People would be willingly supplying constant updates on their likes, dislikes, tastes, contacts, friendships, political affiliations and modes of thinking, all of which could be used against them if required. The kind of blackmail material normally obtained by physical surveillance in the real world could potentially be harvested online. Just look at their porn search history. Or you could take someone’s angriest reflexive rant and criminalise it as hate speech as an excuse to imprison them. The way people presented their private lives online was as useful to emergent tyranny as it was to the home burglars noticing a wealthy family posting that their home would be empty for several weeks as they went on an expensive holiday.

4. Objecting to all this was complicated by two things. First, there are real criminal activities online that should be monitored and should be responded to with prison time. Everyone sensible would want an HONEST police response of some kind to things like child grooming, horrific abuse images, pedophile activities and networking, terrorist recruitment and encouragement of terrorism. Even lesser issues like selling stolen or counterfeit goods on EBay require police response. And most people too don’t want free speech to mean you can stalk someone, issue direct violent threats to kill or rape them, or bombard them with harassment for weeks or months on end. Nobody sane wants children driven to suicide by online bullying or domestic abuse victims being stalked and harassed by ex partners through online interactions. So all of that does have to be protected against. The problem comes when a DISHONEST police force or security apparatus, one serving malign ends, use legitimate policing to justify illegitimate tyranny. And that’s very easily done simply by putting truthful content or legitimate political difference in the SAME basket as real crime, real evil, and real hate.

5. Second, the issues around the use of advancing technology and it’s manipulation by the authorities were also complicated by the lack of public understanding of the history of these technologies and the purposes to which they are put. Even today most people don’t care that Tik Tok is owned by the CCP and is harvesting the extensive private information you put in to be on Tik Tok. Nor do the kind of people ready to do some asinine challenge like eating Tide Pods stop to wonder if their Tik Tok addiction is a healthy one or if a fun entertainment provided by the Chinese Communist Party might want to develop a generation of western morons. And the same thing applies with the western tech companies-even after the Twitter Files were released there are many, many people who support the kind of State-Corporate fascist alliance on censorship and the suppression of truth and persecution of dissident voices thar occurred during the Biden administration. There are just as many uninformed people who still don’t understand what happened. These people won’t investigate anything themselves, will continue to entirely support narratives given to them by proven liars, and will insist that Matt Taibbi is a liar just as readily as they insist that Elon Musk is a Nazi.

All of this history with search engines, social media companies, DARPA grants, the censorship of truth and the promotion of lies, is enough to make anyone highly sceptical about future or emerging technologies and their potential, even likely, misuse. But these aren’t even the only precedents that apply.

The glaring still recent experience of COVID stands like a colossal shadow in the background, a warning from history only five years old. COVID had all the elements of a science fiction dystopia and all the aspects that make fear of developing technology a real fear. It combined technological innovation with a disgusting assault on civil liberties and (in the name of Public Safety) a direct assault on public health. Despite a 4 trillion dollar wealth transfer, despite enormous economic damage, despite it being the case that COVID 19 was artificially created and need not ever have existed without scientific hubris and malpractice, despite excess deaths, despite turbo cancers, despite study after study confirming that the gene therapies were always too dangerous to use and too ineffectual to be useful, society still generally pretends that the COVID period was justified or that the measures taken were normal and rational. For those of us who knew otherwise at the time and have read the evidence confirming we were right since then, this societal failure to acknowledge the evil and stupidity of the COVID measures and to withdraw COVID vaccines entirely (perhaps with an international ban on both gain of function research and mRNA products) leaves us the awareness that our scientists, doctors and experts can nearly all endorse a thing which is insane and are therefore difficult to trust in relation to OTHER technologies as well.

If all this wasn’t an exhausting enough compilation of factors tending towards suspicion of new technologies two other factors still have to be mentioned. These are WEF and UN style plans supported by Globalists in national governments, and Chinese use of technology within a social credit system.

China’s current CCP tyranny is not like old imperial Chinese dynasties or even earlier Communist regimes. It is a Communist tyranny which has harnessed both capitalist private enterprise and cutting edge technologies to the creation of a hybrid form of technocratic tyranny. China has rather chillingly and repeatedly supplied multiple leaders prepared to kill millions of people, both abroad and at home, and China developed multiple technologies before anyone else. But the traditional characteristic of the imperial system was the prioritisation of order and tradition in a way that was far more suspicious of new technologies and approaches than western civilisation was. Chinese imperial powers liked to pretend they had already reached perfection, and it was only the humiliations of the 19th century that fully shattered that innovation averse conclusion. Even while Mao targeted the Four Olds, radical zeal was not fully behind and enmeshed with technology the way it is today. China’s social credit system is a technologically based perfection of tyranny, a means of continually monitoring and controlling citizens more advanced and reliable than simple indoctrination.

That system stands as a warning of what new technologies can be used for. You don’t have to look to science fiction novels. You can see it, today, already in place, in China. Every action is monitored and judged and can be used by the State to reward or punish you almost instantly. All of your spending and purchasing is known and ultimately controlled by the State. You can be denied access to banking, purchasing and the necessities of existence digitally and electronically. The State, simply by denying access to modern systems, can render an individual outside of society. Combined with barrier systems, whole neighbourhoods can become versions of prison, with movement heavily restricted. The individual can be forced to monitor and correct themselves, all in the hope of acquiring a social credit score that lets them survive. The debanking we have seen in the West, together with calls for a central bank digital currency, are that Chinese social credit system tyranny in its infancy.

And the UN, the WEF and transnational bodies were all very busily constructing a western equivalent. That is what DEI and ESG guidelines install. That is why every western nation was looking into a central bank digital currency. That is why power was removed more and more to transnational and unaccountable bodies. Tech was at the heart if it all. The social media companies and legacy media companies would be the propaganda and censorship arms of that techno-feudal system. 15 minute cities would replicate the conditions of barrier divided Chinese prison-cities. Mentoring your ‘carbon footprint’ would be one of the excuses for controlling and monitoring all your spending. National electorates would lose the right to question actions removed to the level of transnational fiat. The behaviour of Canadian banks towards freedom convoys or the Bank of America towards US conservatives during the Biden years would be the core of a western social credit system, especially combined with mandatory digital ID and central bank digital currency. Everything would have a QR code. Everything would be ‘smart’ technology-that is, technology that can be switched off and on by the State. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals stood as the template to follow to create this new slave society, this technologically backed severe reduction of democracy, accountability, and civil liberty. The SDG’s gave a nice propaganda claim and a nice alleged purpose to measures that would represent the death of all freedom in western civilisation, and thereby of course also the final end of western civilisation which without freedom is not western civilisation at all.

And AI would render millions of people both literally and metaphorically redundant, useless eaters in Harari’s chilling phrase, to be….what? Removed first from jobs no longer needed as AI did them, smart monitored and surveilled by AI systems surrounding them, guided to pre determined conclusions so that all human thought and choice, especially political thought, was already programmed by AI acting as both censor and guide, as floating depositary of humanity’s outsourced conclusions and as careful guardian of what we are allowed to know? Or perhaps the greatest truther fears are the most real ones of all, and we would be conditioned by AI, even better than we have been conditioned by legacy media, to consider millions of deaths perfectly unavoidable, normal, or even beneficial?

After all legacy media and CURRENT technology, current control of the flow of information, was enough to enable a truly radical technological experiment on the whole human race that many of us (not me, but many other people) supported. It was enough to force a giant leap of faith with mRNA while experts were screaming that it was reckless, but being silenced for doing so. It’s also turned what was outlying and extremist policy and thought, radical Green extremism, mainstream and respectable through the promotion of climate change hysteria. That, too, shows a major area where new and potentially disastrous tech is pushed to extremes that would once have been widely and automatically considered bizarre and fanatical. Today, the serious and respectable people think it’s perfectly normal to genetically modify mosquitoes and research blocking out the sun.

In other words, extreme complacency on the potential harms of new tech is now the default position of those who consider themselves respectable, and those who determine what is funded and what is dismissed. The scientific community base line of opinion and expert consensus seems to be that there is nothing to worry about and worrying about it is a conspiracy theory, AFTER millions of excess deaths followed just one example of it. All rational understanding that massive proposed changes can have massive damaging effects (exceeding anything they were trying to mitigate, for example) is seemingly gone from many of our leading institutions, especially the transnational ones, even before you get to the point of thinking depopulation is a real and psychotic aim.

How are we to trust the authorities on these issues, when they are fine with continuing experiments to encourage viruses to transfer from animals to humans or even worse, when they are developing viruses with an 80 to 100% human death rate? That’s not much more reckless than deciding that everyone should have a Personal Home Nuclear Bomb to play with and investing heavily in the Home Nuclear Bomb companies (MicroBomb or The Mushroom Cloud Corporation) as an exiting and potentially profit filled developing market.

When technology is sufficiently advanced, and the oversight of technology is sufficiently corrupt, technology can and will pose an existential threat to mankind. And it poses a threat to the current shape of human rights, civil liberties and inherited freedoms even before that point of existential threat is reached.

You don’t have to be a genius to spot this, or a conspiracy theorist to fear it. Science fiction has been speculating and warning about tech developments for as long as tech developments have been both aiding mankind generally and perfecting ways to slaughter us in large numbers too. The negative possibilities of AI are perhaps even more obvious than those of other recent tech developments. At the extreme we have a medium to long term threat of a Terminator scenario. In the medium to short term we have the threat of AI harnessed to tyranny and social credit control systems. And in the immediate to short term we already have the reality that AI can have negative impacts on our general levels of reasoning, political awareness, cognition, memory, and individual capabilities as generations grow up deferring their thinking to machine generated summaries.

We may become Morlocks and Eloi, thanks to AI, at least in behaviour, even before we become John or Sarah Connor. There are already proofs of behavioural differences caused by children using mobile phones or IPads, and some research indicating that mRNA vaccines have psychological and behavioural effects in addition to those caused by lockdown policies.

If the tech doesn’t kill us, then, it may negatively shape us. But the first negative consequence will likely be to render some forms of work obsolete. What happens to the people AI renders obsolete? Do they learn to code, as miners and factory workers have previously been told to do? Do they go the way of the home based cotton weaver? What happens when AI is doing all the coding? When AI is the judge in the courtroom, as has already been proposed by certain lunatics who have never picked up a science fiction book before. Perhaps a limited AI consciousness, or a pure machine of advanced capabilities, can effortlessly replace every human surgeon on Earth. Certainly, my respect for surgeons today, and my prior assumption that they were NOT unfeeling machines, is a bit wobblier after COVID. But I’m not sure that replacing them with ACTUAL machines would be a Great Leap Forward. I’d still want some kind of Bones McCoy waving the brilliant technological healing device around. At least show me a human being pressing the buttons, and hopefully with more understanding than a monkey at a keyboard trying to randomly type Shakespeare plays.

Globalist futurists like Harari almost gloatingly ponder these problems with the air of ‘oh, well, you’ll all die off of course’, and lead every reader to the conclusion that all technological development MUST happen as they foresee it and can never be stopped in its tracks. But is that entirely true? Are we inevitably heading towards a techno feudal slavery where the useless eaters have even less say, if they are still alive, then they have today? I don’t think this is something we should welcome, or pretend is utterly unavoidable either.

All of the above should indicate that as a conservative science fiction nerd I’m rather keenly aware of what the truthers fear most, and of the ways their fears do touch on existing reality. But they also assume that with a 500 billion dollar AI development plan that also means that Trump is ‘controlled opposition’, a lure to dupe us Trumpist sheep over a technocratic cliff edge (as a meme I saw today put it). For me this ignores all the ways Trump is stunningly meeting the promises of the 2nd term in ways that fundamentally oppose Globalism. The techno slave future needs central bank digital currency. He’s acted against that. It needs us all signed up to transnational bodies. He’s withdrawing from WHO and criticising other UN agencies. UN Sustainable Development Goals are the manifesto of the techno slavery future, and he’s in most areas acting against them. Drill baby drill is not compatible with the total control of energy supply and the forced transfer to ‘green’ energy globalists want. DEI and ESG forced by BlackRock on every company there is was a key part of the grim but rainbow plastered dystopia being constructed (you’ll have nothing, you’ll be happy….and you’ll all be trans and ashamed of whiteness could form the core mantra of all this). But Trump is dismantling DEI.

At least three quarters of Trump’s actions and policy platform directly contradicts Globalism and the techno slavery future, which does for me mitigate things like him (remotely) addressing the WEF or falling for the COVID scam in the first term or signing up to a 500 billion dollar AI scheme. Trump is not captured by anyone, even when he’s fooled. He will reach his own conclusions and they are usually reached as a business calculation. 500 billion to give the US an AI edge when China is developing tech at an extraordinary pace? That might be very helpful to the US. At the least it doesn’t seem so far a public-private scheme instantly transferring huge public borrowing to a friend with a start up that 10 years later won’t have built anything. At least this far, it’s not directly comparable to all those Green Globalist projects to buy EV buses that don’t work or turn crop fields into wind farms that don’t supply any energy. It’s a Big Dream project and they can be terrifyingly wasteful and worthless…but they do also occasionally build a Hoover Dam, if done right.

What Trump and Musk share is a belief in the possibilities unlocked by entrepreneurship and business unshackled from State bureaucracy. They combine that with an old fashioned, almost 19th century belief in US destiny manifested through swift technological progress. This is the thinking that built American greatness in the first place. But it can get close to the technocracy, Scientism and blind faith in tech without fear of consequence that Globalists have. That is a potential danger, and we saw how Trump can be deceived with Warp Speed.

None of that, nor does this AI deal, mean that Trump is the captured puppet of Big Tech. It means even the greatest leaders can be led astray. What we must see, what we must hope for, is tech under the 2nd term harnessed to the ambitions, desires and needs of the ordinary citizen, rather than to the corruption, desires and plots of Globalist elites. Tech is exactly the same as money. It is not itself inherently good or evil. It is the direction of it, the spending of it, and the wisdom of the owner of it that makes it either good or evil.

I think that Trump is wiser and possessed of nobler intent than Bill Gates, any Soros, or any technophile Globalist. He and Musk are optimistic about the good that new tech can do, although Musk has expressed doubts regarding the funding of the Stargate Initiative. Trump sees this the way he sees fracking, drilling and ‘liquid gold’. He probably also sees it in the context of trying not to fall far behind China in technological development, capacity and capability.

AI doesn’t have to be used for evil. With correct thoughtfulness and protections, it may make life easier and better. It may do economic and cultural good. But we should closely watch its growth, fully aware that this is a kind of tech with potential species threatening implications that should be taken seriously. Wise caution is far too rare today, regarding technology, but perhaps truther paranoia is also extended too far when considering this AI deal proof of Trump’s perfidy. It proves nothing of the sort. I remain highly suspicious of rapid AI development, certain at a spiritual level that human creativity and ingenuity should only be aided and never entirely supplanted by technology (let alone human political agency) but sure too that there is a difference between the intent of Trump approaching this tech, and the intent of those who want a techno feudal slave society where you and I have no rights at all.