The Deep State of Tech
The so-called swamp is hiding in plain sight
Last week was Tech Week in New York and since AI is the fastest growing technology in human history, of course the calendar of events was all AI, all the time. We watched as audiences listened with rapt attention to speakers as they expounded upon the world of difference that various AI technologies and their applications would make to the human condition.
Once again, we will remind you that what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat. Unfortunately, with AI in the mix, it will be repeated on steroids.
When the Age of Social dawned and Facebook, Google and the likes were establishing their beachheads, we warned back then that these were not mere platforms but rather nation-states with larger populations than any single country on the planet. Or even continent, for that matter. Those platforms are now AI-enabled - more and more so every day – and it seems that there’s no escaping that matrix.
Joe Rogan hosted Elon Musk back in 2018 – long before AI hit the zeitgeist and nearly half a decade before Chat GPT/LLMs and AI-enabled tech became ubiquitous. He sounded the alarm even back then – which has gone almost completely ignored - warning that humans would not be able to hold a candle to AI and that once the genie was out of the bottle, “you’re never getting it back in and it’s definitely gonna be outside of human control.”
“We’re already cybernetically connected,” he added. Every time you use Google or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, you’re basically plugging into the matrix.
“I try to convince people to slow down… to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years. Nobody listened,” said Musk.
They’re still not listening, and for the record, as Musk pointed out, regulations requiring seat belts took over a decade. “Industry fought this for years successfully. Eventually, after many, many people died regulators insisted on seat belts.
“This time frame is not relevant to AI,” Musk noted. “You can't take 10 years from the point at which it is dangerous. It's too late and we’re already in an out-of-control countdown. It's hard to predict what happens past the event horizon - it could be great! It's not clear, but one thing is for sure: we will not control it.”
It’s already being proposed that there be no relations placed on AI for the next ten years (US House of Representatives Advance Unprecedented 10-Year Moratorium on State AI Laws). This, from people who have their assistants manage their social media accounts, as, let’s be honest, it’s beyond them to be able do so themselves.
Also keep in mind that the same tech bros who connected the world on social media are now the Lords of AI, more or less, and given the manipulations they practiced and continue to practice through their platforms – Meta and its many properties, Alpha/Google and its many properties – and nation states? Is there a nation in the world that’ll be able to control those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbor, so to speak?
As Musk warned, once the genie’s out of the bottle… and it’s already proven itself to be dangerous (How far will AI go to defend its own survival? Recent safety tests show some AI models are capable of sabotaging commands or even resorting to blackmail to avoid being turned off or replaced).
Not using Chat GPT? ChatGPT Just Got into Your Google Drive and Dropbox, Too, so think again. and lest we forget, “An AI chatbot pushed a teen to kill himself, a lawsuit against its creator alleges,” the AP reported.
Although, and we just use this by way of example, considering that AIs were used during the COVID era to help people overcome ‘vaccine hesitation,’ do keep in mind that the definition of ‘vaccine’ was altered in order to categorize mRNA ‘vaccines’ as vaccines, and many distinguished doctors and researchers were silenced, deplatformed and even lost their licenses when they attempted to encourage that caution be practiced, it might not be a bad idea to proceed with extreme caution.
Especially as AIs are being woven into government systems, given Palantir’s federal contracts to build a unified database of Americans’ personal information, as The New York Times reported, raising alarms among privacy advocates, former employees, and even some inside the company about potential surveillance and political misuse.
It may be a good time to take another look at Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with its Hal 9000, the homicidal master computer. Is it still truly early days, as we’re told that AI will take over more jobs and professions, or was President Eisenhower’s warning to beware the tech-industrial complex in his farewell address more prescient that we suspected and it’s already later than we think?
There’s no doubt that LLMs are great tools that help you get information faster. But do keep in mind as we barrel headlong and without hesitation into this new technology that it’s not only teaching you: it’s learning you. Onward and forward.