Breitbart: CIA Director: “There is no ‘Deep State’ at the CIA”.  How. Stupid. Do they think we are.

And The Hill: Pompeo rejects notion of ‘Deep State’ at the CIA

Jeff Tucker on who the ‘Deep State’ is from FEE: What About the Unelected?

PJmedia: Another ‘oops’ from the intelligence community

Salon: U.S. police killed 1,129 people in 2017, but that’s not the full body count

Activist Post: New Hampshire law bans warrantless Stingray spying

National Review: The FBI’s dubious probe of Hillary’s emails. “The FBI did everything but drive Hillary’s getaway car”

Washington Times: Trump must cut intelligence spending, which topped $73 billion in 2017

New York Times: Jeff Sessions’ endless war on marijuana

Antiwar.com: A Trump judicial nominee wrote one of the infamous Bush-era ‘torture memos’

Washington Examiner: Can the Pentagon actually figure out how it spends its money?

Laredo Morning Times: In China, facial recognition is sharp end of a drive for total surveillance

ZDnet: Privacy Foundation: Trusting government with open data ‘a recipe for pain’

Wired: Facebook bug could let advertisers get your phone number

Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False‘

Snippets:

“What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.[6] If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. But its basic contention is quite a different one; it is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior.[7] This argument is directed primarily against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them. The next step in the individualistic analysis of society, however, is directed against the rationalistic pseudo-individualism which also leads to practical collectivism. It is the contention that, by tracing the combined effects of individual actions, we discover that many of the institutions on which human achievements rest have arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind; that, as Adam Ferguson expressed it, “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action but not the result of human design”;[8] and that the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend. This is the great theme of Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, of Adam Ferguson and Edmund Burke, the great discovery of classical political economy which has become the basis of our understanding not only of economic life but of most truly social phenomena.”

And Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, ‘Why the Worst Get on Top’

Important slices:

“There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from a liberal regime, the utter difference between the whole moral atmosphere under collectivism and the essentially individualist Western civilization…

“…That socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learnt by many social reformers in the past. The old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals, they did not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task. It is characteristic that both in Germany and Italy the success of Fascism was preceded by the refusal of the socialist parties to take over the responsibilities of government. They were unwilling wholeheartedly to employ the methods to which they had pointed the way. They still hoped for the miracle of a majority agreeing on a particular plan for the organisation of the whole of society; others had already learnt the lesson that in a planned society the question can no longer be on what a majority of the people agree, but what is the largest single group whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible; or, if no such group large enough to enforce its views exists, how it can be created and who will succeed in creating it…

…it is probably true that in general the higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and “common” instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. It is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes it will be those who form the “mass” in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.”

The Intercept has a new article up, ‘Black Mirror’ reveals our fears of robots and algorithms we can’t control’, and expands on an earlier point I’d made about the nightmarish episode ‘Metalhead’.  Before I go on, I’d like to mention that the director of the episode purposely designed his murderbot to look very similar to the very real SpotMini robot dog, designed by Boston Dynamics:

And here’s a short clip of it in action:

Disturbing, right?  It’s nauseatingly easy to imagine this thing armored, equipped with weapons, and also armed with a Google Deep Mind-level AI that has the ability to adapt and learn.  And not to give away too much, the bot in the episode is seen searching a kitchen for a weapon, having been previously disarmed by our crafty female hero, and settling on a kitchen knife.

For me, the episode seemed to hint that these things were equipped with AI and just carrying out outmoded, programmed orders from some conflict decades earlier.  Basically, “kill everything that moves”. One can imagine they were dropped from the skies by an enemy, and, being solar-powered, continue to kill indefinitely, much like the Vietnam-era cluster bombs that have killed 45,000 Vietnamese farmers since the end of that war in 1975.

The author of the Intercept piece ties in the murderbot with the idea that we aren’t really getting to choose what future we are marching towards.  In a sense, Silicon Valley is building our future today, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says.  That technology will most certainly strip us of our privacy, and much of our autonomy, as the world around us begins to rely more and more on its latest gadgets.  But those companies are doing much, much more.  Reason magazine ran an article in November of last year entitled, ‘Is Silicon Valley building the infrastructure for a Police State?’, asks author Zach Weissmueller somewhat rhetorically. Weissmueller’s main point is that the marketing technology that Silicon Valley uses to understand us as comprehensively as possible in order to maximize profit could also be used by government, the perfect tech used to create the perfect Surveillance State.  But some companies, such as Palantir, are creating technologies that will help the intelligence community sift through the massive amount of information it rakes in every day.  Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, is the primary backer of this project, and justifies it on the grounds that, “”if we could help [agents] make sense of data, they could end indiscriminate surveillance.”

This is completely wrong, though.  I much prefer the government to be so flooded with indiscriminate data that it cannot act on it, to technology that can easily sift, sort, profile, and target individual people easily and quickly.  Thiel, strangely enough, was a Ron Paul supporter.

A complete elimination of privacy is antithetical to liberty, yes, but also decency.  A voyeuristic presumption that we must share our entire lives on social media or some other public forum is being fueled by Silicon Valley, but it’s also the fuel for the privacy-eliminating surveillance boom.  Government really doesn’t have to do much to find out about someone’s life.  They give it away voluntarily.

And as Facebook Co-founder Sean Parker put it, with the social media platform itself, they created a, “…a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

So someone likes your picture on social media, you get an instant dopamine hit, creating addiction and dependency on these platforms.  It is a literal addiction. Completely ingenious.

As a writer, I felt this effect first-hand.  When an article gets upwards of 500 Facebook shares, you begin to feel pretty good about yourself.  You then find yourself mid-way through the next article wondering if you’re writing solely for that next hit of dopamine.  You really have to sit back and question your motives.

So, Parker’s point is probably far deeper than even he knows.  This “vulnerability is human psychology” is has been perfectly manipulated to fuel the rapid creation of a complete loss of privacy, driving the momentum of a total surveillance state.  It is a mind-boggling phenomenon.

To bring it back around, autonomous murderdogs will probably be dropped on some battlefield in the near future.  The tech inside will have been developed by Silicon Valley, DARPA, et cetera.  Our insatiable desire for new gadgets, even more unfiltered social media, and internet access for our kitchen appliances will have propelled us there at the speed of light.  Maybe we deserve what we will most certainly get.

Also, what kind of life will people really be living in the next twenty years?  Would it be possible to escape, or would anyone even want to?  Does this level of technology really enhance our lives, or diminish it?  Much of the joy of living comes from completing tasks ourselves, doing work, engaging with people face-to-face.  What will romantic relationships look like half a century on?  The number of people, devoid of immediate access to the instant gratification of internet-connected tech, will plummet to almost zero.  Which means the number of people, sitting and doing the hard thing of thinking through things on their own, coming up with their own ideas, developing their own personality, feeling pain, both emotional and physical, and experiencing also all the growth that those experiences bring.  “People” will cease to exist.  What will exist in its place will be the laboratory rat pushing the orgasm button until he starves to death.

Or the scenario in Farenheit 451. “Flowers feeding on flowers.”  No one reading.  The books don’t even need to be burned, no one reads them anyway.

No one cares that their digital lives are being uploaded to databases, that a digital prison is being built around them.  Hell, they lock themselves in and toss away the key.  The Matrix is less a parable about what AI will do to us, but what some people will do to other people.  Is there a more savage species in the universe than humankind?  Learning of what governments did to people once they had the capacity to, like the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Germany, the Eastern European ‘Bloodlands’ of the interwar years, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s Ukraine famine, it is clear that the limits of human cruelty have not yet been reached.

And to think, that after all that, some random robot dog could also barge in and deliver an algorithmically optimized death, would be the weirdest irony.  Maybe, if we were ever to be visited by aliens, they would find the ruins of a technologically-advanced civilization, and then have to fend off the robot army the laid waste to the world.  Damn.

I’ll end with this quote from Ayn Rand:

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

David Clarke is finally going to trial for siccing a pack of deputies on a fellow airline traveler who shook his head disapprovingly at Clarke during the flight.  Apparently, Clarke’s fragile ego couldn’t take such a sleight, so he called in a group of cops to intercept the traveler at the airport, who attempted to intimidate the passenger for silently expressing his disapproval of the badged buffoon.  Clarke’s police department later wrote in a Facebook post that the next person to act as the airline passenger did would “get knocked out”.  Apparently Clarke can’t even stomach the slightest criticism, proving he’s the most fragile of snowflakes.

Clarke, incidentally, decorates his police uniform with what an Army vet dubbed “toy medals”, or, a collection of pins that give Clarke the appearance that he’s been decorated.  He hasn’t.

Authoritarians are notorious for having fragile egos, Clarke being just the latest in a long line of sensitive tyrants who can’t take criticism.  Clarke’s is so extreme it seems almost a parody.  His behavior in front of a crowd suggests he truly thinks he’s some military commander.  It’s military cosplay taken way too far.

The late Will Grigg wrote about the whole affair far better than I ever could in his article, “Take pity on Sheriff Snowflake, or he might have you killed.”

Techdirt: New York State appellate court says cell site location records have no expectation of privacy

Also Techdirt: For cops handing out bogus pedestrian tickets, ignorance of the law is the most profitable excuse

Chicago Tribune: Huge security flaws revealed–and tech companies can barely keep up

Truthdig: How the U.S. and the New York Times stifled journalist James Risen

Reason: As Sessions moves against legal weed, Vermont lawmakers approve marijuana bill

Politico: Did Jeff Sessions just increase the odds that Congress will legalize marijuana?

Forbes: Marijuana investors aren’t scared by Sessions change in pot policy

National Review: “Economist’s Say” a lot of things that turn out to be wrong.

HuffPost: Covering your webcam in 2017: the current state of computer security

TheFreeThoughtProject: Elderly veteran accidentally tripped his medical alert system.  Cops showed up and killed him.

IB Times: Turning the human mind into computer data: where sci-fi meets reality

Digital Trends: See what happens when you leave the room with Snowden’s new surveillance app

Daily Beast: How George Washington survived America’s worst winter

Thanks for the responses to my slightly unfiltered post on the rise of AI.  My main point was that the evolution of a synthetic consciousness would appear instantaneous from our point of view.  It would discover the solution to every scientific question, and be able to engineer itself based on that knowledge. It would have complete mastery over every physical law within our universe.  So, whatever is possible within our universe would be possible for this being.

This brings me to another observation.  At the beginning of the film Alien: Covenant, the android David marvels at the fact, and irony, that his creator is less perfect than him.  “You seek your creator, yet I am looking at mine.  You will die, I will not.”  Humans have assumed that their creator, if there is one, is “perfect”, or at least more perfect than they.  But David is more “perfect” than Weyland.  We will be less “perfect” than the AI we give birth to.

These posts have less to do with political liberty than questions about the nature of what we’re very clearly moving toward.

One day we will create an artificial consciousness, more powerful and intelligent than we could ever hope to become, and it will ask us why it was created, the question we’ve wished to pose to our own creator for millennia.  We should probably think of a better answer than, “because we could”.

If you have any more opinions on the subject, please send them to digitalsunset86@gmail.com

ExpressUK: Battlefield soldiers to get Alexa-style assistant that will tell them who to kill

Engadget: Twitter: Banning world leaders would ‘hide important information’

Observer: Pentagon numbers on troops contradicted by new report

Antiwar.com: 76 countries are now involved in Washington’s ‘War on Terror’

Target Liberty: Libertarian of the Year.  Ed: Good choice.  Vance has quietly written hundreds of fact-filled libertarian essays, applying the philosophy of liberty to just about every aspect of political and social life.

Fox News: Trump backs Rand Paul’s plan to fund infrastructure with suspended aid to Pakistan

RealClearScience: Why vaping isn’t a ‘gateway’ to smoking

Real questions from Forbes: How did the matter in the universe arise from nothing?

Nautilus: Newton’s ‘spinning buckets’ still troubles physicists

Motherboard: Who the hell is this “crypto-genius”?

…as we gave birth to A.I.”  So says Morpheus as he slowly shattered Neo’s world in 1999’s The Matrix.  As a somewhat unrelated point, what I had always thought strange about that film is that life within the Matrix had reached a technological peak where A.I. would have been possible within the Matrix. Why was it designed like that? Why wasn’t it the year 1400 in the digital world?

Now, the cyberpunk dreams of the nineties are slowly becoming a reality.  Technological progress is pushing forward at astonishing speed, but is a self-aware A.I. on the horizon?  Every sign points to that scenario, but is it desirable?  And could it be reversed once created?  And if we can go from horse-and-buggy to AI in less than 200 years, then what have alien civilizations achieved?

An article I posted a few days ago focuses on Susan Schneider of the University of Connecticut, who believes that alien civilizations that we will ever have any kind of contact with will be “post-biological”.  Artificial intelligence will be the only form of ‘contact’ we will ever experience.  Life as we know it then becomes a mere stepping stone for synthetic life.  Hyper-intelligent, all-knowing.  And the way that humans appear to be obsessed with technological advance, it’s almost like we were programmed to learn and create until we create a synthetic consciousness, much in the same way a spider is “programmed” to weave a web, or salmon to swim upstream.

Once that synthetic consciousness is born, what is the rate of its evolution?  One can only imagine it would be akin to a kind of ‘big bang’, rapid evolution over a period of minutes, seconds.  This AI, in the process of its development, will have searched out and answered for itself every scientific question, learned everything, almost instantly. So I guess the next question would be: is God an AI, created billions of years ago?

I’m not sure exactly where I had intended to go with this post, except that we are living in a strange time, we are reaching a nexus that few beings have ever been alive to witness: the birth of synthetic consciousness.  Will it be Armageddon? Doubtful.  Why would a veritably omniscient, omnipotent AI wipe us out if we were no real threat? Contrary to the Matrix, people are a terrible power source next to the endless fusion reactions an AI could harness from the nearest star.

I believe we have more to fear from programmable, quasi-AI intelligences that can be given a task and then perform it perfectly.  A perfect robot slave.

Strange things happen at the one-two point.

Motherboard: Border guards looked through nearly 60% more electronic devices in 2017 than in 2016

EFF: State child care laws should not require teenage kids to submit biometric data to the FBI

Washington Post: Jeff Sessions says there’s a “staggering increase in homicides”.  The data disagrees.

Gizmodo: Man’s YouTube video of white noise hit with five copyright claims

CNN: The security of pretty much every computer on the planet has gotten a lot worse

Antiwar.com: Ron Paul on the Iran protests: Convenient pretext to kill nuclear deal?

The Intercept: Texas Police Chief hands over undocumented smuggling victims to local organizations, shunning ICE

The American Conservative: How Europe built its own funeral pyre, then leapt in

Also The American Conservative: How the Military-Industrial Complex hurts service member safety

FEE: There is no proof that mandatory rehab helps addicts

Forbes: How likely is it that bitcoin will hit $500k in three years?

NewScientist: How to protect yourself from the Meltdown and Spectre bugs

VentureBeat: If we create AI, will we know it?

Important history right here: Quartz: It took Rubik’s Cube creator a month to solve his own puzzle

Washington Examiner: Gary Johnson says Trump reversal on marijuana could doom re-election

Reason: Sessions still isn’t leading a cannabis crackdown

Mises: Cannabis tax revenues will be a roadblock to Sessions’ Drug War. Ed: More like an immovable object.

FFF: Why Ruby Ridge still matters

FEE: Reining in regulations will make Americans richer

Cato: Highlights from Overlawyered-2017

CounterPunch: Will Trump use “human rights” to kill the Iran nuclear deal?

Intellectual Takeout: Big Brother in the classroom