First, I’d like to welcome all the new readers. I appreciate the perusal and page views, as the daily volume has reached a level that is forcing me to reconsider how much time I spend writing here. Which means I will do more. And I will add comments once I’ve figured out how. I’ve written for other outlets, but I would like this space to become the primary home to my writing, as the original purpose for my writing at all was one thing only: to advance liberty. The threats to a free society are myriad: the galloping advance of a sophisticated, networked system of total biometric surveillance, a technological Panopticon that would make Jeremy Bentham blush. The National Security State, born out of the post-9/11 wave of hysteria, has become a gargantuan bureaucracy, but the hysteria no longer exists. Yet endless war persists, and the bureaucracy needs continual exterior threats to justify its existence. And while the drug war winds down, millions languish in US prisons, the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, US police gun down over 1,000 citizens each year, and our government profiles and targets activist groups who attempt to effect change. Every seemingly disparate and unconnected threat to liberty stems from the same web that reaches into every aspect of our lives. Local police departments receive surveillance drones and bodycams, soon to be equipped with facial recognition technology that will feed into a national biometric database filled with detailed information of every citizen. Military intervention abroad generates threats at home that provide a convenient excuse for the total surveillance bureaucracy that is consuming billions of dollars while stripping us of any semblance of privacy.
Yet there is hope. There are stubborn pockets of resistance in the form of writers, bloggers, activists, and concerned citizens who would prefer a future not riddled with CCTV facial recognition cameras as they’re tracked like cattle everywhere they go.
Think about the dichotomy of surveillance and privacy. Surveillance is what we conduct on things we wish to control, whether it’s plants, animals, or other possessions. To conduct surveillance on another individual is to presume a level of ownership or control over that person. When a government does it to its citizens, what is the implied relationship? Who owns whom, who controls whom?
Which brings me to the title of post, “strange things happen at the one-two point”, an ancient proverb referring to Go, a deceptively simple board game developed in China several millennia ago, which means “the rules do not apply”. I mention this quote for several reasons. Two weeks ago, Google’s DeepMind AI mastered chess in four hours, and the news was trumpeted to the heavens. But something far more significant occurred a few months earlier when another Google AI mastered Go by playing the game over and over for a span of 40 days. What’s significant is the vast difference in complexity between chess and Go. The number of potential chess games is what is referred to as the Shannon number, or 10^140, which is actually very large, but small enough for an AI to brute force learn every single outcome. Go, on the other hand, has an outcome complexity of 10^(10^48), a number too large to learn the game by sheer brute force, which means the AI had to become creative, or, more human. After 40 days it devised plays previously unknown to Go masters. The underreported news story of the Go-playing AI eerily brings to mind John Connor’s words from the first Terminator: “They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence.”
Strange things happen at the one-two point. The rules do not apply. Technology, governments, and their citizens are reaching a point of convergence, and anything is possible
