REPUBLIC REBORN

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

For some reason, due to the recent revelation that citizens of Oregon have never pumped their own gas into their vehicles in their lives, those people feel more foreign to me than a Russian or Pole does.  Even they have to drag themselves out of their cars in the ice cold, cursing silently, as they wait for their car to slowly fill up.  But Oregonians have never done this.  Instead, an attendant comes out and does it for them.  Which wouldn’t be bad at all if it were occurring in a free market.  But Oregon’s government has, until recently, mandated that attendants only can pump gas.  The reaction from Oregonians themselves is hilarious, but fascinating:

It’s normal for every single person in most other states to pump their own gas.  Oregon’s citizens know this.  Yet their attitude is one of the above.  Maybe it’s another example of government’s ability to infantilize its population.  And maybe that attitude is not quite representative of all Oregonians.

Planet Biometrics: Somaliland holds biometric presidential election with Irish ID tech

Motherboard: AI-fooling glasses could be good enough to trick facial recognition at airports

The unsettling thought at the back of our minds: Quartz: We should raise AI like parents, not programmers…or they’ll turn into terrible toddlers

Defense World: US army selects Scorpion ScenGen artificial intelligence tech to manage UAS fleet

Activist Post: When will Trump supporters in the freedom movement realize they were duped?

Snowflakes: Techdirt: Indiana legislator wants to force NFL team to hand out refunds to fans ‘offended’ by kneeling players

Defense One: Pentagon seeks laser-powered bat drones

Zero Hedge: Ukraine’s future Nazi leader?

Daily Caller: Judge rules against Fusion GPS bank battle

Related: New York Post: Democrats’ dishonest scramble to disown the Trump ‘dossier’

The American Conservative: Sessions unleashes the hounds on pro-pot states

Forbes: Rate of universe expansion still a mystery

His essays, A Fable for Our Times by One of the Unreconstructed

In Defense of Demagogues

This is in no way a defense of Trump’s ignorant buffoonery, but rather the rare, unfiltered, intelligent subversive who speaks in uncompromising terms.  We want liberty now.  Half-measures and decades of concessions have brought us to the brink of collapse.  There is nothing more to concede.  The future of our children has been tethered to debt we have allowed to accrue, they are born into a Surveillance State continuously at war, forced to use money continuously drained of its value by a central bank.  That there is no compromise with evil is the first lesson to learn in order to restore liberty.  Be unreconstructed.

The Verge: Former NSA contractor to plead guilty over claims he stole 50TB of classified data

Techdirt: DHS expands license plate dragnet, streams collection to US law enforcement agencies

Reason: California is taxing the hell out of pot, but Washington is even greedier

A more humorous take from FEE: California pulls a California on legal marijuana

Also Reason: Trillion-dollar deficit deja vu

NextGov: The Pentagon’s Cloud strategy is “evolving”

FCW: DATA Act review finds errors in $2 billion of DHS transactions

Rare: The Founders would never have trusted the President with sole power to wage nuclear war

Antiwar.com: Pakistan fumes as US announces aid cutoff.  Why not cut off “aid” to every country, everywhere?

Electronic Intifada: Is Israel testing new types of tear gas in Bethlehem? 

NewsOK: Medical marijuana vote set for June

Inside Edition: $1.3 million bottle of vodka-made of gold, silver, and diamonds-stolen from Danish bar

The Week: Why January is secretly the best month for ghost movies

Newsweek: Ancient cave in China filled with 45,000 year-old tools

Tulsa World: Jeff Sessions to end policy that let legal marijuana flourish

Daily Beast: California’s pot queen raided just before legalization

New York Times: Internet users in China expect to be tracked. Now, they want privacy.

Washington Times: Homeland Security data breach compromises personal info of 247,000 DHS employees

CNBC: It reportedly only cost this newspaper a few bucks to access world’s largest biometric data trove

Consortium News: Erasing Obama’s Iran success

Quartz: Death rates among young adults are skyrocketing