The Statists are coming! The Statists are coming!
The clergy of the Nation-State religion are, along with their acolytes, manufacturing a new sin to save us from. Because what’s the point of salvation without sin? And without salvation, what’s the point of religion, and without religion, what will happen to all those priests and bishops and inquisitors? Not to mention the millions of minions who have dedicated their lives to serving the State-god and thus depend on the money it confiscates from everyone using holy writs enforced by guns and the threat of dungeons. A steady stream of new sins is important to keep the Holy State healthy and thriving, and the place to start is imagining places where the Satan of Self-Interest might be lurking. Buzzwords like “AI” work well.
No, I’m not afraid of AI in the hands of Amazon or Google or Microsoft or Intel or any other collection of people who have banded together peacefully, pooling their money to provide services that others want, and in that way pursuing their shared self-interest of making more money of their own. Why am I not? Because if any of those groups fail to deliver what people want, or if they abuse the power they have amassed, the free, voluntary market will flush them like water down a drain.
Remember CompuServe? AOL? How about Netscape? Whatever happened to WordStar or SuperCalc? The Goliaths of yesteryear have been kicked off the battlefield by Davids emerging from garages; the once “unstoppable” behemoths, if they’re still alive, have been reduced to looking for sparring gigs in local boxing gyms.
What does concern me a lot, though, is AI in the hands of the Church of the Nation-State. The Beast was born in the blood of war, and it consumes the flesh of any who resist its quest for control over every facet of life. It creates enemies by using bombs to kill and maim innocents in far off lands, and by shoveling money into the hands of dictators who torture and rape and kill those who resist the orthodoxy. When a few heretics fight back by doing their own killing of innocents back in the Mother Church, the Church gleefully seizes the opportunity, using “terrorism” as the excuse to tighten its net around its faithful parishioners, who, not yet noticing the net marks on their skin, remain steadfast in their belief in their idol. The priests intone, “If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from our cameras.” And the congregation calls out its answer: “Amen”.
Street-corner cameras, facial recognition, retinal scans, through-the-wall radar imagery, these are just a few of the inputs that get instantly translated to digital data that can be stored forever and used to any purpose that suits the priesthood, now and forevermore, world without end.
But data are just ones and zeroes until something comes along with the ability to translate it and use it; AI is the latest and most sophisticated of these tools. AI can not only digest unfathomable amounts of data, it can find relationships that even its human designers didn’t know to look for. You can now create AI and tell it you want to control the world, leaving it to the machine to work out how to get that done.
Rig elections? Not a problem, ma’am. We can easily identify and hack weaknesses we find that humans left in the pathetic voting systems they created.
Frame public discourse? Easily done, master: we know the words that people respond to, so we will strategically plant propaganda in the mainstream media, writing stories our data prove that they will believe.
Reduce elections to contests between two incompetent or loathsome individuals? Yes, of course we can do that. We know what motivates everyone, so it’s a simple matter of translating it into tiny actions that move it along, step by step. Anyone with any trace of morality will get washed away, and you’ll get your buffoon or your asshole. The election won’t matter because we’ll continue our work whoever wins.
I don’t fear Google because if I don’t like what Google does I can go elsewhere (I haven’t, in fact, used Google for years, having switched to http://duckduckgo.com instead, precisely because of my unhappiness with Google’s collection and storage of my data.)
But how can I escape the Nation-State … the one that demands my allegiance and will soon enforce my attendance at its Church using guns and bombs and the ability to track my every movement and thought? Who will write the regulation to restrain that monopoly?
A suggestion for the Nation-State to further impose its will on the voluntary marketplace is itself a symptom, if not an example, of the AI takeover I’m worried about.
