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This is some very scary information. A Vast Majority have no idea how bad things have gotten. There are some very good reasons that many very powerful people are scared to death by this stuff. There is no such thing as privacy and in many ways, going off the grid is near impossible.
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by David Thrussell
May-June 2017
from NewDawnMagazine Website
Imagine, if you will, a war in the near future…
A war not fought between East and West. Not fought between nations, nor creeds nor races. A war fought brother to brother and sister to sister, father to son and mother to daughter.
Tesh (technologists) against NonTesh (non-technologists)…
The Tesh, a tribe or caste intoxicated and socially validated through their umbilical connection to technology and the Meta/Hive Mind.
Glued to Google Glass, status permanently updated: the Tesh always offer the right opinion at the right time. Incapable of nonGroupThink, the Tesh occupy all positions of import in the professional, media, academic and information classes.
Opinions counter to Tesh GroupThink are not only by definition incorrect, they are also invisible – filtered, de-platformed and deleted into a silent nonexistence.
The NonTesh are homeless, stateless non-people. Unable to participate in comfortable society’s rituals and prefabricated dialogues, without access to currency and the staid social discourse that lubricates function in the mainstream.
They attack from the margins: wild wastelands, hardware graveyards and mountain ranges of landfill – zones abandoned by the Tesh as beyond rehabilitation. The unknowing progeny of the much-maligned (but historically vindicated) Luddites, the NonTesh build primitive Drone traps, savagely attack convoys of technicians and inflict random violence at the edges of Tesh civilization.
They slaughter and destroy with no plan, no blueprint – a simple, intuitive anger and violence that Tesh mainframe-algorithms cannot comprehend and struggle to strategize against.
This will be the Final War – man against machine and man against machine-man…
Trapped by Techno-Blindness?
The omniscient progress of technology brings with it many benefits – this is beyond serious doubt.
But seldom if ever discussed is technology’s insidious and largely invisible detriments. They remain near-invisible for many reasons: commercial imperatives, an infantile inability to see past convenience and short-term rewards and a surfeit of attractive and entertaining distractions.
Perhaps the most difficult to discern are those problems that might occur in the moral, predictive, philosophical or ideological realms: spheres apparently far less concrete than instant, addictive neurochemical rewards and the superficial and textural allure of consumer electronics.
Modern-era human society also appears rusted to the concept of progress – the idea that all technological advances are intrinsically positive whether immediate gains outweigh severe long-term deficits… or not.
The black silicon squid of hyper-technology sends its powerful tentacles into every domain of human activity, its vice-like grip stultifying thought and any hint of animalistic defensive counter-measures.
Our species suffocates in the death-grasp, yet lacks even the primal survival instinct to respond effectively.
Is humankind fatally trapped by techno-blindness?
Big Data & Psychographic Profiling
While essentially unknown to the general public, the astounding technologies of the London based firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) are credited by some as having a fundamental role in the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump and the ‘Leave’ campaign that led to the UK Brexit.
CA trumpets proudly on its website and in its strategic communications that they “use data modelling and psychographic profiling to grow audiences, identify key influencers, and connect with people in ways that move them to action.”
Birthed at the nexus of leading Cambridge University Psychometric scientists and the SCL Group (self-described as a ‘global election management agency’), Cambridge Analytica works big data to identify and manipulate the intentions of mass voter populations.
According to CA Chief Executive, Alexander Nix,
“Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.”
Harvesting,
- Facebook ‘likes’
- smartphone data
- purchase histories
- subscriptions
- church visits
- online and other available aggregate information,
…CA builds profiles of every individual in the target audience (i.e. every potential voter in the US during election season 2016) and generates a ‘psychographic analysis’ in combination with the OCEAN (‘openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism’) personality trait or ‘lexical hypothesis’ model to predict and influence the electoral actions of individuals.
As reported in the Swiss Das Magazin, with just ten Facebook ‘likes’ as input, CA could,
“appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker.
With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes… (the) machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner.
With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”
Deployed in a number of developing nations, the SCL Group has worked extensively with military and political contacts in activities that Slate magazine described as akin to a ‘coup’ scenario.
According to their website,
“Cambridge Analytica is building a future where every individual can have a truly personal relationship with their favorite brands and causes by showing organizations not just where people are, but what they really care about and what drives their behavior.”
Professor Jonathan Albright of Elon University describes CA’s algorithms as,
“a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before.
They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go.”
CA’s Nix gave an example from their brief tenure on GOP candidate Ted Cruz’s primary campaign.
Cambridge Analytica’s big data analysis,
“identified that there was a small pocket of voters in Iowa who felt strongly that citizens should be required by law to show photo ID at polling stations.
Leveraging our other data models, we were able to advise the campaign on how to approach this issue with specific individuals based on their unique profiles in order to use this relatively niche issue as a political pressure point to motivate them to go out and vote for Cruz.
For people in the ‘Temperamental’ personality group, who tend to dislike commitment, messaging on the issue should take the line that showing your ID to vote is ‘as easy as buying a case of beer’.
Whereas the right message for people in the ‘Stoic Traditionalist’ group, who have strongly held conventional views, is that showing your ID in order to vote is simply part of the privilege of living in a democracy.”
According to some sources, CA is able to bombard target individuals with thousands of uniquely tailored and feedback evolving ‘dark ads’ (advertisements that aren’t seen by others).
‘Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine’
In a piece titled ‘The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine’, journalists Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath assert that Cambridge Analytica,
“has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.
Many of these technologies have been used individually to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding factor in elections around the world.”
It would be easy to argue that primitive versions of these techniques have indeed been used in various ‘colored revolutions’ and ‘regime change’ operations for decades at least (and more subtly in the general domestic activities of the mainstream media): perhaps the only salient difference being that now the ‘coup’ chickens have extraordinary ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technologies at their disposal which have now clearly come home to roost.
Fraught and fragile as our democracies are, the inevitable march of ‘progress’ means we’re about to lose them permanently to The Machine.
Predictive Policing
Technology also threatens to advance and empower policing to the realm of monolithic totalitarianism.
In an eerie echo of Phillip K. Dick‘s ‘Minority Report‘ short story, predictive policing software and models are now deployed to assess the assumed future crimes of identified ‘criminal classes’.
In Chicago, a city wracked by disproportionate levels of gun homicide, gang violence and rampant police brutality, a report in Scout Magazine notes that,
“Microsoft, the Chicago Police Department, and a partner called Third Eye have created a cloud-based solution that predicts what types of criminal activity are likely to take place where.
Using historical data, the Chicago force can deploy officers to specific locations across the city based on how likely crime is to occur there. They can also predict crime trends based on the weather, specific times of day or a range of other factors.
The LA Police Department has developed an algorithm called
PredPolthat does the same thing.”
Unfortunately, these predictive models are often wrong.
‘Beware’, a software model developed by security firm Intrado, was tasked with identifying an individual’s,
“threat level based on their address, searches of the deep web, arrest records, vehicle registrations, criminal records, warrants, property records, ‘known associates’ and the content of their latest social media posts.”
Adopted in Fresno, California in 2015, ‘Beware’ was soon abandoned in April 2016 after persistent concerns were raised about its accuracy and deleterious effect on privacy.
Aside from the obvious, nightmarish and Kafka-esque scenarios that predictive policing might produce, it should also be noted that any Artificial Intelligence capability can only be as useful and accurate as the data it utilizes.
Error-prone, biased or prejudiced inputs will inevitably produce arrests or harassment for what equates essentially to ThoughtCrime (1984) or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time (or even being the wrong person at the wrong time).
Predictive policing will always risk impugning guilt through data aggregation rather than actual criminal action.
Star Chamber ‘Justice’
In recent decades the explosion in electronic and online communications has been a boon for surveillance industries and the instruments of the corporate and political state tasked with gathering masses of information.
Post the revelations of NSA whistleblowers like William Binney and Edward Snowden (and Wikileaks’ recent ‘Vault7’ cache of documents), it appears safe to assume that all electronic communications are vulnerable to surveillance at all times.
It came to light through the Snowden revelations that police and other law enforcement departments have regular and essentially uncontrolled access to ‘products’ of the NSA/CIA and surveillance state.
Though use of this ostensibly illegally obtained information is inadmissible in court proceedings, police routinely work around this impasse by creating ‘parallel construction’, a technique to mask the use of ‘unconventionally obtained’ data from defendants or the accused.
According to an August 2013 Reuters report,
“A secretive US Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funnelling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defence lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.”
In the US, local police and the FBI routinely use a device called a ‘Stingray‘ that mimics a cell/mobile phone tower and thus can capture metadata and phone traffic content from nearby phones.
No warrant is required for their use but The Guardian in August 2016 reported on a,
“non-disclosure agreement that local police were forced to sign with the FBI before receiving permission to use Stingray – a document that mandated local prosecutors to abandon cases rather than risk information about Stingray becoming public.”
Using what are legally ‘invisible’ technologies to gather incriminating evidence poses myriad problems for the accused:
a frightening ‘Star Chamber’ scenario that is reportedly now commonplace.
As Reuters confirms,
“If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.”
The continued militarization of police has been of concern to many.
Now airborne drones (Unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs) are also becoming part of the increasingly high-tech law enforcement arsenal. In the US, North Dakota was the first state to legalize armed police drones.
The aircraft will be nominally limited to ‘less-than-lethal’ weaponry, i.e.,
- sonic weapons
- tear gas
- tasers
- rubber bullets
- pepper spray,
…though ‘mission creep’ would appear to make it inevitable that law enforcement will soon patrol from the skies with lethal firepower, a scenario that was science-fiction a few years ago.
Connecting all to the ‘Internet of Things’ – Including People
Advancements in ‘smart’ technology (or as author and Silicon Valley critic Evgeny Morozov calls them: “Surveillance. Marketed. As. Revolutionary. Technology.”) and the approaching ‘Internet of Things’ threaten an ominous near-future where,
- common everyday/domestic appliances/devices
- cars
- dishwashers
- refrigerators
- televisions
- toilets
- washing machines
- thermostats
- alarm systems,
…and alike – are, for ‘convenience sake’, automatically and intrinsically connected to the cloud/internet.
Speaking in 2012 to the In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm) CEO Summit, then CIA Director General David Petraeus remarked about the impending ‘Internet of Things’ saying,
“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low cost, and high-power computing – the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.
“In practice, these technologies could lead to rapid integration of data from closed societies and provide near-continuous, persistent monitoring of virtually anywhere we choose.
‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies, particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.
Taken together, these developments change our notions of secrecy and create innumerable challenges – as well as opportunities.”
US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, similarly remarked in February 2016 that,
“In the future, intelligence services might use the ‘Internet of Things’ for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.”
The day is fast approaching where your fridge might spy on you.
Imagine Cambridge Analytica’s 4-5,000 data points harvested for every individual, correlated with tens of thousands of domestic data observations, and it becomes possible to build electronic and informational profiles of individuals of staggering scale and darkly malevolent detail.
Secret CIA Technology Exposed
Wikileaks’ 7 March 2017 dump of thousands of secret CIA technology documents confirmed a landscape of ubiquitous surveillance and data harvesting. Among the myriad revelations allegedly leaked from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia:
“‘Weeping Angel’, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones.
After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on.
In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.”
As Internet renegade Kim Dotcom noted, the,
“CIA turns Smart TVs, iPhones, gaming consoles and many other consumer gadgets into open microphones,” and further the “CIA turned every Microsoft Windows PC in the world into spyware.”
Also described was the CIA capability to hack computer networks while cloaked as another entity or state actor.
The CIA UMBRAGE group, according to Wikileaks,
“collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.”
(
Further from Wikileaks:
“As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.”
This last point casts an ominous shadow on the 18 June 2013 death of controversial defence and surveillance journalist Michael Hastings.
Just hours before his demise in an inexplicable and fiery, high speed auto-crash, Hastings said,
“The Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates'” and, “I’m onto a big story and need to go off the radar for a bit.”
From ‘Smart Dust’ to ‘Bots’ that roam Internet forums and newspaper sites generating automated comments, from Barbie dolls that collect and wirelessly transmit children’s conversations to marketers, and algorithms or artificial intelligences that finger potential criminals, generate credit ratings, parole recommendations and employment decisions:
we are about to leave the epoch of human decision making and enter a brave new era of automated or ‘virtual intelligence’.
Some, like renowned technologist, futurist and Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil celebrate the coming ‘singularity’ – the point when computer intelligence equals or surpasses human intelligence and potentially the human mind melds with technology.
Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 our brains will fuse with machines and the event will usher in a new ‘techno-utopia’ where according to his evangel,
“We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify those artistic qualities that we value.”
Another noted technologist, Elon Musk, struck a far more cautionary tone in October 2014:
“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”
Digital Control Machine Will Never Sleep
It’s easy to drown in the multifarious, conceptual and jargonistic details – the techno-babble and giddy utopianism.
But the simplest observation is also the best and most essential – in a few short years we will already be in a future where every interaction with any electronic device, technology or landscape will most likely be recorded, stored, analyzed and actioned.
- every phone conversation will be harvested for advertising data
- every comment, search or online visit yielding the raw stuff of social engineering and opinion/vote massaging
- every opinion big data grist for the ‘Shock Doctrine’ mill,
…a traitorous crop of domestic appliances will report on,
- conversations
- sleep
- ablution
- eating habits,
…as online algorithms patrol like nano-ThoughtPolice – reporting social media infractions to employers and state bodies.
Always on – always transmitting – always analyzing and evolving:
the Digital Control Machine will never sleep…
It is, in the most basic form, a nightmare world of permanent, inescapable surveillance and panopticon monitoring:
a Technological Prison that serves up constant entertainments and distractions with the small, dutiful price of mental conditioning and omniscient servitude.
Permanently connected to ‘the Cloud’, a remotely controlled and infinite feedback system that modulates mood, thought, opinion and activity.
Soon we will be digital puppets, addicted to ‘sticky’ devices and rewarded for our compliance by serotonin hits and endless ‘content’.
In 1984 George Orwell imagined a brutal dystopia of regimented ‘Thought Police’ and perpetual war.
Previously, Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World described a future of bio-chemical thought/mood enhancement and control through the cheerfully prescribed and gladly ingested ‘soma’ of ritualized and inescapable entertainments and obligatory trivia and tribal custom.
Our near-tomorrow will likely be a hybrid of the two – swift, final technological punishment for the troublesome ‘Michael Hastings’ types (those who have transgressed beyond rehabilitation) – and endless, comfortable distraction for those who submit meekly to the gilded techno-cage.
A soft, warm and luxurious digital boot “stamping on a human face – forever.”
Human society’s breathless race to embrace dehumanizing and inherently totalitarian technologies must have an end point.
It’s possible to form a cogent argument that recent political ‘shocks’ and developments:
- the election of Donald Trump
- Brexit
- the impending demise of the EU and the UN,
…are in some sense the manifestation of a sublimated rejection of technology (and the government/economic/corporate systems empowered by technology) from a dazzled, bewildered but instinctively antagonistic herd-populace.
Is it to be war between those
Transhumanswho accept and rejoice in their hybridization into
the Matrixof omniscient ideological control technologies,
an adjunct of the modern permanent state of entertainment/distraction and doctrinal/behavioral feedback,
…and those on the margins who knowingly or intuitively reject the encroachment of optic fibre, microwave blast and touch-screen texture into every last human domain of flesh, thought, sinew and soul?
The Final War – the ragtag remnants of man-kind against man-machine:
Tesh versus NonTesh…
by George Dvorsky
April 02, 2014
from io9 Website
The Pentagon’s advanced research wing has announced its latest budget – and whoa, does DARPA ever have some ambitious plans for the future.
Their new Biotech unit will be harnessing biology for national security, and dealing with everything from stopping plagues to building synthetic soldiers. DARPA’s commitment to cutting-edge innovation is unquestioned.
The very essence of the defense agency is to make sure that U.S. military technology is more sophisticated than that of the nation’s rivals.
Among its many current initiatives, DARPA is working on,
- advanced robotics
- an artificial human brain
- next-gen robotic aircraft
- advanced prosthetics
- self-teaching computers (if anyone’s going to build a recursively improving AI it’s going to be DARPA)
In addition to these projects, DARPA has been busy at work on various biotechnology-related endeavors, but these attempts to date have lacked cohesion and focus.
Looking to change this, DARPA has announced the creation of its Biological Technologies Office (BTO) – an effort to,
“explore the the increasingly dynamic intersection of biology and the physical sciences.”
The new division will expand upon its Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO) Offices.
Speaking to the U.S. House of Representatives last week, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said that,
“Biology is nature’s ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions.”
Indeed, the new division will look into three incredibly promising research areas.
The Transhuman Soldier
A priority for DARPA is in restoring and maintaining the abilities of its war-fighters. It wants to maintain peak soldier abilities and then restore those abilities as soon as possible after an injury.
This will include the development of advanced prosthetics (featuring mind-controlled limbs), neural interfaces, the ability to survive blood loss, and even neurotechnological solutions to treat psychological trauma such as PTSD.
DARPA has already made tremendous strides in this area.
Speaking to NPR’s Marketplace, Prabhakar noted:
We had quadriplegic volunteers who agreed to have brain surgery, essentially have a small array placed on the surface of their brains, to pick up these neural signals for motor control, and then to use those to control these new, very sophisticated, robotic, prosthetic arms.
In a sense we’ve opened a door – a connection between the human brain and the rest of the world. You can let your imagination go wild about where that’s going to take us.
No doubt – many of these therapeutic technologies will be leveraged to enhance the capacities of soldiers.
For example, work on memory impairments is leading to new insights into the brain’s functioning. This will inform the development of technologies that will help soldiers interact with complex systems; future interfaces and tools will deliver information to soldiers in a way that’s easier for them to understand (which is a growing problem – our systems are starting to operate faster than human comprehension).
As Prabhakar says, there’s,
“going to be a future where we start learning radically new ways to interact between the complexity of the human brain and the complexity of the world around us.”
And with the introduction of its biochronicity program, DARPA could get a handle on human metabolism and aging, resulting in enhanced human combat performance and freakishly resilient soldiers (both in terms of resisting and recovering from physical injury and resistance to disease).
In addition, DARPA is looking to develop technologies that will identify and protect against infectious diseases, such as tools that will neutralize biological threats.
To Seek Out – And Create – New Life
The Pentagon also wants to dabble in artificial life as a way to create completely new biological systems, products, and materials.
It’s hoping to gain a better understanding of natural process and the underlying design rules that govern the behavior of biological systems, and then apply that knowledge to forward-engineer new systems and products with completely novel functionality.
This is particularly interesting news considering that biologists have recently built an artificial chromosome from scratch.
Once refined, this biotechnology will allow for the creation of entirely new organisms, while adding new capacities (or “features”) to existing ones – including humans. Imagine a soldier who never needs to sleep, requires minimal sustenance, or who has cat-like infrared vision.
Artificial chromosomes could pave the way towards this kind of future – technologies that could eventually trickle into the civilian domain (much like the Internet and GPS has – both military innovations).
Interestingly, this meshes well with DARPA’s existing BioDesign program which is studying the potential for synthetic organisms to be engineered for immortality and programmed with a kill switch that allows it to be turned off at any time.
This recently prompted Motherboard‘s Meghan Neal to ask,
“Why bother with mechanical robots when you can engineer fake human replicants to fight your battles?
We haven’t heard much about the Pentagon’s would-be synthetic soldiers since then, but the BioDesign program got a bump from $11.4 to $19.3 million in
As part of the BTO initiative, DARPA’s Living Foundries program will focus on:
…creating a biologically based manufacturing platform to provide rapid, scalable access to new materials with novel properties that can enable a new generation of mechanical, electrical, and optical products.
While its Chronicle of Lineage Indicative of Origins (CLIO) program aims to:
- make biological engineering safer by establishing enduring control elements that protect against intentionally harmful genetic engineering
- prevent illegal acquisition or misuse of proprietary strains,
- provide novel forensic tools to assist in the investigation of biological incidents
- allow responsible investigators to document compliance with safe biological manipulation practices
Preventing Plagues
Smartly, DARPA is also looking into ways of preventing and mitigating the effects of a global pandemic.
The complexity and unpredictability of outbreaks, it says, is a reflection of our poor understanding of the dynamics involved. In addition, the research agency wants to study larger biological and ecological phenomena, including population-level effects of relevance to agriculture and food security.
With its launch of BTO, DARPA says it also wants to consider the implications of what it’s doing.
To that end, DARPA will periodically converse with experts in these issues to discuss relevant ethical, legal, and social issues
| by Nicholas West September 22, 2013 from ActivistPost Website  Discussion of the “Singularity” – the moment when computer intelligence surpasses that of humans to such an extent that humans become practically redundant – has been gaining steam across the social spectrum. In 2006, Ray Kurzweil pointed to 2045 (The Singularity Is Near – When Humans Transcend Biology) as the date of this tipping point, after which anyone unprepared for merging with machines would likely face a very unproductive future: I set the date for the Singularity – representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability – as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. The Singularity Is Near – When Humans Transcend Biology With the exponential rise of automation, and the announcement that Moore’s Law could lapse within 10 years, the tipping point might already be upon us, with the Singularity arriving as soon as 2029.With the goals of transhumanists and futurists so close to full realization, the world’s leading scientists are beginning to voice their concern that general humanity might not comprehend the full weight of their discoveries. Scientists like Stephen Hawking have formed a group of “scientific superheroes” who supposedly aim to ensure that humanity does not choose the lethal side of the double-edged sword of technology. Let’s see what they are planning to do to save humanity from itself at the dawn of The Singularity. Our current position as we head toward The Singularity is being called The Hybrid Age by futurists, as discussed in the candid video below. It is an increasingly synthetic age of bio-computing, enhanced artificial intelligence and the merging of man and machine through augmented reality. Also stated below is the increasing indication that humanity is not the only biology susceptible to The Singularity; nature, too – the climate, for example – will be increasingly manageable and augmented. The power available is a God-like one, giving us the divergent paths of Heaven or Hell. One slide from the presentation issues this stark assessment about the potential outcomes: “Heaven” Re-make the planet (geo-engineering) Create new life (and new lifeforms) Re-engineer humanity (values and essence) Abundance and plenty for all (mastery over energy and material transformation) Super-intelligence (omniscience) Super-longevity (death as a disease to be cured, immortality) Better than well Transcendental experiences “The cosmos wakes up” (as a new humanity moves off planet) “Hell” Destroy the planet Plagues and pestilence (arising from genetic engineering) Enfeeble and divide humanity (as new technological divisions arise) Environmental catastrophe Ubiquitous surveillance Super-dictatorship Worse than the Dark Ages Nuclear holocaust (enabled by new weaponry) “Terminator enslavement” (artificial intelligence decides that humanity itself is the risk) With these concerns as the backdrop, we need to assess what we see taking place already that might indicate which path we are currently on. Toward Heaven or Hell? We have seen some of the negative consequences of robotics, at least in the economic area. There is the possibility that humans will eventually be fully outsourced to robots through the period of The Singularity. Even if this does not come to full fruition, a recent study points to dramatic technological unemployment over the next 20 years. We have seen major advancements in direct mind control, which also point toward a decidedly negative direction being implemented in an area that also potentially can help enhance the human brain. A paper published by Cambridge highlighted an extreme example of existential threat when they presented their case that “Terminators” should be listed as one of the greatest threats to humanity. And, yet, technologies like autonomous drones continue to be developed with an increasing miniaturization right down to the insect and nano level. Coupled with advanced artificial intelligence, the military is seeking ways for these systems to make decisions on their own, as well as communicate and replicate at their own discretion. The technological ability to track, trace and database everyone and everything is already being used as a system of control and pre-crime evaluation that is ushering in a Minority Report-style world. Control over the climate continues to remain a shadowy and hotly debated topic. One thing we can be certain of is the desire of the military to control the weather for use as a weapon. They issued a document called Weather as a Force Multiplier – Owning The Weather in 2025 – curiously coinciding with the arrival of The Singularity. We also can be sure that elites from societies like the UK’s Royal Society have openly discussed playing God with the climate. Who will this God-like power be given to? Well, themselves of course. The continued genetic engineering of the food supply is also having negative consequences for humanity’s health as well as the health of the environment. Nevertheless, the increasingly open-source nature of access to technologies which are dropping rapidly in cost offers a potential push-back to would-be controllers. This is often presented as a danger in the case of 3D printed weapons, but 3D printing also offers a wealth of solutions for restoring power to the people and creating new means of solving mankind’s most critical issues in the areas of health and the economy. Developments in free energy are also beginning to move beyond the halls of traditional science and elite control. It is even being speculated that DARPA’s efforts to produce a low-cost, portable brain recorder could spark a DIY brain scanning movement. However, we would be quite gullible not to be aware that science has traditionally been joined at the hip with the military-industrial complex. Whether it is the atomic bomb, drones, or nanotech; the halls of science have not been perfectly available for the general public to walk among. The dangers inherent in the new science as we race toward The Singularity are most likely the same dangers that humanity always have faced: Will technology be used to free humanity or enslave us? And who will ultimately be in charge? Who’s in Charge? There is no question that new technologies can and will benefit select people in select ways, but when it comes to the issue of extinction, who has brought us closest time and time again? It is ironic, then, to hear 27 self-appointed superheroes of science assume the role of vanguard for the rest of us. From crippling cyber-attacks by terrorists using the internet to cause havoc, to the release of engineered diseases and killer computers, they warn the future is far from rosy. […] Other scenarios being considered by the 27-strong group, which also involves academics from Oxford, Imperial, Harvard and Berkeley, include extreme weather events, fast spreading pandemics, and war or sabotage resulting in a shortage of food and resources. […] The group’s manifesto is clear: ‘Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole.’ This is a puzzling manifesto coming from a group that largely represents the anti-human ends of transhumanism, where humanity is “upgraded” to become a nearly unrecognizable version of its former self. Hawking himself has echoed Kurzweil when he states that ‘in the future brains could be separated from the body‘. The cosmologist, 71, said the brain operates in a similar way to a computer program, meaning it could in theory be kept running without a body to power it. The worldview of these “superheroes” is at its heart an Orwellian one: humanity must be eliminated in order to save it. This is the exact machine-like mindset that runs the world at every level … and we see their terrific results so far. Who invented the Internet surveillance apparatus? Who creates those “crippling cyber attacks”? Who engineers diseases? Who uses food shortages as a weapon? Who created the dangerous algorithms behind the world’s economy? And who wages war in the name of peace? These are the saviors of humanity? We’re in big trouble. If we are to survive and thrive as a species, we must codify what type of research will or will not be explored, and which will be discarded due to irreversible negative consequences. Until we realize that the only safeguard against the improper use of technology is humanity, our current path toward a robotized, synthetic world of mindless automatons is virtually guaranteed. |
by Anne Gordon, RN
July 31, 2013
from GreenMedInfo Website
| Anne Gordon is an RN, an Author, Researcher, and a computer artist. Fascinated with societies, and the future, she is drawn to medical health trends of tomorrow. What will health look like? Will we be more mechanical than spiritual? These are some of the concepts she is looking at. Many of her articles like her art, are slightly outside the mainstream box, aimed towards thought stimulation. She is also extremely curious about how the ‘business’ of healthcare, and wellness intertwine today. Her artwork, is a combination of photography and painting, and is publicly shown. In her spare time, she teaches in a local community college. |
Do you wonder why films such as “World War Z”, “Walking Dead,” “I am Legend,” or even the ‘tongue and cheek’ marketing campaigns focus on ‘zombie apocalypse warnings’?
Is it just for your entertainment and giggles? After all, we know that zombies do not exist.
Why then, would ‘zombie apocalypse’ be among Google’s most popular search?
A few years ago, it was the blood sucking vampires, which are still quite popular. Are we being psychologically conditioned to accept human changes, such as cannibalism, or ‘transhumanism‘ as evolution?
We are living in the oddest of times. Our society is on the brink of so many simultaneous modifications.
For example, we read about,
- scorpion venom inserted into cabbage (to kill bugs)
- eel genes inserted into salmon (for profitable growth enhancement)
- bizarre animal parts surgically placed in humans
- micro machines drifting inside our cells
What are we doing as a species and what can you do to remain intact?
First, recognize that today, our air, food and water, and even personal thoughts, are being modified, either intentionally, or accidently. The facts remain, and the research indicates that there are serious die off’s and tragic poisonings globally. Most people assume this is solely due to ‘climate change’ as we have been told by experts.
We have to pay for the damage.
When you see new droughts, dying trees, bee colony collapse, birds falling out of the sky, etc. yes, of course we can say, ‘all related to climate change’… and go back to our TV and popcorn… (non GMO, organic?)
But, when your pet, or your loved one gets ill, and you watch the hideous unfold, ‘climate change’ takes on a new meaning.
We still live in a time, when you can search for yourself, and learn of the horrors that potentially face us. Learning how to survive could be critical, and begins with information. Take a look at our recent human history. Movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s do not show obese people, glorified zombies, or cute vampires.
People ate naturally grown food, not like today’s toxic slew of pills, vaccines, and processed ‘convenience’ food.
Water was drilled, and wells provided mineralized nutrition. Today, much of the water is injected with too many things to mention here. Check out geo-engineering, and learn about how everything is connected.
Needles to say, water, air, soil, food is not what it used to be. But there are still things you can do to thrive.
Perhaps, consider that instead of a useless but pretty lawn, plant herbs, vegetables, trees, or flowers. If you live in an apartment, check out the ‘window farms’ and ‘urban farming’ of city dwellers. We do not have to be ‘victims’ of a changing world.
This is our world, our time, and collectively we can make a difference. Learn all you can about climate change, health care, food, water, nanotechnology, genetic experiments introduced into the food chain, etc.
By learning and connecting the dots from so many arrows simultaneously slung at the masses, you can start your own process of survival in a toxic world.
The reality is that if we don’t start making a change now, the day may soon come when its too late.
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