America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. – Abraham Lincoln
MINIMAL EFFORT
The systems of the world appear to have been broken on purpose. Republicans and Democrats, Baptists and Buddhists, Engineers and Musicians; everyone agrees: something is wrong. The idea that the system even is broken is generally considered a universal fact among world governments and even news networks. However, the irony is that nothing is being done to fix the problem. News channels and newspapers, mainstream and unconventional - all discuss holistic food diets as being the answer to all of mankind’s health problems, but ignore dialogue regarding holistic governmental, economic, and psychological health altogether. Just like a diet never committed to, governments are talking incessantly about losing the weight, but never actually losing it. Even with a seemingly universal awareness of a broken system, the government is not actually trying to fix it. Nobody wants to talk about the root of the problem, people only want to patch over the smaller problems.
A MONOPOLY OVER INFORMATION
Of course, well-intentioned mistakes are always involved in hurting or ruining a system, but what if the biggest mistakes we see today appear to be getting constructed on purpose? Smaller issues we see every day can usually be tracked back to a few people just doing a bad job, but the bigger issues we see arising today smell of a ripe agenda. This smell is spreading across the globe, with thousands of people expressing their ideas about the conspiracy’s odor in fringe parts of the internet and dark corners of the bookstore. Ironically, evidence for this scent is being lost in the static of the information age as it continues to get snuffed out from mainstream discussion. News networks never like to challenge their own paradigm, of course. After all, these “fringe” ideas paint a picture that directly counters what we see painted on our flat-panel televisions and 7-inch wide phone screens, so it isn’t hard to believe that the organizations that control the media networks are likely preventing these challenging ideas from bubbling up. Regardless of the biases we see on our rectangular screens, though, these “unconventional” patterns are being recognized and discussed fervently by people across the globe every day in exponentially increasing numbers.
Here we see a $15 million, 10-foot tall quantum computer called the D-Wave 2000Q. The first buyer of the 2000Q was a cyber-security firm called Temporal Defense Systems. The company D-Wave receives funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the CIA. D-Wave claims it can “tap into the fundamental fabric of reality” and the man who owns the company, Geordie Rose, says being near one is like “standing at the altar of an alien god”.
SKYNET, COMING TO A DEVICE NEAR YOU
Unfortunately, the conspiracies being formulated and standardized on the internet by independent individuals and communities may not be around for long. Recent history has hinted that we may see a lot of these theories disappear as standardized information becomes the only accessible information on the internet. Companies like Youtube have already begun demonetizing and removing videos from their platform that disagree with mainstream ideas. Facebook, Twitter, and others have also followed suit, meaning that the decentralized internet may eventually become centralized as corporations and governments attempt to take control of it. Artificial intelligence is an up-and-coming technology, in particular, that would be able to control the internet more effectively than any amount of humans could ever control. In the beginning of the internet, user-submitted content on various internet platforms would be controlled by a team of low-paid people. These employees of the platform would respond to various complaints from users about user-submitted content. Any content that was “flagged” by users, would be sent in and the employees would review the user-submitted content and determine whether it was acceptable or unacceptable per the guidelines of the platform and allowance of the government. Sometimes this would mean that content would get wrongly removed as there was always a level of subjectivity involved, but in general it worked pretty well to prevent inappropriate material from seeping through to the end-user. Paradigm-challenging ideas, though, would still get unfortunately lumped into the same category as genuinely inappropriate content by these content management teams, limiting the overall awareness of that content from the end-user. However, as users of the internet increase exponentially into the future, the human career of content management will likely be replaced by artificially intelligent technology with algorithms that act much faster and cheaper than the human brain. Money and time is all that is needed to build an artificial intelligence powerful enough to scrub the internet clean of unacceptable ideas.
Not only can AI scan and organize everything on the internet more efficiently than any amount of humans could ever do, but it can also act like an actual human. AI can become extremely humanlike just by mirroring how humans talk and think. Give an AI system enough time, money, and data, and magic can truly happen. However, if we build a system that can effectively communicate like a human to other humans, why wouldn’t people naturally desire to consult this system instead of researching independently? Most of us already figured out how to do this in school with the magic of Google, avoiding the need of learning the Dewey Decimal System at the local library entirely. Imagine something like a hypothetical “United Nations World Consciousness” computer, getting constantly consulted for absolute answers to all questions with no need for contrasting comparisons – it is a “super intelligent” AI after all, right? This computer could scour the entire internet, powered by the most powerful processors in the world, and develop ideas about future global governmental decisions. There would be no language barriers between citizens of different countries across the globe because everything could be translated instantaneously with the utmost accuracy via this unified AI system. Of course, this sounds like something directly out of a science fiction movie, but aren’t movies just the imaginings of the desires of the men and women who make them? If the desire is strong enough and the money is there, something is destined to happen, whether that thing is actually successful in the end or not successful at all.
AI IS A BETTER GAMER THAN YOU
Executives at various early-adopting corporations are jumping on AI systems like IBM Watson, for example, because there is definite potential to truly cut down costs by complementing and aiding humans in their daily work. However, some of these cut costs are certainly going to be coming from cut employees as the need for additional human hands is considerably reduced by AI systems when properly implemented. In 2019, artificial intelligence is not exactly intelligent, with most AI systems mainly “doing” human-assisted tasks instead of “learning” new tasks from scratch. However, with enough training, AI systems have the ability to do amazing things. One of these things being the ability to win complex matches of various competitive games against people considered to be professionals in the particular game being played. Let’s look at a few wins for artificial intelligence in the recent years:
· DeepMind dramatically surpassing champion-level high scores at Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Seaquest, Beamrider, Enduro, and Q*bert.
o AlphaGo winning a match of Go against Lee Sedol, one of the highest-ranked players in the world.
· Deep Blue beating reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, at Chess.
· OpenAI beating professionals at Dota 2 (training 180 years a day, collecting patterns that consistently to victory within the game).
AI THINKS, THEREFORE IT IS
These are facts that seemed completely impossible a couple of decades ago. Most of our ancestors would have seen cellular mobile phones and automobiles as being fairy tales, after all. But as we will see again and again: “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. Learning what methods to take to win a rule-based game are some of the first major developments we see coming out of heavily-funded research into artificial intelligence. This means that we can bet that the governments of the world see AI as being a potential method to “win the game” of economic and governmental control. However, understanding politics and human language to deliver answers to questions and really win that game is a much bigger job. Developing an AI system capable of understanding natural language isn’t just time-consuming — it’s really expensive. Developers have to collect thousands of voice samples and annotate them by hand, a process which often takes weeks. That’s why researchers at Amazon’s Alexa division pursued transfer learning, which leverages a neural network (layers of mathematical functions that mimic neurons in the brain) trained on a large datasets of previously annotated samples to bootstrap (a technique of loading a program into a computer by means of a few initial instructions which enable the introduction of the rest of the program from an input device) training in a new domain with sparse data. In a newly published paper (“Unsupervised Transfer Learning for Spoken Language Understanding in Intelligent Agents”), Alexa AI scientists describe a technique that taps millions of unannotated interactions with Amazon’s voice assistant to reduce error rate by 8 percent. Said interactions were used to train an AI system to generate embeddings — numerical representations of words — so that words with similar functions were grouped closely together. As Anuj Goyal, an applied scientist at Alexa AI and a coauthor on the study, explained, embeddings tend to group words by their “co-occurrence” — that is, how frequently they appear alongside each other in a particular order — with different words. “The more co-occurring words two words have in common, the closer they are in the embedding space,” Goyal wrote in a blog post, “Embeddings thus capture information about words’ semantic similarities without requiring human annotation of training data”. The embeddings are based on a scheme called Embeddings from Language Models, or ELMo for short, simplified to make it efficient enough for real-time systems like Alexa. Uniquely, the researchers’ variant is context-sensitive — a word like “bark” receives different embeddings in “the dog’s bark is loud” and “the tree’s bark is hard”.
Onstage at I/O 2018, Google showed off a jaw-dropping new capability of Google Assistant: in the not too distant future, it’s going to make phone calls on your behalf. CEO Sundar Pichai played back a phone call recording that he said was placed by the Assistant to a hair salon. The voice sounded incredibly natural; the person on the other end had no idea they were talking to a digital AI helper. Google Assistant even dropped in a super casual “mmhmmm” early in the conversation.
In tests, Alexa researchers compared ELMo and their optimized version, dubbed ELMo Light (ELMoL), to a network that used no embedding scheme whatsoever. With both ELMo and ELMoL, they trained the embedding layers on 250 million unannotated requests to Alexa, and used another four million annotated request to existing Alexa services to train all three networks on two standard natural language processing tasks. Specifically, the networks were tasked with (1) intent classification, or determining the action an Alexa customer wanted to perform, and (2) slot tagging, or figuring out to which entities the action should apply. Once the networks had been trained, they were retrained on limited data to perform new tasks. The network that used the ELMo embeddings performed the best, with the ELMoL network coming in close second (the aforementioned 8 percent error reduction was achieved with 100 to 500 training examples). “Those improvements were greatest when the volume of data for the final retraining — the transfer learning step — was small,” Goyal wrote, “but that is precisely the context in which transfer learning is most useful”. Amazon scientists described an AI-driven method that can cut Alexa’s skill selection error rate by 40 percent. Considering DOS started as a simple text input/output system and developed into the internet we see today, it isn’t too difficult to understand that artificial intelligence is a beast that humankind doesn’t really understand how to tame. We know it is going to be big. We know it is going to be powerful. But how are we going to truly control something that exceeds our own intelligence? Of course the narcissists of the world are going to jump on this to be the first to control it. If you had the money, power, and influence… wouldn’t you?
Here’s Elon Musk on the popular Joe Rogan Show saying, “You just can’t communicate through fingers, it’s too slow”. The goal of Neuralink is to vastly improve the communication channel between our biological and digital selves, something that could be achieved through neural-link technology, which could help control the evolution of both mankind and AI over the long term.
WITH GREAT POWER, COMES GREAT AI
With technology so powerful, uniting segregated information across the world into a cohesive system that could be consulted for quick answers to questions is an obvious path to take. With enough cash and willpower, all thought systems could be brought together as one unified system: economics, philosophy, education, government, mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, sociology, psychology, and even religion. Google has essentially already done this through the universal adoption of their incredibly powerful search engine. In the future though, typing will be a thing of the past. Imagine asking your phone very conversational questions, and the phone delivering you answers just like a human would. Your own personal AI secretary, great! People, instead of having a mindless device, could have a personal humanoid assistant with an entire emotional profile constructed to relate directly to the personality of the user. We already see companies like Project PAI implementing a “personal artificial intelligence” or “avatar” to be used as a custom-built virtual personal assistant. We even see big players making moves to implement this technology directly into your physical body – more specifically, your brain. Neuralink is an American neurotechnology company, founded by Elon Musk and eight others, developing implantable brain–computer interfaces. These interfaces are planned to allow communication via thought through the implanted computer interface interacting with various brain synapses.
This user-created chart shows the Bilderberg Group's basic connections to everything in the world economy.
A system that the entire human race relies on for information gives the controllers of that system a godlike amount of power. If everyone on the planet adopts a single system of information delivery, that system then becomes the new standard for information regardless of whether the information is actually true or false. Reality then becomes defined through the screen people interact with. This combination of eventually mandatory technology (just look at baby boomers - in the beginning they avoided the internet, but now most of them rely on it) and top-down information control enables the controllers to be able to shape future generations more effectively than ever before. This move toward “mainstream truth” shouldn’t be hard to envision, considering most people already consider algorithm-controlled Google search results to represent what humanity is really thinking. We even see concerns about a “post-truth world” being listed on the agenda for the Bilderberg meeting in 2018, an annual conference established in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands "to foster dialogue between Europe and North America” (around 120-140 powerful European and North American political leaders, experts from industry, finance, academia, and media attend yearly). AI is eventually going to be a major talking point of our world leaders – it is only a matter of time. Understanding the power of artificial intelligence and mankind’s innate narcissistic desire to have power is critical to understanding the future of mankind.
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