Many people, even those who do not fall prey to mainstream narratives, do not know what to make of AI. When the subject of AI comes up, most people assume it is uncanny valley images of people with three thumbs and eleven fingers or that it is a demonic computer entity which will become self-aware and nuke the world. In the case of the latter, popular culture certainly doesn’t help, with movies like Terminator, I, Robot or the most recent Mission Impossible.
As much as Hollywood likes to fantasize about the possibility of sentient, autonomous machines, the possibility of such a thing is highly unlikely. To use the analogy of nuclear weaponry, Artificial General Intelligence is a danger like a nuclear chain reaction, that a large fission reaction would keep going and consume the entire world in atomic destruction. Because the possibility is so unspeakably horrible, no matter how remote it is attracts all the attention, when the much more pressing danger is the extant weapons themselves and how they might be used against you.
In other words, worrying about self-aware AI while ignoring how all its other applications will be wielded against you is like worrying about the remote possibility of a nuclear chain reaction and ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union has the bomb.
And the nuclear weaponry analogy is the exact right one to make. To understand what this means, you have to go back and consider what “information war” and mass media even is. Long before what we might consider the modern age, when the written word had to be painstakingly transmitted by hand, and therefore the majority of the population had no reason to undertake the effort to become literate, the “mass medium” was the human voice.
Poets sang and recited their epics. Prophets and apostles preached to crowds. Criers and heralds announced the news to their cities. Pastors preached to their congregations. Playwrights wrote and actors performed plays in theaters. If you wanted the people of your city or your nation to know a thing, together and all at once, these were the only media available to you.
This was the way information was transmitted to the masses for all the many millennia of human history until the middle of the 15th Century when Johannes Gutenberg developed the moveable-type printing press. Suddenly, the written word, which previously had to be painstakingly copied by hand, one book at a time, now could be mass produced. In the time it once took to make a single copy of a book, tens of thousands could now be printed off.
As the availability of the written word quickly became universal, so too did literacy, and ideas could be communicated to the masses with breathtaking speed as compared to oral communication. As literacy quickly became common, newspapers and journals came into being, and the ownership of printing press meant the ability to influence what the public believed.
In many of the European nations, what could and could not be printed was highly regulated.
Kings and governments regularly shut down presses and jailed their owners for printing forbidden ideas. For those in power, information had to be controlled. “Freedom of the press” has become a lib meme in contemporary American culture, which essentially means the corporate media is sacrosanct. In this warped understanding of “freedom of the press” the Regime-allowed corporate media can lie, manipulate, distort, slander, and manufacture any false narrative for the public to lap up.
That is what they believe the First Amendment is about. But if you actually understand the historical context, it meant that the extant media of mass communication was not allowed to be restrained, harassed, bullied, or abused by those in power. It meant that anyone could communicate to the masses anything he wanted to. As technology continued to advance, radio, motion pictures, and eventually television became the dominant mass media.
Unlike the printing press, where the capital requirements were low enough that nearly anyone could set one up, television required massive stations and networks, with all their equipment, and legions of employees to staff them. On top of this they were highly regulated—so much for the spirit of the First Amendment!—which created even more barriers to entry. Throughout most of the second half of the 20th Century you had just three television networks in the United States. And these three were what carefully crafted what the public would perceive reality to be.
For the generations that grew up in this environment, whatever the television said was unassailably true. And not only was it not to be questioned, no one would even consider questioning whether it was true. “Of course it is true! It was on TV, wasn’t it!” So much of the radical social engineering that occurred in the latter half of the 20th Century was only ever possible because of the mass communication technology that is television. The rapid transformation that took place away from historic ways of life would simply not have happened without the ability to broadcast ideas into every living room in the country.
But things began to change with yet more technological advancement. With the advent of the internet, and its widespread adoption that especially came with the use of smartphones, the absolute control the corporate media gained via television began to fracture. It didn’t happen in an instant, after all, if you have been marinated in television from cradle to grave, the mere availability of counter-narratives did not guarantee their immediate acceptance by the general public. But over time, the influence of the corporate media began to wane. By 2020, a little more than a decade after the iPhone was introduced, the ability of the Regime to wield unquestioned control of the narrative the public believed was gone.
Yes, the majority of the public still believed whatever the TV told them, but a large enough minority broke through that the Regime began to panic about “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” Put another way, if the “totally not a manufactured bioweapon pandemic,” the “mostly peaceful Summer of George,” the “most secure election of all-time,” and the release of “the 100% safe and effective mRNA gene therapy” had taken place in 1997, a vanishingly small number of people would have questioned the prevailing narrative surrounding those.
And in reality, the fact that any of those things were done to us in the first place is because of the power the internet to reveal the great and powerful Regime propaganda machine is just a man behind a curtain, demonstrated in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But the Regime struck back.
Every social media platform, with one solitary exception, immediately began an intense campaign to ban users, shadowban and hide content, plaster “misinformation” tags everywhere, and otherwise censor to the point of unusability.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the moderate improvements he has made to that platform notwithstanding, the Regime has figured out a way to lock the internet down in a way little different from the People’s Republic of China. They have done what they can to return to total mass media control, recreating the days of the Big Three television networks but for the internet age. BUT… Technology has continued to develop.
AI has the ability to permanently break through the Regime’s control of the internet. This is why Regime-aligned corporations have spent billions to develop AI that is already censored and locked down. They have done this, in advance, because they know the disruptive power of AI is unlike anything that has come before it. They know that AI can be used in a mass media propaganda environment and render all their controls over information totally useless.
To return to the analogy of warfare, they have massive armies of millions of troops, tanks, aircraft, artillery, and aircraft carriers which they have wielded against an unarmed populace. But now a superweapon exists which makes all their formidable strength obsolete. You can see why they have devoted tens of billions of dollars to companies like OpenAI, as well as with Meta and Alphabet, to ensure that they are the only ones that have this power.
They are terrified of the prospect that this superweapon will get loose, and anyone can wield it. That is what is at stake with an uncensored AI. Uncensored AI is a Manhattan Project for the truth against the disruptors of reality. No longer will they be able to assert total control over narrative formation. No longer will they have full-spectrum dominance of what everyone assumes to be true and real.
We are entering an epoch just as revolutionary as the printing press and the internet. In fact, by comparison, AI has the potential to be even more earth-shattering than those innovations that changed the world forever. The power of the Regime will have been forever neutered and the truth will prevail. |
