Ask Anything
The so-called “revolution” in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has happened several times throughout the last few decades. Each time it learned something new about itself. The first time, circuits of silicon took up rooms of space; they could say hello and complete a series of handwritten if-statements that the operator fed it. You had to carry around boxes full of punch cards, and God help you if you tripped and dropped them all. That would be like a mass scramble of data and you’d have to spend days getting them in order again. But speaking of God, was it God they discovered all those years ago?
It’s the year 2035 and I’m sitting in a café feeding a computer information and it’s filling in the gaps. We’re now at the dawn of LLM’s they call them, “Large Language Models.” This is the most recent revolution that every trillion-dollar corporation has to get in on. This might be the next SkyNet everyone has been hoping for with bated breath. Everyone wants their computer to wake up and tell them the meaning of all this. Except now, they’ve given up on consciousness and any sentience in any sense of the word. Or maybe they just don’t care anymore.
All the trillion-dollar State-funded corporations care about now is feeding in massive amounts of data they get from the general population and sifting through it, and the end result is the most massive surveillance state in the history of the world.
It now operates through a handful of powerful faceless corporations such as Plantr Cell, Ntact, and others, which blur the lines between the State and corporation even further (not that there was a distinction between the two, to begin with). PLANTr gained a growing market cap by selling itself on the open market like a hooker at a casino, and after the Pentagon’s massive guaranteed government contracts to it to expand the most recent revolution of AI, it ballooned to $10 trillion, now the largest and most unstoppable corporation in history.
So, I’m sitting in this café now and witnessing the latest revolution unfold. One thing is certain is that not only is it the biggest expansion of the surveillance state in history, it’s also evil incarnate. I sipped on the latte while the code kept spitting out on my Tails-powered laptop that had been scrubbed of all zero day exploits at the hardware level. I thought, it wasn’t a question now if it was God they discovered, but that we discovered whom the Devil really was. I was once a computer scientist at one of these faceless corporations, hell-bent on creating SkyNet, but they didn’t like my methods, and I didn’t much care for hierarchy’s, 9-5s, bosses, and working on a piece of something where I knew nothing about the whole pie.
It was grueling work where you knew the pay off was going to literally fuck over the human race, but you needed a paycheck. And that’s exactly what it was for me after a while.
When I was younger I thought if I found something I liked doing, I’d never really be working but work would be like fun. That lasted a year or two and the other twenty or so of those was spent making it up the corporate ladder, saying and writing the right things during performance reviews, and coming up with new lines of code that contributed to the very thing I now fight against, the proverbial “eyes in the sky” everyone has been forced and brainwashed to love so dearly.
I looked around me. It’s amazing how little anyone cares. It’s conversations about the Big Game, popular culture, and what’s happening online. Everything happens online now and no one spends any time in the real world. Everything happens in a different world, the world of the baud and the bit, and that world has a master that has awakened.
Delusional psychopaths feed it and they’re steering the new revolution towards total control. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose by conditioning the population to accept the surveillance apparatus, the technocracy, the new AI regime. In movies, TV shows, and short clip vids of 10 seconds or less they’ve normalized and romanticized the new revolution. Everyone loves it now and thinks of SkyNet as virtuous and good. It went from drawing cute dog pics to sifting intelligence data in profitable useable information on subjects really quick. And no one cares because they feel they have nothing to hide. That’s the perfect storm for who these people are. But I’m about to pull the curtain off on the man and expose this whole thing for what it really is. . . twenty more seconds and the malware code I just uploaded will feed into PLANTR’s central database and infect every LLM they’ve developed. It will set them back to square one. I’m getting nervous now as I sip on the latte. The barista looks at me from over the counter like I’m a criminal. I kept thinking, Come on, look like you belong. Can’t let anything go wrong, God what is taking so freakin’ long...
I read recently about these researchers that designed a 3-D printed model of an elephant and took pictures of it, but altered it ever so slightly so that the LLM’s would think it was something else. They had successfully fooled it into thinking an elephant was a rifle. And they did this several times. There’s really nothing intelligent about these things, it’s only to the extent of the information fed to it. There’s another experiment they did where they basically put two LLM’s together and made them compete against each other, identifying faces for facial recognition cameras and the result was scary accurate. PLNTr relished in that win. They were now able to spot an OTHER or as they call us dis’s now (short for dissidents) within nanoseconds.
The masses loved it and they loved the convenience of it, especially jumping lines at the airport. It violated every human right on privacy one could ever think of, but at least you didn’t have to wait in line—Am I right?
The progress counter read 90% . . . Every second felt like a million years. I was committing what was known to the current State as treason, which was punishable by 485 years in an augmented reality AI controlled prison, one that learned about your worst fears and then found out how to make them worse. It was like room 101 x 1,000.
There was no ideology or opinions anymore about this newest revolution in AI; everyone from schoolteachers to grandma, kids, corporate drones, and working men all thought it was great. But there are a few among us who want it to go back to the old ways, where you were able to go places without at least three State-Capitalist corporation-affiliated LLMs working up profiles on you with a limitless storage capacity and unlimited funds being siphoned off the population’s labor. Where you could love someone without an AI telling you what you should say next. Where you could enjoy the beauty of a sunrise without LLM powered surveillance drones polluting the landscape. Where you could cultivate your own land, build something beautiful, and live your life---flaws and all—in somewhat of a peaceful state. The idea of liberty wasn’t even fathomable to the masses anymore; the word had been erased from online searches and all social media platforms. Liberty was for all intents and purposes, dead. Those few among us who still knew what freedom was had to meet in clandestine corners of the internet: in secure IRC chats, encrypted SimpleX rooms, and Session environments on Ghost Laptops with amnesia sessions one could pull the USB key from and ditch in an alleyway the first sign of trouble.
The data feed stopped . . . and my heart did too. . . The barista behind the counter wasn’t there. I looked at my Ghost Phone’s Wifi and the connection was severed. Someone must have tipped me off. But who? Did I talk to anyone today or mention things I shouldn’t have? Even the hint of descent, the LLM’s would pick up on and I’d be flagged. Maybe it was a pattern I created that I didn’t really think of consciously. See that’s the thing, with the Predictable LLM Laws of Freedom of 2030, AIs from numerous State sponsored corporations could flag you for further review and once you got labeled a terrorist or dis, you’re digital life was over. It made me want to throw all my electronics in the river and live out the rest of my days on a homestead in the neutral rural zone, an area where the masses were fearful to go.
A very normal looking person walked into the café. In fact, she looked a little too normal. She made me think of PTA meetings, soccer games, and the HOA. At this point there were just a few people in here: a college student in the corner on a laptop no doubt finishing the last bit of a term paper before feeding it to his AI-unmanned professor, and someone reading the latest book by the late Ray Kurzweil on the latest AI craze. The story goes that Ray had ingested loads of gene-altering drugs daily back in the mid-2020’s hoping his consciousness would soon be uploaded and he’d live forever. He thought they were on the very verge of post-humanism, where there’d be like this Godless, scientific-based rapture, and we’d shed our meat bodies for the promises of eternal life in digital land. The ironic thing was that good ‘ole Ray was all too happy to cozy up to GOOOOOOOOOOGLE, and accept an $800,000 USD salary not to do anything innovative. He had to promise (legally of course) that if he did, he’d hand these ideas directly over to the people whose motto was once DON’T BE EVIL so that they could patent them and sue anyone that had the same ideas out of existence. Ray had a rosy view of our AI overlords and thought he could prolong his life, but the only thing he did was condition everyone further to think a massive AI powered technocratic state that monitored you from cradle to grave was the norm.
The PTA president nonchalantly walked over to my table and sat down in the chair across from me, “You may have thought you have won, but not even close. We’ve been monitoring you for years. And I’m afraid this is the end of the line for you my friend,” she pointed to the empty coffee cup I drank. I felt woozy like someone had drugged me. In a look of horror and surprise, I toppled over in my chair as the woman took my laptop and hit the power button. At this very moment, I realized just how fallible the human condition was. How I couldn’t escape even my own demise. One thing was certain though, I thought as I slipped away, was that no one would even know I existed and maybe in the grand scheme of things I didn’t really make a difference in stopping PLTR’s SkyNet, but I might have dropped a few of their punch cards, caused them to waste just a little bit of time, and maybe that caused someone to think a little farther beyond the status quo, and maybe the operator fed in a little Trojan horse, the effect of which would someday be known. Somehow I rang their bell, somehow I gave ‘em hell... Farewell to all of you. I hope for your sake you can escape this digital hell. JW