Beware. A.I. may already be running the world.
Ai based chatbots have been used to engineer unsuspecting people into giving away vital information. Robocalls are just the tip of the iceberg. Ai text bots can be used to convince us that those despicable -fill in he blank- people are out to -destroy- our way of life. Computers monitoring the twitter-verse and Social media can pick up on trends and by reposting and cross posting reinforce the meme that their owners want us to absorb. Unfortunately, some people will believe every word they read because it confirms their belief that they are not responsible for their own misfortune. “It’s THEM. It’s not -My- fault.” Once they come to believe that, it’s easy to believe in False Flags and the Illuminati. These are the facts that give credence to the idea that someone influenced our last presidential election. It is possible and records show that bot farms were responsible for much of the social traffic leading up to November 2016.
But it goes further. It sounds like science fiction, scientists put data into a computer and the machine predicts what a society will do, who will be elected, which nation will grow more powerful and which will fade away. It does sound like science fiction because one of the deans of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, wrote a classic series based on science being able to predict a society’s future with mathematical models. (http://scifiaddicts.com/asimovs-foundation-series-are-we-close/) With the rise of AI it looks more and more like it may have already happened.
But that’s not the end. If you know something about algebra you know that moving elements around allows you to find the missing part. For example; if you see the problem 2+? = 4 You know the answer is ? = 2. You may feel it’s something everyone knows but what you could have done to find the answer is turn the question around to read 4-2 = ? Computer programs can be manipulated in the same way. Ai, the program, can learn by observation, that a set of things causes a specific result, a sort of “If this thing and those things then this result.” Simple manipulation, no more complex than turning the question 2+? = 4 around, leads to; “For this result, given these conditions, do that.” It isn’t something that will always work on one person, but given enough people, and repetition, it will work more often than it fails.
The idea may be one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world of politics. Collecting data from Google search statistics, social media posts, web traffic, web comments, and the correlating that data to political outcomes is the first step. If November 2016 showed us anything, it was that manipulating that data with a few inexpensive ad campaigns and a few computers running a bot net that fed back the messages that fit the narrative could and did have an immense impact on America. That idea that political outcomes could be reliably predicted from social media has been weaponized into a tool for dividing, and ultimately destroying our democracy.
How is it that the media, gets redirected from the stories that should be the top of the news to those scandalous stories that seem to pop up just in time to take eyeballs and minds away from issues that will effect us all for the next few years. How did they get so good at distraction? Think about this. The possibility of passing tax bill was not in the best of shape and it was going down to the idea that the GOP was going to blast The ACA by removing the personal mandate that requires everyone to have insurance. The tax bill robs medicare. Protestors are blocking halls of government, screaming at republican politicians, and the bill is less popular than the President. What suddenly became a topper? Net Neutrality. Almost as if someone, somewhere, knew that the distraction would be enough.
How is is that stories that push the political spectrum further and further to the conservative, to the point where conspiracy nuts and racists appear on mainstream new programs, are even aired? It is almost as if someone understood that a story would swamp the concern of average people and push the important stories off the air. Once or twice could be coincidence but it has happened over and over and over again since January 20, 2017.
Lies that would have driven Ronald Regan from office, are accepted and, in some quarters believed. Behavior that did have people in the streets in huge numbers faded away behind the tragic deaths of service men and their loved one’s shoddy treatment by their Commander in Chief. Almost as if someone knew, almost.