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Photo Source thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

This year Facebook filed two very interesting patents in the US. One was a patent for emotion recognition technology; which recognises human emotions through facial expressions and so can therefore assess what mood we are in at any given time-happy or anxious for example. This can be done either by a webcam or through a phone cam. The technology is relatively straight forward. Artificially intelligent driven algorithms analyses and then deciphers facial expressions, it then matches the duration and intensity of the expression with a corresponding emotion. Take contempt for example. Measured by a range of values from 0 to 100, an expression of contempt could be measured by a smirking smile, a furrowed brow and a wrinkled nose. An emotion can then be extrapolated from the data linking it to your dominant personality traits: openness, introverted, neurotic, say.

The accuracy of the match may not be perfect, its always good to be sceptical about what is being claimed, but as AI (Artificial Intelligence) learns exponentially and the technology gets much better; it is already much, much quicker than human intelligence.

Recently at Columbia University a competition was set up between human lawyers and their AI counterparts. Both read a series of non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. AI found 95% compared to 88% by humans. The human lawyers took 90 minutes to read them; AI took 22 seconds. More incredibly still, last year Google’s AlphaZero beat Stockfish 8 in chess. Stockfish 8 is an open-sourced chess engine with access to centuries of human chess experience. Yet AlphaZero taught itself using machine learning principles, free of human instruction, beating Stockfish 8 28 times and drawing 72 out of 100. It took AlphaZero four hours to independently teach itself chess. Four hours from blank slate to genius.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Has The Era Of Autonomous Warfare Finally Arrived?

September 23, 2018

Has The Era Of Autonomous Warfare Finally Arrived?

The global arms race for the latest weapons of war is a naturally escalating cycle of countries pursuing ways to dominate the battlefield of the future. Increasingly, that battlefield is a matrix of soldiers with traditional weapons, robots, drones and cyberweapons. Until this point, command over this matrix has ultimately been in the hands of humans. Now, however, many of the trends in artificial intelligence-driven autonomy are enabling data collection, analysis and potentially combat to be done by algorithms.

Another key signpost has entered the roadmap toward a future of autonomous systems capable of engaging in combat without human oversight. The U.S. military announced the first ever successful unmanned aerial “kill” of another aircraft during a previously unreported training exercise.

The successful test late last year showed the U.S. Air Force that an unmanned vehicle like the MQ-9 has the ability to conduct air-to-air combat, much like its manned fighter brethren such as an F-15 Eagle or F-22 Raptor, according to Col. Julian Cheater, commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.

“Something that’s unclassified but not well known, we recently in November … launched an air-to-air missile against a maneuvering target that scored a direct hit,” Cheater said. Military.com sat down with Cheater here at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber conference outside Washington, D.C.

“It was an MQ-9 versus a drone with a heat-seeking air-to-air missile, and it was direct hit … during a test,” he said of the first-of-its-kind kill.

(Source: Military.com)

An Air Force Special Operations Command MQ-9 Reaper taxis. (U.S. Air Force photo/Dennis Henry)

The fact that the military has this capability should not be shocking, as it has been well documented on this website and others that the largest defense contractors in the world have developed a clear intention to create fully autonomous weapons systems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook Plans “War Room” And A.I. Software To Prevent Election Meddling Ahead Of Midterms

September 20, 2018

Facebook Plans “War Room” And A.I. Software To Prevent Election Meddling Ahead Of Midterms

Apparently Facebook thinks it’s the US military, or a NATO command center, or perhaps its millennial employees want to relive the 1980’s cult classic “WarGames” movie.

Facebook announced Wednesday that it plans to set up a “war room” at its Silicon Valley campus to prevent potential foreign election meddling during the midterms.

“We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the Brazil and US elections,”Facebook elections and civic engagement director Samidh Chakrabarti said, according to the AFP. He added, “It is going to serve as a command center so we can make real-time decisions as needed.”

A “command center” in a “war room” to make “real-time” decisions huh?… And oh Facebook says it will gain help from artificial intelligence software to prevent fake posts by those pesky Russians to boot…

Apparently office space for the planned anti-election meddling HQ has already been set aside as Facebook says it’s still in the procession of “building” this war room.

But the AFP reports this incredibly amusing detail:

He declined to say when the “war room” — currently a conference room with a paper sign taped to the door — would be in operation.

Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message, according to executives.

Don’t worry America your elections are safe with Facebook on watch at the forward operating post! Though likely a conference room with paper taped to the door won’t exactly convey confidence and readiness to the American public.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will Bilderberg still be relevant as the future of war is transformed?

June 12, 2018

Will Bilderberg still be relevant as the future of war is transformed?

This year’s summit is all about war – but what they all want to conquer is artificial intelligence

A protester’s sign saying ‘Stop The New World Order’ near the venue of the 2016 Bilderberg conference in Dresden, Germany. Photograph: Chad Buchanan/Getty Images

This year’s Bilderberg summit is a council of war. On the agenda: Russia and Iran. In the conference room: the secretary general of Nato, the German defence minister, and the director of the French foreign intelligence service, DGSE.

They are joined in Turin, Italy, by a slew of academic strategists and military theorists, but for those countries in geopolitical hotspots there is nothing theoretical about these talks. Not when the prime ministers of Estonia and Serbia are discussing Russia, or Turkey’s deputy PM is talking about Iran.

The clearest indication that some sort of US-led conflict is on the cards is the presence of the Pentagon’s top war-gamer, James H Baker. He is an expert in military trends, and no trend is more trendy in the world of battle strategy than artificial intelligence. Bilderberg is devoting a whole session to AI this year – and has invited military theorist Michael C Horowitz, who has written extensively on its likely impact on the future of war.

Does Russia present a credible threat to the UK?

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, left, shakes hands with China’s president, Xi Jinping — Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, left, greets China’s president, Xi Jinping. China and Russia are investing heavily in artificial intelligence. Photograph: Sergey Guneyev/AFP/Getty Images

Horowitz sees AI as “the ultimate enabler”. In an article published just a few weeks ago in the Texas National Security Review, he quotes Putin’s remark from 2017: “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New DARPA Program Plans To Patrol Cities With AI Drones

May 22, 2018

New DARPA Program Plans To Patrol Cities With AI Drones

The primary objective of the URSA program is to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of blending unmanned aerial systems, sensor technologies, and advanced machine learning algorithms to “enable improved techniques for rapidly discriminating hostile intent and filtering out threats in complex urban environments,” said FedBizOpps.

In other words, the Pentagon is developing a program of high-tech cameras mounted on drones and other robots that monitor cities, which enable identification and discrimination between civilians and terrorists through machine learning computers.

DARPA provides a simple scenario of what a URSA engagement would look like:

“A static sensor located near an overseas military installation detects an individual moving across an urban intersection and towards the installation outside of normal pedestrian pathways. An unmanned aerial system (UAS) equipped with a loudspeaker delivers a warning message. The person is then observed running into a neighboring building. Later, URSA detects an individual emerging from a different door at the opposite end of the building, but confirms it is the same person and sends a different UAS to investigate.

This second UAS determines that the individual has resumed movement toward a restricted area. It releases a nonlethal flash-bang device at a safe distance to ensure the individual attends to the second message and delivers a sterner warning. This second UAS takes video of the subject and determines that the person’s gait and direction are unchanged even when a third UAS flies directly in front of the person and illuminates him with an eye-safe laser dot. URSA then alerts the human supervisor and provides a summary of these observations, warning actions, and the person’s responses and current location.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook: Six Degrees of Giant Squid

March 22, 2018

Facebook: Six Degrees of Giant Squid

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) German artist, philosopher, composer, mystic Cosmic TreeAll of a sudden, politicians in the EU, UK, and USA all want to talk to Mark Zuckerberg. That’s a bad enough sign all by itself. It means they all either have been asleep, complicit, or they’re not very bright. The media tries to convince us the Facebook ‘scandal’ is about Trump, Russia (yawn..) and elections. It’s not. Not even close.

If Zuckerberg ever shows up for any of these meetings with ‘worried’ politicians, he’ll come with a cabal of lawyers in tow, and they’ll put the blame on anyone but Facebook and say the company was tricked by devious parties who didn’t live up to their legal agreements.

After that, the argument won’t be whether Facebook broke any laws for allowing data breaches, but whether their data use policy itself is, and always was, illegal. Now, Facebook has been around for a few years, with their policies, and nobody ever raised their voices. Not really, that is.

And then it’ll all fizzle out, amid some additional grandstanding from all involved, face-saving galore, and more blame for Trump and Russia.

The new European Parliament chief Antonio Tajani said yesterday: “We’ve invited Mark Zuckerberg to the European Parliament. Facebook needs to clarify before the representatives of 500 million Europeans that personal data is not being used to manipulate democracy.”

That’s all you need to know, really. Personal data can be used to manipulate anything as long as it’s not democracy. Or at least democracy as the Brussels elite choose to define it.

First: this is not about Cambridge Analytica, it’s about Facebook. Or rather, it’s about the entire social media and search industry, as well as its connections to the intelligence community. Don’t ever again see Google or Facebook as not being part of that.

What Facebook enabled Cambridge Analytica to do, it will do ten times bigger itself. And it sells licences to do it to probably thousands of other ‘developers’. The CIA and NSA may have unlimited powers, but prior to Alphabet and Facebook, they never had the databases. They do now, and they’re using them. ‘Manipulate democracy’? What democracy?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

AI Censorship and the Power of Steem to Preserve Truth

January 24, 2018

AI Censorship and the Power of Steem to Preserve Truth

Just read a great article by Caitlin Johnstone over at Medium where she discusses the automation of censorship tools by companies like Twitter and Google.

Putting paid Julian Assange’s warning last year on this, Ms. Johnstone details just some of the abuses that Twitter and Google engaged in to subtly and not-so-subtly shift public perception of major issues that run counter to the narrative the power structure wants us to believe.

And it is for this reason that projects like Steemit are so very important.

I talked about how important Steem is after James O’Keefe’s latest expose of Twitter (read it here). Watching people like Mrs. Johnstone wake up to the problem is great, but she also needs to take the next step.

You can’t hack something whose underlying content is stored in a distributed blockchain. Because the blockchain’s ledger is immutable, what you wrote is preserved in all of its glory (ignominious or otherwise) forever.

As she points out, type of censorship is far worse than simply throwing books into piles and burning them. With DRM and all digital assets, inconvenient truths can be memory-holed off your Kindle never to be seen again.

Abridged versions of books can be substituted for the original text and worse.

So, the blockchain as it pertains to how we communicate is a fundamental need to disrupt this communications super-state they are building.

I can’t stress enough how important this is today.

Now, more than ever, the information war is heating up. And the ability to control not just the validity of what people produce but what everyone consumes is the single most important issue of the age.

If we are to finally break the backs of the people working so hard to maintain their gravy train, we have to build systems that are beyond their control.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Assange Keeps Warning Of AI Censorship, And It’s Time We Started List

January 22, 2018

Assange Keeps Warning Of AI Censorship, And It’s Time We Started Listening

Throughout the near entirety of human history, a population’s understanding of what’s going on in the world has been controlled by those in power. The men in charge controlled what the people were told about rival populations, the history of their tribe and its leadership, etc. When the written word was invented, men in charge dictated what books were permitted to be written and circulated, what ideas were allowed, what narratives the public would be granted access to.

This continued straight on into modern times. Where power is not overtly totalitarian, wealthy elites have bought up all media, first in print, then radio, then television, and used it to advance narratives that are favorable to their interests. Not until humanity gained widespread access to the internet has our species had the ability to freely and easily share ideas and information on a large scale without regulation by the iron-fisted grip of power. This newfound ability arguably had a direct impact on the election for the most powerful elected office in the most powerful government in the world in 2016, as a leak publishing outlet combined with alternative and social media enabled ordinary Americans to tell one another their own stories about what they thought was going on in their country.

This newly democratized narrative-generating power of the masses gave those in power an immense fright, and they’ve been working to restore the old order of power controlling information ever since. And the editor-in-chief of the aforementioned leak publishing outlet, WikiLeaks, has been repeatedly trying to warn us about this coming development.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Capitalism Dead or Merely Dying?

October 22, 2017

Is Capitalism Dead or Merely Dying?

Alfred Wertheimer Elvis 1956

New Zealand’s new prime minister Jacinda Ardern calls capitalism a blatant failure. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is ‘merely’ coming to an end because it is making itself obsolete. Mathematics professor Bruce Boghosian claims that without redistribution of wealth, our market economy would not be stable, because wealth always tends to concentrate. The people at Artemis Capital Management write that the stock market has begun self-cannibalizing like a snake eating its tail, and the only reason we’re not in a recession already is ‘financial alchemy’.

At the very least we can say that the system is under pressure. But what system is that? It would be nice to have a clearcut definition of capitalism, but alas, there are many, about as many as there are different forms of it. That doesn’t make this any easier. Americans call many European economies ‘socialist’, which seems to mean they are not capitalist. But Scandinavian countries don’t function like the Soviet Union either.

And if you see how much money is involved in transfer payments to citizens in the US, the supposed bastion of free market capitalism, it’s tempting to conclude the system has already failed. But even with transfer payments, inequality is at record levels. That would seem to confirm Boghosian’s statement that “even if a society does redistribute wealth, if it’s too small an amount, “a partial oligarchy will result..” So what then?

Varoufakis and others want a “universal basic dividend”, or “universal basic income”. Would that be the end of capitalism as we know it? Or is it just a -perhaps more extreme- form of ‘state capitalism’? Varoufakis deems it inevitable because technology will eradicate so many jobs from societies that people won’t be able to make money from work. Personally, I’ve long thought that the pending large-scale demise of pensions systems will lead to some form of UBI.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

3D printing, AI and Robots v Dark Age

September 1, 2017

3D printing, AI and Robots v Dark Age

QUESTION: Hello, Mr. Armstrong.

Let us say that the future turns out OK-ish (post crash and burn), that we avoid another dark age. 3D printing, AI and robots do a lot of the work for humanity. The amount of available mundane jobs are reduced and replaced by our inventions.

Have you had any thoughts about a society where technology makes most humans obsolete? I would not know if that would be a dystopian or utopian way of life. Probably neither.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge!

-Arild

ANSWER: Let us hope that we do not go into a Dark Age. I certain do not think we are going all the way to a Dark Age. The reason I warn about that is to hopefully make people aware that this is one of those times when such events take place. I do not believe that the cycles can be altered. What I do believe is we possess the power to understand and reduce the volatility.

What we face is rising tension and dysfunctional government. It is always government that causes the Dark Age. Their greed and obstinate desire to maintain power results in them turning against the people to retain control. If we understand what they WILL do, we can intelligently counteract those measures. The army will be a key component. If some divisions support the government and others the people, there is your civil war. Then we have the Marxists who are in a clear trend to retake government. So this is the battle we will have to confront.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Feudalism and the “Algorithmic Economy”

April 25, 2017

Feudalism and the “Algorithmic Economy”

Using AI and algorithms to return to feudal economic models

For the sake of this essay, feudal economic models imply the idea that a very tiny segment of the society is fantastically rich while the bulk of society works hard, has few choices about the work they do, and tend to be poorly compensated for their efforts.

feu·dal·ism: noun, historical

the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.

Feudalism – Wikipedia
Although derived from the Latin word feodum or feudum (fief), then in use, the term feudalism and the system it…en.wikipedia.org

Welcome to the Algorithmic Economy, a future which uses machines to determine how effective you can be and how little they can pay you in the process.

There are no unions in this economy. There are no bosses to complain to. There are no people you can ask for redress. Because in this economy, the people doing the labor are considered the least important part of the machine and it’s best if they never communicate with someone living if it can be helped.

This is just like something out of a dark and dystopian science fiction novel, except its likely happening to you, right now. If it isn’t, unless you are very fortunate, it will be, soon. I write about the near-future in my speculative fiction. Often these are my most unpopular stories because they paint technology in a less-than-ideal light.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The A.I. Economy, An Open Secret: “Why the Market Never Crashes”

March 11, 2017

The A.I. Economy, An Open Secret: “Why the Market Never Crashes”

market-party

How are they keep this dying patient, the economy, together?

Perhaps we are long past the point of an organic, “real” economy. Instead, autotrading and artificial intelligence appears to be auto-investing into the stock market and other parts of the economy in order to keep it afloat.

Meanwhile, the individual will be increasingly barred from using cash, and forced onto a digital, tracking system.

Matthew McKinley of Texas Shrugged Books explains why he thinks that the system hasn’t crashed yet in spite of overwhelming systemic problems, and plenty of room for crisis.

Basically, everything is rigged, and we are at the mercy of a more organized, data-loving computer.

via Texas Shrugged Books:

I am sick of the talking heads who all swore up and down that 2016 would be the year of collapse, and of course, it didn’t happen. All of these talking heads are so arrogant, they can never admit they were wrong. Saying “I was wrong” allows one to stop running down the wrong path, reassess, and find the right track. In my opinion some form of A.I. and supercomputer is injecting the system with “printed” money so nothing really fails. I am not just talking about banks. I think, at this point, “regular industry” of a certain size is also getting these magic funds. This is almost the only way to explain how nothing has really failed since 2009. This magic show will go on for as long as the rest of the world still covets our fake monopoly money painted green. So, if no group of countries begin using real money or any other way of rejecting the dollar by bartering locally for example, this system will go on that long. It could be another decade I just don’t know at this point, but it cannot go on forever. A system based on lies, manipulation, and fakery can’t go on forever.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

April 28, 2016

Tatiana Shepeleva/Shutterstock

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

How shortsighted policies are creating a long-term crisis

Students of Austrian business cycle theory are familiar with the term malinvestment. A malinvestment is any poor use of resources or capital, commonly made in response to bad policy (usually artificially low interest rates and/or unsustainable increases in the monetary supply). The dot-com bubble that popped in 2001? The housing bubble that similarly burst in 2008? Those were classic examples of malinvestment.

With this article, I’d like to introduce a related term: malincentive. While not part of the official economic lexicon, I consider a ‘malincentive’ a useful word to describe any promise of short-term gain whose long-term costs outweigh any immediate benefits enjoyed. The temptation to urinate in one’s pants on a cold winter day to get warm is a (perhaps unnecessarily) graphic example of malincentive. Yes, a momentary relief from the cold can be achieved; but moments later, you’ll have a much larger problem than you did at the outset.

Malincetives and malinvestment go hand-in-hand. In my opinion, the former causes the latter. As humans, we respond remarkably well to incentives. And dumb incentives encourage us to make dumb investments.

In this current era of central planning, malincentives abound. We raced to frack as fast as we could for the quick money, while leaving behind a wake of environmental destruction and creating a supply glut that has killed the economics of shale oil. Our stock exchanges sell unfairly-fast price feeds for great sums to elite Wall Street high-frequency-trading firms, and as a result have destroyed investor trust in our financial markets. The Federal Reserve keeps interest rates historically low to encourage banks to lend money out, yet instead the banks simply lever up to buy Treasurys thereby pocketing vast amounts of riskless free profit. The list goes on and on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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