Be very, very afraid.

I’ve just looped back into this thread from the technical side and an excellent, detailed example of how botnets are implemented on Twitter. This may be a bit boring to people outside the IT realm but it shows exactly how to set up the technology to implement what the referenced article here describes. If you read the article it happens to be a Russian botnet operating as individual US pro Trump supporters who generated tens of thousands of tweets in January and early February. The goal in this case was not, it appears, political but standard old fashioned business funneling Trump followers to a site that offered dollars for clicks. And everyone uses Twitter bots to amplify any retweet or quote on their product, meme, or position. I mention this to make sure that everyone (human) here understands how very real and basic the underlying technology is today. The AI layer rides on a vast network of technology that can capture and deliver information. I could get into more discussion on this but not in this response today.

For the last few days I’ve been more and more concerned with how fast and pervasive the AI control systems have become and with the use of those systems to counter exactly what we are doing here. While Medium is in may ways the a Great Leap Forward it is also becoming successful enough in terms of size and status that it is drawing the very activity we are worried about. And I don’t know any good way of countering or even knowing the nature of responses to distinguish between someone who may be simply a different opinion (I accept that there really are Trump supporters although I don’t see very many), ordinary human trolls, and AI triggered responses to create trouble for purposes of suppression. The only useful clue for me on Medium is a broadly angry response from an unknown account that has almost nothing but a picture or icon. But yesterday I responded to an article that was strange but seemed valid and rational from a Republican but only vaguely pro-Trump. Having read through the responses, all of them polite and began writing my own I had to change direction. I’m not linking to this because I’m not sure about it although that my change. The problem was it was too good and I realized that the content and responses to questions was carefully bland and keyed to Trump talking points. These are not complex, in fact they are crude and don’t make much sense. This smacked of an effort to broaden normalization of a clearly neo-fascist regime. Myles point is not that this as an AI but could well have been a person using a script designed for the Medium environment.

And that’s why I’m writing this response here today on article with responses from people that I “know”. I’m very pro-AI as I think that we are already so far over our heads in non-linear situations that we must move to AI to handle our own management. The problem is not AI development at this level, it’s far to simple despite it’s stunning abilities, to become some kind of evil thing but the rate of change is far beyond what we can comfortably understand. It’s the human problem of evil and irrationality and emotional instability. And now we have truly evil people who have been given access to the best there is to with what they will. I’ve been saying this, hoping for proof that I was wrong, but I think our time has run out. Technology, even if it is in many ways, smarter than we are is a tool that can be shaped for overall good or evil. Our evolution is lagging so we are jumping to hybrid evolution but we need to do whatever we have to do to control the tools until they can be given an ethical and moral framework. And however broad that moral and ethical framework may be, manipulation, greed and domination are not virtues and cannot be allowed.