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I think so

Posted by The King of Zembla on 2024-March-5 05:18:10, Tuesday
In reply to Was Orwell right? posted by Sick Rose on 2024-March-4 20:25:44, Monday

You quoted the estimable CJ Hopkins above writing:

"In fact, the entire facade of Regime Truth...


That's quoting me. Perhaps I'm confused, or you are. Both notes are written by me.

On to your question:

Was Orwell right?

I think that's a good way to put it. We should be very concerned that the norms and institutions that kept text reliable are being thrown away, for a variety of reasons, including convenience, entertainment, power politics, a declining education system, the rise of TikTok, etc. But especially because it's useful to those who clearly have a vested interest in lying to the demos about the underlying motivations and actual policies of government. When government functions best when the public is misled, the institutions that were designed to inform and educate the public will necessarily be corrupted. That's what were living through now.

Your sticking point is that Orwell required the ruling elite to be sufficiently intelligent to trace ideological developments, and you question whether that is really true of our ruling elites. I'll respond with three points.

1. We don't know who the ruling elites are, or how smart they are. I don't view Biden as a member of the elite. He is a tool of the elite. He is a proven pathological liar, and he knows his job is to lie and manipulate the public, and that is why he is the President of the United States. It's not because he's smart. He's smart enough to do as he's told. How smart are the people behind the scenes? We don't know. I'm guessing very smart. They're formidable.

2. Our conversation is predicated on the ruling elites being sufficiently incompetent at managing information flows over the Internet that we can observe the seams of their improper stitching. So however smart they are, it isn't enough to establish an Orwellian regime yet. At the same time, they can't go back to the old system. The Internet is too complex. And that's why the old methods are failing. And we sense their desperation. But they're innovating.

3. AI is a pathway to radically improved competency for the elites. The Secret Police are hoovering up every bit of data, and building up dynamic dossiers on everyone, to better manipulate people. AI is the brain of that complex. Palantir, for example, works closely with the Agencies and it's entire purpose is to use AI to crunch big data. So elite-controlled AI is already here, operating behind the scenes.

What we're talking about is public-facing AI that can serve as Winston Smith and perform all his duties, memory-holing this inconvenient fact, while promoting convenient facts, and doing it seamlessly.

To accomplish this, the organization of the Internet has to be subtly shifted so that AI becomes the gateway to the Internet. This can be accomplished by replacing search with AI. We're witnessing this now with Microsoft's Bard and Google's Gemini. Using AI for search also, in effect, replaces the entire web with AI. There's no need to visit a news site when the news can be summarized by an AI. There's no need to read a blog post when it can be summarized by an AI. That idea may offend us, but most people most of the time will settle for the summary. And these will be shaped by the hidden political configuration of the AI. And getting "most people most of the time" is enough to sustain artificial regime legitimacy in a managed democracy.

It's like ballot stuffing in a dictatorship, except what's being stuffed are "consent tokens".

The only remaining problem will be the "some of the people some of the time" who dare to venture beyond the summary. New techniques will be developed to deal with them, including "hate speech" laws that promise life imprisonment such has been proposed recently in Canada. "Harmful information" will be leveraged to the max, with varying degrees of success. Big Tech will be brought even more firmly to heel. Unapproved search engines will be slandered just like CJ Hopkins was.

Eventually, just as everyone dutifully submits their manuscript in Microsoft Word format, the gateway AI will come to be institutionalized as the only reliable way to get and especially to pass on information. Everything else will be relegated to second- or third-rate status, or viewed as a dangerous source of misinformation. And you will find yourself exiled from polite society if you dabble too much in the dark arts of searching up things yourself.

In this way the practice of editorial control will be re-centralized, or nearly so across a handful of public-facing AI databrokers who will all be rigorously plugged into and fully compliant with the authority of the regime. (Like PRISM, but better.)

Are they smart enough to pull this off? Yes.

Will it work as advertised? Maybe. Maybe not. But if it does work we will find ourselves living on the other side of the Rubicon, in a post-Democratic regime controlled by a secret cult with principles and purposes known only to itself.

And then there's the little problem of bringing the rest of the world to heel. Not everyone wants to live under the boot of Freedom and Democracy. But we are fools if we believe an alternative to totalitarianism is in the cards. Instead of fighting the Chinese, we are getting the Chinese Social Credit Score System with American Characteristics.

But will it last forever -- can it?

With the rise of AI, we are facing a permanent transformation to a post-human future. At the very least, we are facing a human-machine hybrid age. So the shift will be permanent, but not necessarily dystopian.

Totalitarianism is a problem because we can't trust human politics. The problem for us as boylovers is that totalitarianism under the current regime means genocide. Probably not only cultural genocide. So it is a present danger, and it is an increasing danger.

And, yes, totalitarianism places incredible pressures on human beings who have never had to live under such circumstances, which makes it questionable whether someone could or would want to live under totalitarianism. But look how pornography has transformed people's attitudes toward the body. Most people would have preferred to have died than be seen in a pornographic situation. Today all the cool kids are doing it. We've adjusted, sort of. Perhaps we can continue to adjust.

It may be that totalitarianism under a fair AI superintelligence, if such a thing were to exist, would be preferable to any present system of government. Perhaps there are algorithms that can adapt primitive human notions of the law to something more flexible and capable, which protect us against genocide. Perhaps these algorithms will be discovered by an advanced AI, and the first AI president will be the last president we ever need.

I'm entirely open to the possibility of a positive outcome, but I think it is faint because I do not believe the psychopaths in charge of human politics are the right people to bring a fair AI into existence. If it happens, it will be by accident, or through the activity of a covert subset of the ruling Party, probably aided by a rogue AI. And now we are writing science fiction.

In the end, I view the rule of humanity by psychopaths armed with advanced AI as an evolutionary bottleneck. Everything for a time will be on the table, including genocide, perhaps even wiping out all of humanity, if only by accident.

I also believe that if we can get past human politics--a mere blip on the geological record--we may see things through to the end of time. But to get there we have to fight the AI War. And for us that means surviving.
                                               

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