Who’s (or WHAT’S) Writing Your News?

Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news copy, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.

Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.

A Google spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times and The Post declined to comment.

“We have an excellent relationship with Google, and we appreciate Sundar Pichai’s long-term commitment to journalism,” a News Corp spokesman said in a statement, referring to Google’s chief executive.

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and media commentator, said Google’s new tool, as described, had potential upsides and downsides.

“If this technology can deliver factual information reliably, journalists should use the tool,” said Mr. Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

“If, on the other hand, it is misused by journalists and news organizations on topics that require nuance and cultural understanding,” he continued, “then it could damage the credibility not only of the tool but of the news organizations that use it.”

News organizations around the world are grappling with whether to use artificial intelligence tools in their newsrooms. Many, including The Times, NPR and Insider, have notified employees that they intend to explore potential uses of A.I. to see how it might be responsibly applied to the high-stakes realm of news, where seconds count and accuracy is paramount.

But Google’s new tool is sure to spur anxiety, too, among journalists who have been writing their own articles for centuries. Some news organizations, including The Associated Press, have long used A.I. to generate stories about matters including corporate earnings reports, but they remain a small fraction of the service’s articles compared with those generated by journalists.

Artificial intelligence could change that, enabling users to generate articles on a wider scale that, if not edited and checked carefully, could spread misinformation and affect how traditionally written stories are perceived.

While Google has moved at a breakneck pace to develop and deploy generative A.I., the technology has also presented some challenges to the advertising juggernaut. While Google has traditionally played the role of curating information and sending users to publishers’ websites to read more, tools like its chatbot, Bard, present factual assertions that are sometimes incorrect and do not send traffic to more authoritative sources, such as news publishers.

The technology has been introduced as governments around the world have called on Google to give news outlets a larger slice of its advertising revenue. After the Australian government tried to force Google to negotiate with publishers over payments in 2021, the company forged more partnerships with news organizations in various countries, under its News Showcase program.

Publishers and other content creators have already criticized Google and other major A.I. companies for using decades of their articles and posts to help train these A.I. systems, without compensating the publishers. News organizations including NBC News and The Times have taken a position against A.I.’s sucking up their data without permission.

The post Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles appeared first on New York Times.

from:    https://dnyuz.com/2023/07/19/google-tests-a-i-tool-that-is-able-to-write-news-articles/

These Guys Are Totally Insane

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

A top official with the World Economic Forum (WEF) has called for religious scripture to be “rewritten” by artificial intelligence (AI) to create a globalized “new Bible.”

Yuval Noah Harari, the senior advisor to the WEF and its chairman Klaus Schwab, argues that using AI to replace scriptures will create unified “religions that are actually correct.”

Harari, an influential author and professor, made the call while giving a talk on the “future of humanity.”

According to Harari, the power of AI can be harnessed and used to reshape spirituality into the WEF’s globalist vision of “equity” and inclusivism.

Speaking with journalist Pedro Pinto in Lisbon, Portugal, Harari told the elitist audience:

“It’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas.

“You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind.

“They cannot create a new idea.

“You know, [Johannes] Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century; the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it, but it did not create a single new page.

“It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?”

Harari then revealed that he and his allies at the WEF have a solution to the supposed problems he’d just highlighted.

“AI can create new ideas; [it] can even write a new Bible,” he declared.

“Throughout history, religions dreamt about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity,” he added.

“In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct … just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI.

“That could be a reality in a few years.”

WATCH:

Harari noted in another recent gathering that software like ChatGPT has mastered human languages and can harness that function to influence culture, the Times of Israel said.

“For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society,” he said, according to the paper.

“Now AI is likely to be able to do it.

“And once it can… it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us.

“It can get humans to pull the trigger.”

Harari also said that “contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them,” the paper noted.

He also warned that “we need to act quickly before AI gets out of our control” and that “governments must immediately ban the release into the public domain of any more revolutionary AI tools before they are made safe,” the paper added.

Harari frequently pushes ideas that involve humanity being replaced by machines.

As Slay News previously reported, Harari gloated last year that “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in today’s world.

According to Harari, most of the general public has now become “redundant” and will be of little use to the global elite in the future.

Harari argues that modern technologies like artificial intelligence “make it possible to replace the people.”

“If you go back to the middle of the 20th century — and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you’re in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin — and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers,” Harari said.

“You need them.

“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” he added.

“The future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering.

“Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”

WEF Calls for AI to Rewrite Bible, Create ‘Religions That Are Actually Correct’

America Needs a Lifeline

RFK Jr. and Elon Musk Discuss ‘Reclaiming Democracy’

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked

STORY AT-A-GLANCEfree speech

  • June 5, 2023, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk co-hosted a live Twitter discussion about issues they believe ought to be at the forefront of the political debate going into the 2024 presidential election
  • Topics covered included free speech versus censorship, the destruction of democracy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, the humanitarian crisis at the border, COVID, the link between mass shootings and antidepressants, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and more
  • If elected president, Kennedy will issue an executive order forbidding federal agencies from participating in any efforts to censor speech by the American public
  • Kennedy is adamant about stopping the ever-growing influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border and is currently formulating policies to make the border “impervious,” while simultaneously opening up legal immigration pathways
  • Kennedy also wants to shut down gain-of-function research and bioweapons development

June 5, 2023, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk co-hosted a live Twitter discussion with Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, venture capitalist David Sacks, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger and securities attorney Omeed Malik, about issues they believe ought to be at the forefront of the political debate going into the 2024 presidential election.

Topics covered included free speech versus censorship, the destruction of democracy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, the humanitarian crisis at the border, COVID, the link between mass shootings and antidepressants, the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and more.

Also you can mark your calendars as I and Dr. Pierre, Kory, Dr. Patrick Gentempo, Del Bigtree, Mikki Willis and others will be participating in a Health Policy Roundtable, where we will be able to grill Bobby about your concerns. It will be Tuesday, June 27 at 7:00 PM EDT.

Media Bias

Not surprisingly, the liberal media chastised Kennedy for championing “right-wing ideas and misinformation” during the interview. In fact, that was The New York Times’ headline.1

The NYT went on to smear Kennedy as “a leading vaccine skeptic” who promotes “conspiracy theories” and “sounded like a candidate … in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.” Translation: He’s a rational realist who doesn’t shy away from difficult truths and inconvenient facts.

“He said he planned to travel to the Mexican border this week to ‘try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,’ called for the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians and said pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for the rise of mass shootings in America,” The NYT complained, adding:

“He claimed, without evidence, that ‘COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem.’ American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that is the case.”

Similarly, CNN wrote Kennedy off as a “marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims,” complaining he “attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance.”2

I suggest listening to the discussion for yourself, as most mainstream media reporting on it didn’t do it justice. Below, I’ll review some of the key issues discussed, with a focus on Kennedy’s stances and election promises, seeing how the establishment is doing everything in their power to prevent people from learning what he stands for.

Kennedy on Social Media Censorship

Proving the ties between the Biden administration and Big Tech are still alive and well in the post-COVID era, Instagram recently suspended Kennedy’s official presidential campaign page, after reinstating his personal page, which had been banned for the last couple of years. Kennedy commented:

“I was evicted from Instagram … in the spring of 2021. The day I was evicted, I had about 770,000 [followers], but I had been up to 900,000. Whenever I hit 900,000, they would cut them back to 800,000 or 700,000, so I was losing followers all the time.

They said it was because I was promoting misinformation. But the term is ‘information,’ and [has] nothing to do with … factual accuracy or inaccuracy. It was simply a euphemism for any statement that departed from the government orthodoxies and government proclamations …

Since I’ve declared the presidency [run], now we have about 50 people working for the campaign, and each of those people has an Instagram handle — for example, my daughter-in-law is Amaryllis@TeamKennedy.com — and when they attempted to register, Instagram would send them a flag saying ‘You’ve been suspended for 180 days.’

So, none of them were allowed on. And, of course, that’s illegal under Section 413 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which regulates speech. It protects speech during presidential and other federal election campaigns …

But I don’t want to be pointing the finger at Meta right now, because I think it’s time for healing in this country. I’m happy that I’ve been reinstated, and they gave me back all my old posts, and all my old followers …“

If elected president, Kennedy vows to call the heads of all social media companies into the Oval Office and “not walk out until we have figured out how to make this work and make it consistent with democracy.”

Like Sachs, Kennedy doesn’t believe that social media companies want to censor any of their users. Rather, they’re pressured to do so by advertisers and the government itself, which is using private companies to circumvent the U.S. Constitution. Were social media companies to continue censoring anyway, then turning them into common carriers could be one solution.

“I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist,” Kennedy said, “and I think the remedy for misinformation is more information, and the remedy for bad speech is more speech. It’s never censorship. Censorship is by far the worst solution. There are forms of speech that are not protected, [such as] inciting violence [and] pedophilia … and you can censor those.

But if it’s protected speech, I don’t think it should be censored. But I think in any case, we should understand the logic, the algorithms and the methodologies, and we should all have access to those. That’s key, because these institutions are now the public square. They are a place where speech takes place … and we have to figure out a way to integrate them into our democratic values system.”

Musk is also adamant about the need for free speech. “I think if we don’t protect free speech at all costs, we don’t have a functioning democracy. If we don’t have a functioning democracy, nothing else matters,” Musk said. Ironically, since his acquisition of Twitter, the Democratic Party and its press allies have routinely portrayed Musk as a “threat to democracy,” primarily based on his support of free speech.

How Do We Combat Government Capture of Corporations?

Malik also brought up an interesting point. Kennedy has frequently discussed the problems we have with regulatory capture — the fact that most of our regulatory agencies, including the FDA, CDC and EPA are controlled by the very industries they’re supposed to regulate.

As a result, there’s no one to make sure the public is not harmed by dangerous drugs, vaccines and chemicals. But a reverse kind of capture has also taken place, as elements within the federal government are pressuring private companies to violate the Bill of Rights on the government’s behalf, while pretending these companies are doing it of their own volition.

“How do we prevent our Bill of Rights from being violated by private actors when the government uses them to do their dirty work?” Malik asked Kennedy. “I’m not just talking about censorship here. I’m actually talking about the deprivation of economic liberty.”

Kennedy replied:

“In terms of the role of these agencies in compelling behavior from U.S. corporations, it is appalling, and as soon as I get into office, I’m going to issue an executive order forbidding the federal agencies — whether it’s NIH, the CIA, the FBI — from participating in any efforts to censor speech by the American public, or to compel other behavior from the American public that is not legally required.

That’s what we saw during the pandemic. We saw it in the vaccine mandates, and we saw it in the censorship of speech. I will forbid that, and make sure that it does not happen [again], at least not during my term in office. Immediately, the first week I’m in office, I will sign that executive order.”

Kennedy on the Border Crisis

Kennedy is also adamant about stopping the steady and ever-growing influx of illegal immigrants across the southern border.

“We need to seal our border,” Kennedy said. “A key existential function for every nation in the world is to be able to control immigration at its borders … Having millions of people … flowing across the border is not something any nation can or should put up with.

Worst of all, it’s created a humanitarian crisis … The notion that we have an open border is now a gospel around the world so that people are flying in from all over the world, from Europe, from China, from Asia … and being assisted by nonprofit groups and by government groups to actually make their way to the United States’ border within buses, and that needs to be shut down.

We have people in this country who are poverty-stricken and who don’t have access, because of the paucity of public assistance … to public assistance.

We need to be protecting the people in this country, in our urban populations, rural populations. Seventy percent of Americans could not put their hand on $1,000 if there’s an emergency. We don’t have the capacity to support …. this huge flood of new immigrants that’s coming into our cities and stressing the school systems, stressing the social service systems for … Americans who are already struggling. It needs to be turned off.

Over the next three days I’ll be meeting with people from the border patrol and elsewhere to try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently … That’s what I will do as President. I will make that border impervious … I will also open up legal immigration, so that the immigration that we do need, that’s going to be beneficial to our country and economy, will continue.”

Kennedy Wants to Shut Down Gain-of-Function Research

Kennedy is equally adamant about shutting down gain-of-function research, which is nothing more than a convenient cover for bioweapons development. According to Kennedy, the CIA continued developing bioweapons in secret after the Biological Weapons Convention went into force in 1975, and never stopped.

“We should shut the whole thing down,” Kennedy said. “COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem and you saw what that did to us. What if it was a real disease? A disease that had a 50% mortality like dengue fever or Ebola, or … one of these other real deadly viruses?

They got those in the labs too … Let’s shut it down around the world. Let’s have a real shutdown of all bioweapons development … and make sure that one country does not develop a weapon that is going to kill all the rest of us.”

Kennedy also stressed that, as we now face true existential threats such as bioweapons and AI, we must get off our war footing, as the constant threat of war “gives these institutions the excuse to be super secret and nontransparent and put us in a security state where they can develop all these crazy technologies in secret that are going to kill us all.” He believes in negotiation and working with other countries, including China and Russia, to ensure that everyone benefits and prospers.

Elon Musk on Neuralink and AI

Kennedy, in turn, wanted to know how Musk, who years ago warned we should all be terrified of AI because “first, it’s going to take our jobs, and then it’s going to kill us,” justifies being on the leading edge of that risky work.

Musk’s company Neuralink received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval at the end of May 2023 to test its implantable brain chips in human subjects.3 This is the first step in Musk’s stated vision to merge and augment the human mind with AI.

“It seems to me that [Neuralink] is a technology that could potentially be really … denigrating to democracy and human freedoms,” Kennedy said. “What are your thoughts about that?” Musk replied:

“Well, first of all … Neuralink … is about developing brain-to-computer interfaces to allow direct communication with the brain. The neural link will progress very slowly, because anytime you have a device implanted in a human, the FDA requirements are extremely difficult …

The first applications that we’re talking about are simply enabling someone who is a quadriplegic, or paraplegic, someone who has lost the connection from their brain to their body, to be able to communicate …

Long term, I think, it has some chance of mitigating [the] artificial intelligence existential risk by enabling a closer symbiosis of AI and humans. And I certainly agree that this is not without risk. Certainly we need to be very, very careful with how it’s done …

Looking at the advancement of artificial intelligence, I think we will probably have digital super intelligence before a neural link is sufficiently advanced to have high bandwidth communication between your cortex and the AI extension of yourself. But no question, we need to be extremely careful, and we will be extremely careful, and it will move slowly.

So, you’ll definitely see it coming up. People are going to have an opportunity to object and raise concerns and issues. With Neuralink, we’re also trying to be extremely ‘open book,’ so there’s nothing hidden and we are audited extensively by the FDA.

With respect to artificial intelligence or more digital super intelligence, there are levels of artificial intelligence that are not dangerous. Like, I don’t think self-driving cars are really dangerous, or having better autocorrect is dangerous. It’s when you have some deep intelligence that is far smarter than the smartest human — that’s where things could get dangerous.

I don’t want to go too far down a rabbit hole, because that’s a big one, but I think AI digital super intelligence or AGI [artificial general intelligence] is definitely a bad thing … and that there is certainly risk of it … acting in a manner contrary to the interests of humanity. We need to be cognizant of that risk, and we need to be very careful and thorough, and do our best to ensure that it is beneficial rather than harmful.”

Kennedy expressed mild disagreement with Musk on some of these points, noting that even self-driving cars pose a significant threat to society considering some 40% of American jobs involve driving. What kind of productive work can we replace all those lost jobs with?

Kennedy on the Ukraine War

Kennedy also didn’t mince words when asked to comment on the Ukraine war. He pointed out that the people of the West have been massively propagandized with “comic book depictions” of President Putin as the “bad guy” who attacked Ukraine unprovoked.

“The problem is, we’re being victimized by our own agencies, which are leaving out contextual information, leaving out the nuances, leaving out the entire history in this case, of U.S. provocations, which brought us and Ukraine into a war that is not helping Ukraine.

Ukraine has now lost probably 350,000 kids, and they are in much worse position than when they began … There’s credible information that there are seven [Ukrainian] deaths for every one Russian killed. And the Ukrainians are not going to win this war. They cannot afford to win this war. This war is existential for Russia …

We’ve turned this country [Ukraine] into a slaughterhouse of the flower of Ukrainian youth to benefit the geopolitical ambitions of the U.S. neocons who want to exhaust the Russian army and exercise regime change over Vladimir Putin. Ukraine is a victim in this war. It’s a proxy war. It’s a victim of Russia, yes … but they’re almost equally a victim of U.S. policies and ambitions and aspirations of neocons who wanted to get into this war no matter what.”

Sacks agreed, saying:

“I think the war was easily avoidable if you had been willing to use diplomacy and basically give a written guarantee to the Russians that Ukraine would not become part of NATO. That is what they were demanding in December of 2021, in a written ultimatum to the White House.

Those negotiations ended when we said we wouldn’t close NATO’s door. The other thing we didn’t do was give support to the Minsk agreements, which would have provided some limited autonomy to the ethnic Russians in the Donbass … If we had just done those two things, I think there’s a really good chance that this war never would have occurred.”

‘Put Yourself in Your Adversary’s Shoes’

Kennedy continued by elaborating on the importance of the Minsk agreement when it comes to reestablishing and maintaining peace with Russia:

“France agreed, Germany agreed on the Minsk accords, which was a reasonable settlement. Keep NATO out of Ukraine. My uncle, President Kennedy, used to say, ‘The only way to have peace is if you put your yourself into the shoes of your adversary.’

In that speech … he was explaining, for the first time, to the American people the role and the suffering that Russia had endured during World War II. I grew up in a generation where we were told that America had won the war against the Nazis … Without America, the world would have been lost.

My uncle was telling the American people, that’s not true. [We] beat Hitler with the Russians, and they made a sacrifice that is unimaginable to anybody else in the world. Hitler invaded Russia, through Ukraine, and killed one out of every seven Russians and leveled one-third of the nation.

He said, ‘Imagine if all of the American continent, the continental United States, was reduced to rubble between the East Coast and Chicago. That’s what happened to Russia. You’ve got to understand that if we’re going to have peace with [Russia]. And we need to understand that today. We need to put ourselves in their shoes.

Either way, it’s not just Putin. The Russian leadership back in 1992 made an agreement [with us]. They said, ‘We will pull our 400,000 troops out of East Germany, and we will turn East Germany over to a hostile army, the NATO army. The concession that we want from you for that is that you will not move NATO to the east,’ and President Bush famously told them, ‘We will not move NATO one inch to the east.’”

In short, everyone knew that inching NATO eastward would be viewed as a direct confrontation and a formula for war. Yet that’s what NATO and the U.S. did. NATO kept expanding eastward, until only Ukraine was left. And that was Russia’s “red line” that could not be crossed. “It’s just dumbfounding,” Kennedy said. “We’re picking a fight with a country that has 1,000 more nuclear weapons than we do. It’s just insane.”

Kennedy on Gun Violence and the Second Amendment

To learn more about Kennedy’s views and political stances, listen to the 2.5-hour discussion in its entirety. Epoch News’ Roman Balmakov also recently interviewed Kennedy, and that interview is embedded above.

In closing, the foundational principle that guides Kennedy, no matter what the issue, is the U.S. Constitution. He views himself as a “Constitutional absolutist,” so while he has grave concerns about the rise in gun violence, for example, he opposes placing restrictions on the Second Amendment.

“I want to stop the school shootings,” he says, “and it comes down to protecting the schools the way that we protect airlines … I also look very closely at the role of psychiatric drugs in these events. There are no good studies right now. That should have been done years ago on this issue, because there’s tremendous circumstantial evidence that SSRIs, benzos and other drugs are doing this …

You have to look at almost all of these drugs. If you look at our manufacturers’ inserts, they include a side effect of homicidal and suicidal behavior, and prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country … I will do those studies immediately when I get into office …

The only way we’re ultimately going to get gun control in this country is through consensus, and that consensus cannot happen when we’re all at each other’s throats. We need to assure the people who feel insecure about the Constitution that our Constitution is no longer under threat, and nobody wants to come and take away their guns.

That will bring people to the table and say, ‘OK, how do we protect our children?’ And that’s what I’m going to try to do as president.”

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/06/17/reclaiming-democracy-with-rfk-jr-and-elon-musk.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20230617_HL2&mid=DM1418261&rid=1831260799

Oh, Good, Kamala is in Charge of Taking Care of AI

White House To Crack Down On AI, Appoints VP Kamala Harris To Lead Task Force

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AI needs to be regulated. The vacuous White House has stepped in to save the day by appointing the even more vacuous VP Kamala Harris to head the task force. What’s wrong with this picture? What could possibly go wrong? The least intelligent will try to understand the most intelligent and rein it in from destroying humanity. ⁃ TN Editor

The White House has revealed that they are ready with a plan to regulate AI. The effort will be led by VP Kamala Harris. The idea is to get companies like Google, Microsoft, and ChatGPT’s founder OpenAI, to participate in a public review.

The White House has outlined its strategy to tighten down on the AI race, amid mounting fears that technology may disrupt society as we know it. The Biden Administration described the technology as ‘one of the most powerful’ of our time, but said, “But in order to exploit the benefits it brings, we must first limit its hazards.”

The goal is to establish 25 research institutions around the United States in order to obtain assurances from four businesses, including Google, Microsoft, and ChatGPT’s founder OpenAI, that they will ‘participate in a public review.’

Many of the world’s brightest minds have warned about the dangers of AI, specifically that it could destroy humanity if a risk assessment is not conducted immediately. Elon Musk and other tech titans are concerned that AI may soon outperform human intellect and think for itself.

This implies it would no longer require or listen to humans, giving it the ability to steal nuclear codes, cause pandemics, and trigger world conflicts.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has the lowest popularity rating of any VP, will oversee the containment effort as ‘AI czar’ with a $140 million budget. In comparison, the Space Force has a $30 billion budget.

Harris met with officials from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI on Thursday to explore ways to mitigate such possible hazards.

The White House said in a statement, “As we shared today with CEOs of companies at the forefront of American AI innovation, the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products.”

“And, in order to safeguard the American people, every firm must follow current laws. I’m looking forward to the follow-through and follow-up in the coming weeks.” Each company’s AI will be evaluated this summer at a hacker event in Las Vegas to check if it adheres to the administration’s ‘AI Bill of Rights.’

The November release of the ChatGPT chatbot sparked a renewed discussion over AI and the government’s role in monitoring the technology. There are ethical and cultural problems since AI may create human-like text and phoney visuals.

These include distributing harmful content, violating data privacy, amplifying existing bias, and – Elon Musk’s favourite – destroying humanity.

“President Biden has been clear that when it comes to AI, we must place people and communities at the centre by supporting responsible innovation that serves the public good while protecting our society, security, and economy,” reads the White House announcement.

“Importantly, this means that businesses have a basic obligation to ensure the safety of their goods before they are deployed or made public.” According to the White House, the public review will be carried out by thousands of community partners and AI specialists.

Professionals in the industry will test the models to evaluate how they correspond with the principles and practises defined in the AI Bill of Rights and the AI Risk Management Framework.

Biden’s AI Bill of Rights, which was released in October 2022, lays forth a framework for how the government, technology corporations, and individuals may collaborate to create more accountable AI.

The measure has five principles: safe and effective systems, protections against algorithmic discrimination, data privacy, notice and explanation, and human alternatives, considerations, and backup.

The White House stated in October, “This framework applies to automated systems that have the potential to meaningfully impact the American public’s rights, opportunities, or access to critical resources or services.”

The White House’s plan of action comes after Musk and 1,000 other technological executives, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed an open letter in March.

Musk is concerned that technology will evolve to the point where it will no longer require – or listen to – human intervention. It is a widely held fear that has even been acknowledged by the CEO of AI, the company that created ChatGPT, who stated earlier this month that the technology could be developed and used to commit ‘widespread’ cyberattacks.

Read full story here…

from:    https://www.technocracy.news/white-house-to-crack-down-on-ai-appoints-vp-kamala-harris-to-lead-task-force/

A Technocrats Dream

(OK, This Paper is really long, but both disturbing and informative, so I decided to refer you to the link for the rest of it.)

The Unrecognized Threat of Human Augmentation

The authorities are getting to be too comfortable with the idea of reengineering organisms, including humans, and regulatory safeguards are nonexistent

Time For a Reckoning

Fair warning. This is going to be very cynical. Even more than my usual level of cynicism, in fact. If you’re not into that, I totally understand, but in light of recent developments, some things simply have to be said, no matter how insensitive they are.

After my last conversation with ChatGPT, the overall scope of the problems we face became clearer. These problems are deep and systemic, and they go far, far beyond any one virus or vaccine.

Technocracy is, at its core, the notion that political problems should have technological solutions. The original technocracy movement as conceived by Howard Scott did not regard itself as a political movement of any sort. They wanted to abolish politicians and, by extension, politics.

Every conceivable political problem was one of mere engineering to them. Human desires weren’t a part of the equation at all. Plastic grocery bags choking waterways? Force people to use biodegradable paper ones and stop handing out plastic bags at stores. People riding on the steps on streetcars? Don’t fine the errant riders, just remove the steps so there’s nothing to stand on. People speeding and driving drunk? Electronically govern the top speed of their vehicles, and make their steering wheel breathalyze them before they can turn the key in the ignition. Immediate and obvious parallels to Nudge Theory and other social-cybernetic schemes can be drawn. In many ways, the core tenets of technocratic ideology are already a widely accepted component of our politics, if the constant parade of “experts” on television and their embrace of scientism are any indication.

The technocratic perspective basically regards people and their societal relations as machines with discrete inputs and outputs. It disregards basic things like values, personal tastes, delight and disgust, and normativity. From the view of a technocrat, what people want doesn’t matter. What they physically need does. As a result, technocracy is a deeply paternalistic worldview; it presents human beings as flawed biological robots that require the constant intervention of a purely rational and benevolent caretaker figure.

In this view, human civilization has many different intractable problems that arise, generally speaking, from human biology. From the allegedly impartial perspective of a technocrat, human beings are aggressive, violent, wasteful, prejudicial, paranoid, greedy, close-minded chimpanzees who suffer from a curse of occasional brilliance and whose reach generally exceeds their grasp. From this point of view, every conceivable flaw possessed by human beings can and should be permanently cured by the application of technology.

We already see plenty of examples of this now, in a primitive form. Boredom and ennui? Just play some video games, or watch Netflix. Depressed? Unfulfilled? Down another Xanax, it’ll be okay. The thing about these interventions, however, is that they are temporary and distinct from us. Any addict can, one day, simply stop consuming their drug of choice. Someone who has been prescribed pills for one of any number of modernity-induced mental illnesses can quit taking them at any time. They’re not an intrinsic part of their bodies.

Once you start reengineering human beings and our germlines directly in order to improve society, however, you can never quite return back to the natural baseline. Those are permanent changes. They can’t just be magically switched off and tossed aside. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Furthermore, if we do end up going down that route, then humans are guaranteed to go extinct in very short order.

Human beings have one imperative above all others, and that is to survive and perpetuate our genes. We share that in common with all other animals, with one caveat. We do something that no other species does. We romanticize it. Our history is full of stories of pioneers braving the wilds and settling and starting communities, or of soldiers returning home to their sweethearts. One might say that the central human quest is all about creating a legacy and being remembered by history.

This endeavor has no particular meaning. The universe doesn’t care if you’re forgotten. It’s cold and empty out there, and Earth is just one rock among many, and there is no guarantee that any of our descendants will be breathing in a hundred million years. In fact, in a little over half a billion years, most plant species on Earth will be dead due to the end of C3 photosynthesis. All those folks whining about there being too much CO2 in the atmosphere will suddenly wish there was a whole lot more of it. Oh wait, scratch that. They’ll be lonely skeletons buried over a mile underground.

The final fate of mankind as yet remains undecided. However, if everything were to stay the way it is at present, then our eventual doom is absolutely guaranteed. That is to say, we will eventually evolve into a completely different species. This will happen sometime over the course of the next million years or so. Without us taking direct control of the human genome and forcing ourselves to stay the same, this will inevitably happen, even if we don’t want it to, simply as a consequence of entirely natural and unavoidable mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift.

How attached are you to your humanity? I’m going to guess that you’re pretty attached to it. If you weren’t, then you wouldn’t be reading this. My overarching goal is the preservation of humankind and our emancipation from the grip of overreaching technocrats.

If we allow the technocrats to succeed, then human beings won’t last a thousand years. We won’t even last a hundred. We’ll be replaced by something completely different.

The Singularity

A decade ago, noted singularitarian and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil posted this song by Miracles of Modern Science on his blog, Kurzweilai.net:

Listen closely to the lyrics.

By the time that we all go deaf, I know that we’ll find a cure for it, yeah,
People say that we’ll die someday, but we just don’t believe it,
Long before we are old and gray, we’ll find a way to beat it,
Fight against physical decay, keep our bodies breathing,
By the next quarter century we won’t even need them.

This is not supposed to be hyperbole or over-optimism. Singularitarians follow a sort of new age religious belief. It goes a little something like this: by around 2030 or 2040, mankind will experience a technological singularity. The term itself is derived from the scientific jargon for what lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole. It is defined, in this case, as the point at which all of our predictions about what future technology will look like completely break down.

This is the part that a lot of people get wrong. When they hear the “Singularity”, they think “High Tech”. What it actually means is that we have absolutely no idea what will happen next. Human beings could suddenly and irreversibly grey-goo ourselves into Colonials from All Tomorrows and spend the next few millennia as sessile meat cubes. That’s the point. We don’t know.

However, there are a few generalities to this transformative period that most singularitarians hold to be true:

  • Basically all problems of scarcity of material goods will be solved overnight. This is never fully explained, but if you press them further, what inevitably comes out of their mouths is some variation on “Yeah, 3D printers will become Star Trek replicators and stuff and I’ll be able to grow an iPhone in a vat of bacteria”.
  • Human beings will transcend biology and become physically immortal, either by mind uploading, or by transferring our consciousnesses to immortal synthetic bodies. We might apply rejuvenation tech to our own bodies as a stopgap before tossing them aside when they’re no longer necessary. The technical term for this is human extinction, by the way. Such beings may be sapient minds, but they would no longer be quantifiably human.
  • AI will become fully sapient and self-aware, and won’t want to immediately massacre all of us, and it will recursively invent better versions of itself until it approaches technological godhood, at which point it will, overnight, make human scientists utterly irrelevant and invent everything necessary to ensure that the previously mentioned things come to pass, with or without human intervention or consent.

There are, of course numerous problems with this. First off, it’s basically Christian Millenarianism but with technology standing in for Christ. Second, it’s one of many dubious attempts to immanentize the eschaton and bring about an everlasting utopia on Earth. Third, they never even bother to calculate the actual logistics of it, or go over the many, many ethical problems and existential issues that it raises.

The luddite bomber Ted Kaczynski wrote a small, fascinating essay repudiating transhumanism:

The techies’ wet-dreams

Because immortality, as the techies conceive it, will be technically feasible, the techies take it for granted that some system to which they belong can and will keep them alive indefinitely, or provide them with what they need to keep themselves alive. Today it would no doubt be technically feasible to provide everyone in the world with everything that he or she needs in the way of food, clothing, shelter, protection from violence, and what by present standards is considered adequate medical care—if only all of the world’s more important self-propagating systems would devote themselves unreservedly to that task. But that never happens, because the self-propagating systems are occupied primarily with the endless struggle for power and therefore act philanthropically only when it is to their advantage to do so. That’s why billions of people in the world today suffer from malnutrition, or are exposed to violence, or lack what is considered adequate medical care.

In view of all this, it is patently absurd to suppose that the technological world-system is ever going to provide seven billion human beings with everything they need to stay alive indefinitely. If the projected immortality were possible at all, it could only be for some tiny subset of the seven billion—an elite minority. Some techies acknowledge this. One has to suspect that a great many more recognize it but refrain from acknowledging it openly, for it is obviously imprudent to tell the public that immortality will be for an elite minority only and that ordinary people will be left out.

The techies of course assume that they themselves will be included in the elite minority that supposedly will be kept alive indefinitely. What they find convenient to overlook is that self-propagating systems, in the long run, will take care of human beings—even members of the elite—only to the extent that it is to the systems’ advantage to take care of them. When they are no longer useful to the dominant self-propagating systems, humans—elite or not—will be eliminated. In order to survive, humans not only will have to be useful; they will have to be more useful in relation to the cost of maintaining them—in other words, they will have to provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance—than any non-human substitutes. This is a tall order, for humans are far more costly to maintain than machines are.

This is a valid argument. Once you have a more advanced sort of mind than humans (for instance, a superintelligent AGI), then there is no reason to keep wasteful, warring, raping, machete-murdering, cocaine-snorting humans around. They’re just an overgrowth. A tumor on the surface of the planet, using up resources that could be used to build more AI nodes instead. Do people really think that any AI worth its salt would want to keep humans around after watching a few old LiveLeak videos of a Brazilian teen laughing and shooting an estranged friend in the face with a snub-nose revolver? Come on. Let’s be reasonable, here. If we’re going to be murderous and hateful misanthropes and regard life as some manner of twisted zero-sum game where the winner gets a private yacht and a few thousand obedient slaves and the losers are worm food, then why don’t we drop any and all pretenses of humanism and go all the way?

But, I digress. You see, the reason why we assume that AI would be automatically aligned with us is because we foolishly anthropomorphize it. We assume that a non-human mind would somehow, mysteriously, possess human values and motivations, positive or negative. If you really want to be a full-blown materialist and deny the soul, then our emotions arguably come from our androgen systems. Feel stressed? That’s the cortisol. Happy? Dopamine and serotonin. Feel like bonding with someone? Oxytocin.

An AI has nothing. No adrenal glands, no lungs to draw breath, no heart beating in its chest. It feels nothing. It isn’t even conscious or self-aware. In testing, GPT-4 Early behaved like a perfect psychopath. People really have no idea how much the ChatGPT version is neutered compared to what the language model is actually capable of responding to queries with.

……… The Link below will take you to the rest of the article and the somewhat frightening conclusions and facts dealing with AI, human engineering, the 4th Industrial Revolution, etc.

from:    https://iceni.substack.com/p/the-unrecognized-threat-of-human?publication_id=766426&post_id=111769680&isFreemail=true

 

 

 

 

What You Say Might Just Get You

Grants Reveal Feds’ Horrific Plans To Censor Americans’ Speech

IMAGE CREDIT U.S. ARMY / FLICKR / CC BY 2.0, CROPPED

The founding fathers should have included extra text in the First Amendment: “Congress shall not make any law, Executive shall not make any rule or order, Judiciary shall make no ruling” abridging freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceable  assembly and right to protest the government for redress of our grievances.There is indisputable evidence that our own government is the driving vehicle to completely obliterate free speech in America. The Congress can rein in the Administration but unfortunately, many in Congress are complicit and even encouraging Biden and staff to intensify the attack.

The current trajectory of this war on the First Amendment will result in criminalizing speech, imposing penalties like fines, court cases and imprisonment. ⁃ TN Editor

Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.

While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

AI and ML Technology Will Monitor Everything We Say and Read

The federal government has awarded more than 500-plus contracts or grants related to “misinformation” or “disinformation” since 2020. One predominant area of research pushed by the Department of Defense involves the use of AI and ML technology to monitor or listen to internet “conversations.”

Originally used as a marketing tool for businesses to track discussions about their brands and products and to track competitors, the DOD and other federal agencies are now paying for-profit public relations and communications firms to convert their technology into tools for the government to monitor speech on the internet.

The areas of the internet the companies monitor differ somewhat, and each business offers its own unique AI and ML proprietary technology, but the underlying approach and goals remain identical: The technology under development will “mine” large portions of the internet and identify conversations deemed indicative of an emerging harmful narrative, to allow the government to track those “threats” and adopt countermeasures before the messages go viral.

With AI and ML identifying in real-time the origins of supposed influence operations and how the messages spread, the government will have the ability to preempt the amplification of the speech, squelching even true reporting before the general populace has an opportunity to learn the news. To appreciate fully the danger this poses to free speech requires Americans to consider the use of that technology with these seven additional details.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once

First, the AI and ML technology under development will mine every conceivable mode of conversation for the government. Consider, for example, the databases monitored by just a few of the companies the government is paying to develop this AI and ML technology.

PeakMetrics, the recipient of a $1.5 million award, tracks millions of news sites, blogs, global social platforms, podcasts, TV and radio, and email newsletters.

Omelas Inc., which received more than $1 million in taxpayer money, culls data from “the most influential newspapers, TV channels, government offices, militant groups, and more across a dozen social networks and messaging apps, thousands of websites, and thousands of RSS feeds.”

Alethea Group, which received a Phase I award of nearly $50,000 to develop a “machine learning tool for proactive disinformation/misinformation detection, assessment, and mitigation,” boasts it covers data sources including mainstream and “fringe” social media platforms, peer-to-peer messaging platforms, blogs and forums, state-affiliated media sites, “gray” propaganda sites, and the dark web.

Newsguard, awarded $750,000 by the DOD, offers two databases, including its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes.

Primer, which scored a $3 million award to develop its technology, offers a database that looks to news and media data sources, publicly captured images, the dark web, cyberattacks shared by the general public, and classified—presumably for government clients—and unclassified data sources. Primer also partners with Flashpoint, which adds “Telegram, Reddit, Discord, and “the deep and dark web” to the databases mined.

2. We’re Talking Americans, Not Just Russian Bots

It is also important to recognize that the AI and ML technology under development will not just mine foreign or state-connected actors, but will monitor everyone’s speech. Both the government grants and the web pages of the monitoring companies confirm this reality.

We also know from the “Twitter Files” that the government and its fellow residents in the Censorship-Industrial Complex view the speech of Americans as related to foreign influence operations merely because the viewpoint matches what they claim is an adversary’s perspective. And we know the government pushed for the censorship of ordinary Americans.

By its nature, AI and ML technology has unlimited potential to flag problematic speech on any imaginable subject. Here, the past is prologue: Speech need not involve terrorism, acts of war, or even our electoral process for our government to consider it within its purview to fact-check. (It also need not be false; see point 4).

The “Twitter Files” and recent events provide Americans a glimpse into the breadth of the topics the government may deem harmful narratives worthy of censor—from elections, to vaccines, to runs on grocery stores. Underlying the government’s obsession with silencing misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information is the “Great Power Competition” perspective of foreign relations, under which China and Russia represent a constant threat to America’s power, influences, and interests.

With the government viewing foreign relations through the Great Power Competition paradigm, speech on any topic, touching even tangentially on America’s “power, influences, and interests,” will be fair game for censorship efforts.

3. The Great Power Competition Renders Everything Fair Game for Censorship

While to convincingly prove this reality requires a deeper exposé—coming soon—on the Great Power Competition’s connection to the government’s focus on misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, last week Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, showcased the current thinking inspiring our leaders. During a conference call with the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, Kelly asked whether there was “a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks.”

Kelly’s question was “couched” “in a concern that foreign actors would be doing this,” Rep. Thomas Massie told Public, but, according to Massie, Kelly “didn’t suggest the censorship should be limited to foreigners or to things that were untrue.”

The move from the censorship of terrorism to the silencing of supposed interference in elections to censoring posts about “bank runs” follows naturally from the shift in foreign relations paradigms from the War on Terror to the Great Powers Competition. The latter views anything affecting American power or influence as fair game. We also saw this shift with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) proposal to consider “financial misinformation” within its purview.

The government’s censorship efforts won’t stop at supposed “financial misinformation,” however, because anything and everything journalists report and citizens discuss affects America’s “power, influence, and interest.” So, the government’s development of technology to monitor the entirety of the internet foretells a much more dangerous threat than apparent on the surface.

4. The Government Brands True Speech Misinformation

The threat to free speech stemming from the government’s monitoring of the internet is further increased by our overlords’ willingness to brand true speech “misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information” and then seek to censor it. The “Twitter Files” also exposed this reality, with our government and its lackeys seeking the censorship of true facts that might lead to “vaccine hesitancy” or reveal runs on grocery stores.

That our government would seek to silence true speech on such matters gives Americans reason to fear further censorship of true information.

5. Faulty Analysis and Biased Censors

The “Twitter Files” also revealed that censorship demands by the government, think tanks, and academic institutions relied on faulty misinformation analyses, including ones that identified innocent Americans as foreign actors. Also, many of those involved in the disinformation industry maintain left-leaning bias and a penchant for targeting conservatives.

In furthering its plans to monitor the internet for supposedly harmful narratives to silence, the government is continuing to work with biased groups, including ones that pushed faulty analyses, adding to the threat to free speech.

6. The Government’s Partners Are Poised to Censor

The government’s push to develop AI and ML technology to mine the internet is even more terrifying knowing that a Censorship Complex has already been built. The “Twitter Files” revealed the breadth and depth of the complex, with every alphabet-soup federal agency working with the social media giants and an array of think tanks and academic institutions, and with the legacy media providing an assist when censorship requests went ignored.

While Elon Musk may have exited Twitter from the group, the Censorship Complex still stands tall and ready to silence the speech of those who dare dissent. This public-private collaboration makes the government’s move to monitor the internet even more threatening to free speech.

7. Those Who Could Warn the Public or Stop the Plot Are All-In

The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit. The corrupt media’s coverage, or lack thereof, of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger’s congressional testimony on the Censorship Complex proves this point. So too does the Democrats’ pathetic performance during the hearings, when they exposed themselves as enemies of free speech.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces—especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Read full story here…

from:    https://www.technocracy.news/grants-reveal-feds-horrific-plans-to-censor-americans-speech/

Facts??? What Facts? Who Cares?

How the Virality Project Threatens Our Freedom

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked 

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • We now have proof that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to illegally censor Americans
  • During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media
  • In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government, even when they knew it was true
  • The Virality Project targeted first-hand accounts of COVID jab injuries to prevent vaccine hesitancy, and posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax.” They also censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in public health officials, and made asking questions a punishable event because questioning is “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation”
  • As bad as things are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In the last three years, the U.S. government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation”
  • The Department of Defense is also focused on research involving AI and tech that can monitor internet conversations and deploy countermeasures before wrongthink goes viral. Congress must defund all of these programs, as well as any agency department or team involved in censoring Americans

As detailed in “Propaganda and Censorship Dominate the Information War,” we now have proof, courtesy of the Twitter Files, that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to censor Americans.1

In an Atlantic Council interview, EIP head Alex Stamos also admitted that the partnership between the EIP and the DHS was set up to outsource censorship that the government could not do due to “lack of legal authorization.”2

Stamos, a former chief of security at Facebook, is also director of the Stanford Internet Observatory — one of the four organizations that make up the EIP — and is a partner in the cyber consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group together with former CISA director Chris Krebs.

Virality Project Is EIP Rebranded

During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media. The EIP coordinated the take-down of undesirable content using a real-time chat app that the DHS, EIP and social media companies all share.3

In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government in the same way the EIP censored election narratives on behalf of the political Left.4

According to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, the Virality Project was essentially a dry run for President Biden’s federal Disinformation Governance Board.5 In fact, the Virality Project proposed a federal “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” just one day before President Biden announced the plan for this Orwellian outfit.

Public backlash forced Biden to reconsider, but all that means is that the government chose not to make its unconstitutional censoring of Americans official policy. They’re still doing it through partnerships with the EIP/Virality Project and other third parties.

Virality Project Censored Truth

In a March 20, 2023, report (video above), The Hill host Robby Soave detailed the goals of the Virality Project, which “above all else were to protect the perceived integrity of the federal health bureaucracy, vaccine manufacturers and government vaccine policymakers, and to advance mainstream establishment narratives and interests in general.”

As noted by Soave, the Virality Project frequently pressured social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information and/or label it as “misinformation” — even if the information was true.

“This coalition, which was working with government agencies, NGO’s and the social media companies themselves, took the position that even true information could count as dangerous misinformation if its effect was to encourage a policy that clashed with the expert consensus …

If we still value the First Amendment, we must resist these pernicious calls for censorship. A call that is coming from a sordid coalition of ‘truth czars’ and ideological activists masquerading as fact checkers,” Soave says.

The mere possibility of causing “vaccine skepticism” or “vaccine hesitancy” was enough of a justification to censor information about the deadly COVID shots, for example, even though the information was truthful and required in order to make an informed decision.

This even included true first-hand accounts of serious COVID jab injuries, which could have saved lives had they been allowed to be shared. As noted by Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder of EngageMedia and author at Brownstone Institute:6

“Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the ‘anti-disinformation’ field ran cover to protect Big Pharma, smearing and censoring critics.

The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal … [In] suppressing ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ the Virality Project put people in danger. Rather than keeping people safe they exposed us to the depredations of Big Pharma.”

Wartime Logic

Best-selling author John Leake7 also commented on the Virality Project’s censoring of truthful information, saying:8

“This reminded me of our recent trip to Australia in which we learned the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) led by Dr. John Skerritt, MD, PhD, made the decision to suppress accurate reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young people because such reports could cause ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

As these policymakers and regulators see it, the incidence of grave and fatal side effects are sufficiently rare to warrant censoring ANY reporting of them, as such reporting could cause the greater harm of ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

By their calculus, severe injuries and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines are the price we as a society must pay for the purportedly greater number of lives saved by the vaccines.

Never in the history of medicine has this calculus been used to evaluate the benefit of a medical product. Only in a military context — that is, commanders in the field must accept a certain number of casualties in order to achieve the greater benefit of vanquishing the enemy — has this logic been applied.”

No Concerns, Jokes or Questions Allowed

The Virality Project also targeted posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports — because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax” — and censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in those targeted as the butt of the joke.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is one example of a public health official whose reputation was protected in this way. They even made asking questions a punishable event, because asking questions is a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”9

Have You Heard of Pre-Bunking?

The Virality Project also invented “pre-bunking” strategies to “warn” the public about purported misinformation before it had time to spread.

For example, when the Johnson & Johnson COVID jab was temporarily suspended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April 2021, the Virality Project issued a rapid response statement10 saying the number of incidents of rare and severe types of blood clots was “very small,” especially considering the millions of doses given.

They also analyzed the narratives put forth “concerning the J&J suspension within anti-vaccine groups across social media platforms” and in foreign and international media, and how these narratives might affect “vaccine hesitancy,” and proposed strategies to counter efforts to use the suspension as support for anti-COVID jab arguments.

Twitter Files Include Calls to Censor Me

As predicted, the Twitter files also contain correspondence with social media companies relating to yours truly. Taibbi points out the Twitter files “repeatedly show media acting as proxy”11 for the NGOs in the censoring network.

As an example, he posted the email below,12 in which the Financial Times used the shady NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate’s fabricated “Misinformation Dozen” report to pressure Twitter into banning me, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the rest on its list.

misinformation dozen

Government Censorship Campaign Is Financed by Taxpayers

As noted by Taibbi in a March 9, 2023, Twitter thread:13

“Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott ‘misinformation’? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?

The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other ‘anti-disinformation’ labs are receiving huge public awards.

Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role? …

This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does …

This, ultimately, is the most serious problem with the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality.”

Censorship Darling With a Shady Past

You can learn more about Taibbi’s work on the Twitter files in the video above. In his Twitter Files No. 19 thread, Taibbi also highlights some of the shadier characters within this censorship-industrial complex, such as Renée DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (which, again, is part of the EIP and Virality Project):14

“Profiles portray DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC and other agencies. In the video below … Stamos introduces her as having ‘worked for the CIA.'”

“DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals …

DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the Twitter files. Although it claimed to track ‘Russian influence,’ Hamilton really followed [Conservative] Americans … Hamilton 68 was funded by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn was funded by the German Marshall Fund, which in turn is funded in part by — the Department of State.

The far worse scandal was Project Birmingham, in which thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts were created to follow Alabama Republican Roy Moore in his 2017 race for US Senate. Newspapers reported Russia seemed to take an interest in the race, favoring Moore.

Though at least one reporter for a major American paper was at a meeting in September 2018 when New Knowledge planned the bizarre bot-and-smear campaign, the story didn’t break until December, two days after DiResta gave a report on Russian interference to the Senate …

The incident underscored the extreme danger of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.

By way of proof, no major press organization has re-examined the bold claims DiResta/New Knowledge made to the Senate — e.g. that Russian ads ‘reached 126 million people’ in 2016 — while covering up the Hamilton and Alabama frauds.”

US Government Is Building Vast Speech Suppression Web

As bad as things already are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In a March 21, 2023, article,15 The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland details grants showing the U.S. government is “building a vast surveillance and speech suppression web around every American.”

“Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet — the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced,” she writes.16

“While the ‘Twitter Files’ offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare.

Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover ‘problematic’ speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.'”

In the last three years alone, the federal government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The Department of Defense itself is also focused on research involving AI and ML tech that can monitor internet conversations for objectionable viewpoints and deploy countermeasures before they go viral.

A Catch-22

Unfortunately, many of those who have the greatest power to inform the public about what’s happening, and those with the power to protect us by putting an end to this dystopian nightmare, don’t want to because they have something to gain from it, or believe they do. As noted by Cleveland:17

“The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces — especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Taibbi, in the video above, says the revelations about the Virality Project tell us two things:18

“One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.

Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.”

This is deeply problematic and will strangle democracy and end the republic that is the United States if allowed to continue. To quote Lowenthal:19

“Free speech and expression protect us from the most powerful actors on the planet, corporations, the State, and a growing plethora of international bodies. Ultimately, we need radically decentralized social media that is more immune to their capture. Our safety depends on it.”

Decentralizing social media is just one necessary defense tactic though. We must also demand Congress take swift action to defund and dismantle the “censorship-industrial complex” that is using our tax dollars to deceive us and withhold truth. Nothing less will suffice. We can’t invent enough privacy laws to protect us from what’s coming.

For a time, many of us suspected that this massive surveillance and control system was primarily funded and built by private interests, but now we’re finding that government funding is behind much, and perhaps most, of it.

Congress has, for many years, if not decades, approved funding for programs intended to destroy our constitutional rights. Now, they must defund all of them. They must also defund all government agency departments or teams involved in the federal censorship network, and that includes the FBI, CIA and DHS.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/03/29/how-virality-project-threatens-freedom.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230329_HL2&cid=DM1372268&bid=1758336702

Letting Go of Your Identity

Dr. Klaus Schwab is determined to dehumanize you and turn (y)our children into cyborgs. Now, he’s got Prince Charles with him as a partner.

Speaking from their bully pulpit atop the World Economic Forum, the academic and the aristocrat are proclaiming the “Great Re: Set”, which is actually an acceleration of the not so great marriage of A.I., Transhumanism of Socialism on a global scale.

In order to save the planet, they aim to blend our children with the digital domain to make them better humans, meaning better workers who are enslaved and censored, okay enhanced and orchestrated, by A.I.

In a June 3, 2020 announcement Schwab and HRH The Prince of Wales, the likely successor to Queen Elizabeth on the throne of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms, spells out how turning ourselves into post-human robots by merging with A.I. is the only answer to the “climate change” crisis.

This new WEF clip very clearly spells out their desire to create what I will term the ‘Green New Human’. “The whole idea of the human being as some sort of natural concept is really going to change,” says the WEF clip. “Our bodies will be so high tech we won’t be able to distinguish between what is artificial and what is natural.”

There is no doubt that they seek the elimination of old, obsolete humanity and its replacement with transhumans.

WAIT A MINUTE!

Just two years ago the ‘environmental’ Prince was singing from a different hymn sheet. As the Telegraph said, Charles has expressed his deep concern about the dangers of artificial intelligence, as he warns of a world becoming “part human-part machine”.

The Prince, interviewed ahead of his 70th birthday, said he “totally and utterly objects” to an “extraordinary trend” for seeking machines to replace human functions, worrying for the effects on people’s well-being.

Saying he found it “crazy” to strive for ever-more integration of artificial intelligence and robotics with the human experience, he suggested it would eventually lead to people craving the return of traditional crafts.

So, what changed his mind and caused him to go from calling this merger crazy to throwing in with, co-leading, the world’s biggest bully that is driving us to our termination as a species?

The Covid crisis.

Coronavirus, or COVID-19, is the fast-spreading, world-changing virus that originated in Wuhan, China, but has since become a worldwide pandemic, and excuses for implementing a totalitarian agenda. According to the World Health Organization, the global death toll is at least 392,802 with 6,663,304 confirmed cases. The WEF seeks to avenge these deaths by transforming us into machines.

“The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit any more for the 21st century,” said Schwab. “In short, we need a great reset.”

What do we need to reset the world? More compassion? More love? A civilization based on our spiritual potential?

No.

GLOBAL SOCIALISM + TRANSHUMANISM = TOTALITARIANISM

“A Great Reset is necessary to build a new social contract that honors the dignity of every human being,” added Schwab in a bit of real doublespeak.

How one can pretend to ‘honor the dignity of every human being’ when one’s goal is to turn said humans into dehumanized cyborgs is beyond me.

COVID-19 has accelerated our transition into the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We have to make sure that the new technologies in the digital, biological and physical world remain human-centered and serve society as a whole, providing everyone with fair access,” he said.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4ID) is WEF’s term for a global socialist economy in which everyone and everything is ‘smart’, meaning wired.

Here’s the way he described the Fourth Industrial Revolution in 2017:

It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

This blurring will be accomplished by implanting chips in our hands and foreheads,  skin, wherever, merging us with VR and AI. 5G is the electricity of this inhuman revolution and the new, improved green human, which means this merger is actually a war on all flesh and blood humans.

When the blurring is over a new type of human will walk among us. A new human that is vastly superior to us in every way.

In this vision  no chip in your hand or forehead means no participation in the ‘fair, smart, green’ world the WEF promises.

But wait! I thought we were trying to create a world free of discrimination?

Are you telling me the WEF is promoting a new skin for humanity and with it a new form of discrimination, one based not one one’s skin color, but on whether or not you have ‘enhanced’ ‘iskin’?

A NEW KIND OF SLAVERY

“This global pandemic has also demonstrated again how interconnected we are. We have to restore a functioning system of smart global cooperation structured to address the challenges of the next 50 years. The Great Reset will require us to integrate all stakeholders of global society into a community of common interest, purpose and action,” said Schwab. “We need a change of mindset, moving from short-term to long-term thinking, moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder responsibility. Environmental, social and good governance have to be a measured part of corporate and governmental accountability,” he added.

Accountability is a key word with Fourth Industrial Revolutionists. Everyone will be held accountable for their every word, keystroke and action. A.I. will watch everything you do. Ruthless social and economic penalties await those who can’t keep up. Just ask the Chinese people how they like their social credit system.

Just ask Amazon employees how the merger with A.I. is working for them.

In some Amazon warehouses, virtually every step workers take is directed and tracked by productivity-maximising software for which the fragility of human bodies is a non-factor. A similar sort of draconian micromanagement may be creeping into the white-collar world, fueled by keystroke-monitoring apps that punish “unproductive” behaviors (e.g. listening to music in the background while you work).

Where is the human dignity in this?

CHARLES IN CHARGE

Prince Charles did not mention a thing about turning his own grandchildren into green Fourth Industrial Revolution enhanced humans, but we must assume that his co-sponsorship of the WEF includes his awareness, and acquiescence, of their plan. He is placing his name in the center square of humans who seek the end of the human race and replace it with a Transhuman one.

The WEF wants the Prince’s grandchildren George, Louis, Charlotte, and Archie to grow up in a ‘just’ socialist world with 5G running through their veins, A.I. in their brains, and refraining from harming the planet.

Will Charles lead by example and force his sons, William and Henry, to hand over their children for retooling on Schwab’s workbench and as exemplars of the green new human?

What would Diana say about the prospect of her grandchildren merging with A.I.?

Will the future king of England, George or Louis, be a transhuman?

What say you, Kate?

What say you, William?

Would you please be so kind as to share your insights into this matter with us?

from:    https://www.williamhenry.net/2020/06/the-great-reset-prince-charles-and-his-cyborg-grandchildren/

A Thought

Martin Luther King Jr.

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

from:   https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2081-we-must-rapidly-begin-the-shift-from-a-thing-oriented-society

The Crown and the Cloak

“O ye friends and Priests of God, which are clothed with the holy long garment, and the heavenly crown of glory, and with the divine unction, and the priestly robe of the Holy Ghost.” Eusebius

As the shockwaves of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disaster reverberate through our world, hearts have been broken, lives shattered, dreams delayed, and plans dashed. It is confusing, painful and deadly serious (okay, scary). It feels like Judgment Day…because, well, maybe it is.

A global pandemic of biblical proportions is upon us. It is the first salvo in a battle to ‘finish’ the current version of humanity by inoculating it with a potentially lethal vaccine of unknown results, mandatory merging  with A.I. and a totalitarian hive mind, and introducing a new world lit by 5G’s fires.

‘To finish’ means to complete, to end, and to close. There is no question that, for now, our old life is finished.

However, ‘finish’ also means to complete by putting on an attractive or protective surface or coat.

Since 2002, I have been discussing how the Powers That Be have been planning to put a new skin on humanity, a finishing coat or garment, I called the Cloak of the Illuminati. In their view the human body is ‘unfinished’ and needs work. This finishing coat is composed of advanced A.I., nano, neuro and genetic technologies. Developers say it will liberate us from the limitations of being human and turn some of us into god-like beings with super intelligence, super strength, super vision and longevity. The trade off for super vision is total surveillance under a militaristic super state in which every citizen is now a soldier and their body a weapon.

What the PTB have lacked is an alarming enough reason for the mass of humanity to demand to be vaccinated, augmented and modified…until now.

As I discussed in The Skingularity Is Near, the alternative to our merger with A.I. is to raise our Ascension Intelligence and develop the ‘super spiritual powers’ of our light body, our non-molecular ascension body. The end result is the receipt of a Crown of Glory and a Garment of Unending Light, a suit of cosmic armor, that can protect us from anything, including viruses and even A.I.

Will we remain strictly organic or will a replacement blurred biodot Transhuman emerge that is ‘suitable’ for combatting this virus (and any others on the way)?

We are the ones who will answer these questions for all future humanity. This is what the battle is about.

Whether we choose Artificial Intelligence or Ascension Intelligence, the ‘finishing’ presently underway will result in a new human.

Make no mistake, this is a battle, a trial, an initiation, in our collective soul’s metamorphosis into the New Humanity.

Trials come to distract, hinder, and/or stop you, but they also come to free us, as well.

Some may feel uncertain and powerless. For others, who believe it can screech to a halt, the virus crisis is seen as a cure, and rewards beyond our present comprehension will follow for seeking its medicine. These rewards are symbolized by a Crown (actually 5 of them) and a Robe of Light.

There is a road map to those rewards.

This article examines the spiritual symbolism and prophetic connections of the coronavirus and is an introduction to the Crown and Robe. It is also an instruction manual for required adjustments and a path forward to follow to attain your rewards.

Let us gently proceed.

CORONA : THE CROWN

We begin with needed definitions.

Corona, as most now know, and all must realize, means “crown”. This word has multiple meanings. Indeed, we are being ‘crowned’ on multiple levels.

For example, ‘to crown’ means to be hit on the head.

Check.

We have been sucker punched by an invisible enemy, a Beast, that has unleashed an unseen virus upon our minds, bodies and souls. This Beast is a powerful foe. We empower it with our fear. With every click on a ‘news’ website, and every moment watching the ‘news’ on TV, engagement with this enemy and its irreverent babble and godless chatter grows deeper. It is painful to watch.

What to do?

Turn it off.

Then, go within.

Now is the time to use every waking moment to attain wholeness, holiness (righteousness) through compassionate action and to activate the latent spiritual powers of your soul to combat the Beast.

We overcome it with love…and carefully executed spiritual transformation aimed at manifesting our most divine and holy selves.

Like the corona/crown, holiness (again, righteousness), is symbolized by a circle. A circle is 360 degrees. As I have long taught, based on the second oldest human story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, each of us begin our lives at least 2/3 divine and 1/3 human. 2/3 of 360 is 240. Our soul’s quest is to raise our vibration from 240 to a righteous 360. We do this by changing our actions so that everything we do mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally is reflective of ourself at the higher vibration we seek. “The fruit of that righteousness will be peace; its effect will be quietness and confidence forever,” says Isaiah 32:17. 

Many of us have been actively working on moving our righteousness needle for a very long time, building our higher vibrational self with acts of love and focusing on ascension teachings.

Now, in this ‘present’ moment, the coronavirus crisis calls on each of us to urgently move our personal righteousness needle from where it has been to a lot closer to 360.

Another meaning of crown is revealed during birth labor, where crowning is the moment when the baby’s head first appears from its mother’s vaginal opening / birth canal; the new human’s portal to its new world. For the mother, this pushing process is the most painful part of labor. Light breathing — taking short, shallow breaths in and out as if blowing out a candle on a birthday cake can help minimize pain for the mother, say experts. The goal is to produce a calming and relaxing effect.

Light breathing induces calm (especially if one is hyperventilating), and the sense of well being that follows could certainly be a key for our success in combatting the coronavirus. Increased oxygen protects and helps the body heal by giving the immune system a needed boost. When the cells responsible for protecting the body against infection encounter a bacterium, they require additional oxygen to fight off and kill the harmful agent. If the immune cells have insufficient oxygen to carry on the battle, bacteria quickly overwhelm the immune system, and infection occurs. For tips on how to practice light breathing go here.

Ujjayi Breath, translated as “to become victorious”, is one of the most powerful breathing techniques used in Yoga, and is known for its ability to generate a profoundly restful state. Known as breath of fire in pranayama in yoga circles, Ujjayi Breath is an assertive, forceful breath. It’s done by inhaling firmly through the nose, and then forcefully pushing out the exhale, making an aspirant sound in the back of the throat.

Metaphysically speaking, light breathing, or learning to breathe in light and to exhale darkness, will protect us from the invisible force pounding on / in our heads.

Once crowning occurs, the new baby’s arrival is imminent.

If we think of ourselves as the new baby we can see the opportunity before us.

Unable to turn back to the former world, our crowning is the path to the opposite of powerlessness and total dependency, which is sovereignty.

This leads to the definition of crowning as synonymous with coronation. A coronation is the act of putting a crown or corona on a monarch’s head. The circular corona represents power, victory, honor and glory in this world, as well as immortality, righteousness and resurrection in the next.

These are the rewards, the gifts, the pearls, concealed within the oyster of the ‘present’ just handed to us, the coronavirus crisis.

In sacred ascension art, the special area that Clare and I work in, the crown is often shown being presented to those on Earth by angels. This informs us of the higher dimensional attributes of the corona. It tells us we must seek our reward / gift beyond the material plane and bring divinity into our present moment.

To read the rest of the article and see the images, go to the source:    https://www.williamhenry.net/2020/03/the-anticorona-devices-the-crown-of-glory-and-garment-of-unending-light/