The Palantir Panopticon

Michael Rectenwald | REKT

In my book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (2019), I argued that the main danger with AI is not a rogue super-intelligence that might rebel against humanity; the far greater danger is perfect AI obedience. AI could function as the ultimate instrument of authoritarian "elites," faithfully executing total surveillance, behavioral scoring, and preemptive social control.

Further, AI reliance risks the wholesale abdication of human agency and the flattening of human intelligence and sociality. As decision-making authority is ceded to algorithms, people will become passive nodes in a system that replaces human thinking with AI information processing — "Bots R Us" — eroding autonomy, creativity, and genuine deliberation.

Geopolitically, AI threatens to produce unrivaled systems of ideological and political dominance and cohesion. The dominant worldview is the worldview that dominates AI. The AI race is not toward liberation but toward a hybrid post-human order in which freedom is rendered obsolete, and free will, as Yuval Noah Harari says, is "history."

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The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities

Nate Bear | ¡Do Not Panic!

 

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen's firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the 'No Kings' protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July. 

 

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Faster Than Truth: Quantum-Enhanced AI and the Next Frontier of Information Warfare

Joshua Nieubuurt | Propaganda in Focus

In the very near future disinformation will target you autonomously in fractions of a second. As the quantum computing age draws near, Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality will coalesce with Edward Bernays’ notion of a crystalized public opinion: creating consensus through individualized reality creation. The methods of the deployment of the past will give way to an infrastructural inevitability: GenAI, guided by algorithmic troves of personalized information, will be weaponized into personally targeted mis/disinformation campaigns that cost pennies on the dollar. Propaganda will no longer be an international foxtrot of moving actors and action but will become an autonomous force plowing into the synapses of the masses on micro scales. As this occurs, humanity’s long-smoking gun will be turned back on the gunman — obliterating the boundary between the real and its simulation through recursive, accelerated, and increasingly personal targeted information operations.

Your Data Used on You

This process has already begun and – for the time being – is being spat forth into the world at the speed of an AI prompt. According to the findings of Goldstein et al. (2024), Generative AI is capable of “generating text that is nearly as persuasive for US audiences as content we sourced from real-world foreign covert propaganda campaigns.” In other words, the digital machines we have created to help us are already being used to persuade our ideas and actions. As public facing models increase their aptitude, more advanced private models will likely follow. This extends far beyond text-based modalities and into the realms of photo and video generated by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models.

In fact, AI-generated propaganda is already being deployed en masse. The 2024 election in the United States was rife with examples flooding social media feeds and creating alternative narratives to not only the election, but also real-world events. In more recent world events, the conflict between Israel and Iran, and the infamous black bags being thrown from a window of the White House, have also produced increasingly potent misinformation across the web. There are currently varying degrees of virility with AI-generated propaganda. The newness of the technology and the experimentation of finding ways of making it effective to skulk into the minds of people still maintains a firehose approach. Meaning that it is created with a widespread in mind: reach as many people as possible and hope that it lands with some of them. If attempts at virility are stymied – it fails. But what if AI-generated propaganda were to be tailored to individual users en masse? One of the key elements in potentially deploying tailor-made propaganda at scale is already part of how the internet-connected world works: Surveillance Capitalism. 

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AI brain implants that can change a person’s mood are tested on HUMANS by the US military

Daily Mail

 

The US military has begun testing AI brain implants that can change a person’s mood on humans. 

These ‘mind control’ chips emit electronic pulses that alter brain chemistry in a process called ‘deep brain stimulation.’

If they prove successful, the devices could be used to treat a number of mental health conditions and to ensure a better response to therapy.

The chips are the work of scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the US Department of Defense which develops new technologies for the military.

Researchers from the University of California (UC) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) designed them to use artificial intelligence algorithms that detect patterns of activity associated with mood disorders.

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The Augmented Horror of Hyper-Reality

Daily Grail

As we march forward into the brave new world of the future, for many of us the 'helping hand' of technology is becoming more and more of a distraction from actually 'living'. And with new 'augmented reality' devices about to appear on the market from the likes of Microsoft and Magic Leap, a whole new layer of information overload is about to be added.

The short film above, Hyper-Reality, looks at a possible end-point of such interminable distraction, presenting "a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media." It's beautifully executed and terrifyingly realistic.

Creating malevolent AI: A manual

Hope Reese
Tech Republic

The boom in AI promises to enrich our lives. AI assistants keep our schedules in order; robot "crew" members help us on cruises; and "swarm AI" even offers the chance for us to win big in the gambling world. But there's a dark side of the coin as well: AI that can cause great harm.

While much thought has been devoted to the dangers of AI, and centers like the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Ma., and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University are focusing resources on how to support the creation of 'safe' AI, few have attempted to intentionally create malevolent AI.

Until now.

A new paper by computer scientist Federico Pistono and Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville and author of Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach, explores "Unethical Research: How to Create a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence."

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The Pentagon is building a ‘self-aware’ killer robot army fueled by social media

Nafeez Ahmed

 

Official US defence and NATO documents confirm that autonomous weapon systems will kill targets, including civilians, based on tweets, blogs and Instagram

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project for the global commons

 

An unclassified 2016 Department of Defense (DoD) document, the Human Systems Roadmap Review, reveals that the US military plans to create artificially intelligent (AI) autonomous weapon systems, which will use predictive social media analytics to make decisions on lethal force with minimal human involvement.

Despite official insistence that humans will retain a “meaningful” degree of control over autonomous weapon systems, this and other Pentagon documents dated from 2015 to 2016 confirm that US military planners are already developing technologies designed to enable swarms of “self-aware” interconnected robots to design and execute kill operations against robot-selected targets.

More alarmingly, the documents show that the DoD believes that within just fifteen years, it will be feasible for mission planning, target selection and the deployment of lethal force to be delegated entirely to autonomous weapon systems in air, land and sea. The Pentagon expects AI threat assessments for these autonomous operations to be derived from massive data sets including blogs, websites, and multimedia posts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The raft of Pentagon documentation flatly contradicts Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work’s denial that the DoD is planning to develop killer robots.

In a widely reported March conversation with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Work said that this may change as rival powers work to create such technologies:

“We might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are, and as that competition unfolds we will have to make decisions on how we best can compete.”

But, he insisted, “We will not delegate lethal authority to a machine to make a decision,” except for “cyber or electronic warfare.”

He lied.

Official US defence and NATO documents dissected by INSURGE intelligencereveal that Western governments are already planning to develop autonomous weapons systems with the capacity to make decisions on lethal force — and that such systems, in the future, are even expected to make decisions on acceptable levels of “collateral damage.”

Behind public talks, a secret arms race

 

Efforts to create autonomous robot killers have evolved over the last decade, but have come to a head this year.

A National Defense Industry Association (NDIA) conference on Ground Robotics Capabilities in March hosted government officials and industry leaders confirming that the Pentagon was developing robot teams that would be able to use lethal force without direction from human operators.

In April, government representatives and international NGOs convened at the United Nations in Geneva to discuss the legal and ethical issues surrounding lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS).

That month, the UK government launched a parliamentary inquiry into robotics and AI. And earlier in May, the White House Office of Science and Technology announced a series of public workshops on the wide-ranging social and economic implications of AI.

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