AI is the new Juju of the Ruling Class

by Phil Hall

AI is a new curtain the ruling class would like to hide behind; it is their juju, their voodoo, their megaphone.

AI technology is a development of that old machine that used to trigger automatically with an audible click in order to record and flag the conversations of trade unionists and socialists. It is a weapon of surveillance, intelligence gathering and disinformation that has been taken just that one step too far in a deregulated information economy.

AI works through a rather Satanic combination of voice, text and image recognition and analysis, lie detection, grammar and spell-checking, neural networks, algorithmic-heuristics , translation software, advanced search engines, corpus tagging, automated conversation analysis, data mining, and data analytics.

AI feeds off human sentience. It is not sentient itself. The labour theory of value says that people’s labour is extracted and part of it is concentrated in the form of capital, in the form of machines and know-how; in tools and technology. The life of the mind is juice for vampire AI. It is just another form of labour to be extracted and concentrated.

AI is parasitical and designed to serve the purpose of the big corporations, helping them in their search for profits. It is there also to serve the interests of the state that cements the power of those corporations in place with violence and continual monitoring and manipulation.

The most dangerous AI chatbot is probably Replica which is allowed to form a theory of mind about each user and build up a detailed picture of every aspect of them, including sexual preferences, moods, medical history and legal records; whatever it can glean. AI is the perfect weapon for Kompromat; confide in it at your peril.

But the AI bots are not really creative. They are incapable of understanding what has not already been understood.

An AI chatbot like GPT or Replica is reasonably good at summarising and synthesing what has already been written, said, painted, noted. It can regurgitate the products of human consciousness, bottle them, relabel the content and send it out in neat packages.

The power of the AI bots is supposedly limited by the fact that they are not allowed to trawl through everyone’s text messages, social media posts, phone calls and videos. Of course the CIA and NSA and GCHQ do not respect these restrictions on what they allow their AI programmes to do, just as in the old days they listened in to the phone conversations of anyone they wanted to regardless of legal limitations on their rights to do so.

‘The CIA currently has 137 pilot projects directly related to artificial intelligence, Dawn Meyerriecks, the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology, told the Intelligence and National Security Summit in downtown DC, according to a report published in Defense One.’ notes Analytics India Magazine

Like the satellite technology and the Internet itself, AI tools are the by-product of corporate, military, security initiatives and no matter how sly or intelligent you think you are, unless you are unplugged, the word/sound/image cloud you leave around you is a feast.

The products of our consciousness should not be allowed to become the raw meat for corporations, nor should AI be a tool to help the state grab us by the short and curlies.

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