Part Nine of Natural Intelligence - How Artificial Intelligence could spiral downward into real stupidity

Part 9 of 14: The Politics of Power - What is the price of freedom of speech?

And now we are really starting to get to the crux of the problem. We have laid out in the previous sections is a sequence of events that at best ae a series of evolutionary steps, or at worst are a global manipulation. If you switch briefly into another world, that of Finance and Money Laundering, this might be viewed as “layering” a means by which you lay a trail that is hard to follow. But let’s take the middle ground here, and assume that we are not all living under a huge cloud of conspiracy, but instead we are somewhat hapless victims of a manipulation of opportunity. That being the case, what is that manipulation? Well what we have detailed so far, is a commercial manipulation – finding ways to encourage you to buy and being right there to take advantage of the situation as it develops (or as it is developed) for you. Despite the fact this touches your aspirations, your self-worth and your place in the “tribe” this is a manipulation that is leading you to a commercial outcome. It may be that some of the side effects of that could be and are very damaging and addictive, but the motives are commercial nonetheless. Is that good? Not really, but there is a twisted logic to it and within it there is obviously some value. We should never lose fact of the advantages that all this technology has brought us – the whole point of this series of articles is to open up eyes to the balance that needs to be properly understood, the yin and yang of technology.

Just a slight interlude here, I went through most of my life thinking the yin and yang was about balance, light vs dark and all that. It turns out that is a bit wrong. It is more accurate to represent it as a balance created by cause and effect. Think of it in terms of a shadow will not exist without there being sunlight…

But, back on track, what is the next development of this virtual spinning of reality? Well it is actually the changing of perception of reality and this has a very different purpose – to create and consolidate power….

Albertism: “Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.”

At this point, I am going to quote directly from Matt Tiabbi, ex-rolling stone reporter and now editor of “Rocket” on the independent platform Substack, who made this statement at the US select committee about the so called “Twitter Files”

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” ‘disinformation’, or ‘malinformation’. The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.” Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for ‘deamplification”’ or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

Some will say, So what? Why shouldn’t we eliminate disinformation? To begin with, you can’t have a state-sponsored system targeting ‘disinformation’ without striking at the essence of the right to free speech. The two ideas are in direct conflict. If there’s anything the Twitter Files show, it’s that we’re in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.”

We have to absorb that a little. These are not my words or completely my sentiments, but this idea that disinformation is endemic and hiding behind a veil of freedom of speech is one that is a little hard to shake. Even without such coordination and all the conspiracies about institutions that come with this, we have already talked over and over again about how the ability to access lots of people at the same time gives unprecedented access to people or bodies with even relatively limited access to resources. Then put the huge access to resources that can come with large organisations or unscrupulous state actors and we have a powder keg of manipulation against which people have been increasingly disarmed by removing their natural skepticism

This also brings another argument to the fore when connected with Freedom of speech, and that is anonymity. In the US, when freedom of speech was written into the constitution, this was at a time when that speech pretty much had to be face to face, but you certainly knew who said something. That was really the point of the protection, to prevent persecution because of what you wanted to express. Now we are in a very different world, where it is entirely possible to express an opinion and for that not to be attributed to you at all. We permit anonymity because there are some very legitimate reasons why anonymity can be important, to prevent the persecution, bias or discrimination that can result. But these needs manifest themselves in lots of different ways in different places in the world. The state itself has a different attitude to freedom of speech and their own actions related to that. But the “internet” applies a global ruleset to this.

What this actually means is that we have a mechanism to distribute unattributed material to a very large audience, without validation or tangible attribution, that can be good, bad or completely fictitious, but being badged as the truth. For the sake of perceived freedom of speech we allow freedom of distribution in a way we have never done before. Imagine in the pre-internet age that we enshrined in law that freedom of speech meant that everyone was entitled to have an article about whatever they wished published in every newspaper, without being identified who they were – but this is, essentially what we have now. At a very personal level, this is what allows “trolls”, the “Dark Web” and hate or harm sites to operate. We have let that happen under the banner of free speech, because we are wary of filtering becoming censorship. We do not know who we would trust to determine what is good and what is bad, so we allow people to determine this for ourselves. We do not believe that legislation designed to protect us will actually do so, and it is that that particular failure in trust is what leaves open a door to abuse by people who want to exploit the system, for whatever reason.

The net effect of this plays out amongst a populace that, for commercial reasons have been “trained” to believe, to not question and be sceptical. In a twist of irony, the freedom of access and information that should have enfranchised our populace, has become weaponised against it and we have not been trained to defend ourselves against this embedded weapon. Children can be trolled, encouraged to self-harm, and radicalised, all by people or organisations we allow to be faceless. Are we sure we have the balance right here?

If you take nothing else away from this series of articles, it is the point that we have failed to educate people to think for themselves and question what they see and hear, in a way that we used to naturally, and we need to bring that back into balance. We also have to consider segmentation of use rather than ubiquitous rulesets. There should be a way for people to socialise, but with people that are known and have validated identity. If people choose to be anonymous, then that needs to be in forums (Britannica historically defines a Forum as a “multipurpose, centrally located open area that was surrounded by public buildings and colonnades and that served as a public gathering place”) that makes this clear. Mixing the two mixes the good and bad into the same place in a way we would never do in person. We have to give people the option to know and be aware fully of what and who they are interacting with, be that individuals or corporates or Governments

Albertism: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

And then AI enters this marketplace and this amplifies two capabilities that can be layered onto the weakened defence structure we have already created. Firstly, it gives compute capability to the masses. For good reasons we have democratised technology and access to it, but also unleashed its dark side at the same time. What was now only available to a select few, is now available to all and capabilities can range from analytics through (and this is the scarier part) to generation.

The ability of AI to generate, or to take information and use this as a basis to create something new is a fascinating element to AI that opens up a huge number of doors to analytical thought. It can create combinations of elements in the blink of an eye that would have taken more passive tools (or humans) decades to achieve, even if they had seen the patterns in the first place. This is already having massive implications in things like medicine, where it is looking at genetic patterns and solutions to anomalies, including new drugs and treatments. However, the same technology can be applied to taking elements of what exist and regenerating them in a new format. This means that it can emulate something but in a new way – and hence we have “deep fakes”. It is now entirely possible to take original content (pictures and videos) and adapt then to appear or say something completely different and it is entirely believable. So, onto a generic population that already had its skeptical antenna switched to low power, we introduce the capability to create content that appears real but is actually not. Even for those that do have a skeptical instinct, they have to consider almost everything to be untrue – the large well we had of available information has suddenly become poisoned.

Added on top of this, we now have a new element, political manipulation. In the political world of the “soundbyte” where a message is delivered quickly and sharply through “channels”, sometimes the accuracy of what is being delivered is less important than the underlying sentiment. Content that is controversial gets views and people absorb prior to the filter being in place. Deep fakes and then the anonymity of the source is a gift to those who wish to manipulate the political system and the thought patterns of the populace that form the voting community. Unfortunately, this influence can be from all sources. It can be legitimate political parties that seek to undermine their opponents, or by malicious external influences that are trying to manipulate an outcome in a competitive jurisdiction.

We have opened ourselves up to manipulation in the most important aspect of our lives, our determination of who should have power over our existence through our democratic process. Somehow we need to correct the balance, and we can do this through the top via regulation and legislation, or from the ground up via education and awareness. In reality it should be both, but I would argue that we have not really begun the educational aspect of this with any seriousness yet. The core of democracy is not a voting franchise, it is about understanding what you are using for and why. If we don’t think this through in the modern world, but instead cling to old principles of the way the world used to work, then actually we could be manipulated out of being relevant quicker than we think. It is always true that a committed minority have an ability to disproportionally influence an outcome in anything that we do – that’s because the majority of us are pretty passive and willing to go with the flow. As a simple example of this, how many of us watch the film on a terrestrial channel, complete with the interruption of adverts when we have that same film in a streaming service or on a DVD (not going to explain what they are to a younger audience). The reason is that something has been selected for us – something else has made the decision. On that note, as a light entertainment item, but with an intriguing backdrop to manipulation, go watch the film WALL-E

Albertism: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

Coming Next - Part 10 of 14: Stealth Surveillance - The increasing capability to monitor and predict behaviors