Your Coming Brave New World of “Artificial Intelligence”

Your days of having access to search engines are probably numbered.

Jan 09, 2024

Back in the 1970's I had my first chat with Eliza, a computer program whose purpose is to fool you into thinking that you are talking to a human therapist. Eliza asks you a bunch of questions, parses your answers, determines which of the terms you used are significant, and spits back new questions containing those terms. If Eliza runs out of terms or can’t determine what you’re talking about, she emits random queries that sound like something a therapist might say.

Eliza was impressive, but there’s no more intelligence behind “her” than there is in your hand calculator. Eliza’s only skills are in the rather mechanical tasks of parsing English, extracting the parts of speech, and constructing questions that sometimes contain the terms you used. You can illustrate Eliza’s shallowness by talking nonsense to her, upon which you will see that she traffics in nonsense just as easily as she responds to more authentic conversation.

Eliza's moniker is part of “her” ruse. You start your relationship by imagining that the thing to which you are speaking has a human name. Can Eliza fool you? Try “her” for yourself: Eliza, the Computer Therapist

Spoiler Alert: Computers (and computer programs) aren’t intelligent

In November 1963, Twilight Zone aired an episode in which a man named Goldsmith was the leader of a small group of folks who, a decade after an atomic war, were still alive. They avoided death by eating only foods that Goldsmith told them were safe to eat. How did Goldsmith know? He told his followers that he got his info from an old man in a nearby cave, an old man that nobody else had ever seen.

In the end, the survivors went to the cave, where they broke in and discovered … a computer. Or rather, a 1963 TV conception of a computer, complete with blinking lights, dials, knobs, meters, hanging wires, and whatnot:

As silly as this depiction was, it paled in comparison to the absurdity of the story line. How could this box, sitting alone in a cave, determine which canned foods were poisoned? With no sensors or humans conveying information to it, how would it know more than the surrounding humans about which local soils were radioactive?

The purpose of the story was to warn us of the folly of engaging in atomic war, but there’s another, underlying message, namely that a computer can somehow infer what humans cannot. This seems plausible because, like all heavily promoted absurdities, there’s an element of truth to it. Your hand calculator can perform math much faster than you can. Computers can predict a mid-air crash sooner than air traffic controllers can. A search engine can scan the content of the web faster than you can.

The danger comes when we are led to imagine that computer programs can discern “truth” from “fiction,” even when it is impossible for humans to do so.

Learning Programs are not “Intelligence”

Like the name Eliza, “Artificial Intelligence” is designed to trick us into believing that there is something human-like or even superhuman about a computer program. There’s nothing new about this naming trick; propagandists are already using it to convey the same notion about human sources:

We have “fact checkers,” who by virtue of their title must be indisputable oracles that have some direct pipeline to the truth.
TV talking heads declare non-approved ideas as “misinformation” or “conspiracy theories” or “hate speech,” as if there were indisputable definitions of such things.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is farcical. Nobody knows what intelligence is (look up "the hard problem" with the quotes), so consequently we have no definition for it. Is a gnat "intelligent"? How about a bird that builds a nest that you couldn't? What we call "AI" would actually more accurately be called "learning programs.” Such programs are no more or less a new convenience than computers were 50 years ago.

I've had a few conversations with "Copilot", which is Microsoft’s adaptation of Chat GPT. Copilot is “intelligent” in the same way that Eliza is a female therapist. Chat GPT is really just a data aggregator and summarizer. It's a plagiarist. It roams around the Internet looking for terms that you used in the question you asked, searches for "answers" much more quickly than you can, and produces a summary. Like Eliza, it's quite impressive. And, like Eliza, it is no smarter than your hand calculator. Yet people are being led to revere Chat GPT, as if it could somehow teach us something that it didn’t learn from us first.

It's true that our use of learning programs (“AI”) poses a risk, just as our use of traditional programs poses a risk. Whenever you automate something, you lose some degree of control. When you put your airplane on “autopilot,” you’re handing your life over to something that could cause a disaster faster than you can react. Learning programs also adapt their behavior to information they encounter rather than just following a script, and so they are less predictable than non-learning programs. Such is the price of convenience.

The hype is not organic

When I see a topic relentlessly hyped in the press, year after year, I know two things:

there’s a lot of money behind it,
and it’s almost certainly bullshit designed to force me to buying something or doing something I don’t necessarily want to do.

Examples:

Climate change is going to kill you, and that justifies our forcing you to buy all-new electric devices.
COVID is going to kill you, and that justifies our forcing you to inject our stuff.
The police are going to kill you, and this means that Black Lives Matter, which justifies our forcing racial discrimination upon you.
White Supremacy is the most lethal terror threat to the homeland today, so you’d better vote Democrat.

There is a reason for all the “AI” hype. The reason is that somebody is going to gain a lot of control and make a lot of money by convincing you that there’s now a superior “intelligence” and that you’d better be obeying it.

Where is “AI” going?

When I click on the Bing search bar in my Edge browser, I see this:

So, regardless of what I’ve been searching for, “Copilot” is now my top search choice. I can also invoke Copilot by accidentally scrolling upward after Bing has delivered a search result, producing an entire page dedicated to having me “chat” with Copilot:

Bing also produces search results that look like ordinary search items, but when clicked open up a session with Copilot. Want even more Copilot help? Whenever I highlight text in the mobile version of Edge, I get a new message at the bottom:

When I’m highlighting text, it’s usually because I’m going to copy it somewhere, most likely to a post I’m constructing. I wonder what sort of help Copilot would offer if I were to ask it to revise the text I’m copying.

In my many decades of using software, I have never seen anything like this kind of coercion. What’s even stranger is that almost nobody in the press, not even the computer press, is talking about it. It’s pretty obvious where Microsoft (along with the rest of Big Tech) is taking us. They have a three-step process:

1.      First, they offer new features as options.
2.      Then they impose those features upon us by making them defaults, or by relentlessly asking us to change our preferences. For awhile, the old and the new things coexist side by side, allowing vigilant users to choose one or the other.
3.      In the final step, they force us to use the new features by removing the alternatives.

With regard to Microsoft and Edge and Bing, we are now in step #2. It’s becoming ever harder to avoid stumbling into a chat with Copilot.

The final step seems clear: Big Tech vendors will eliminate search engines. You will no longer have the option of looking up original sources. Big Tech vendors (Microsoft, Google, etc.) will conveniently aggregate the “correct” answers for you, and their “AI” answer will be the only answer. Won’t that be convenient?

If you think I’ve gone overboard, then consider this from PC Magazine:

When Will ChatGPT Replace Search? Maybe Sooner Than You Think

The folks at PC Magazine don’t seem to feel there’s a problem with having a computer program determine what you can and cannot see online.

The prize: total control

Big Tech leaders are all seeking the same prize. For years they’ve merely wanted our data in order to more effectively persuade us, but this is no longer enough. Big Tech wants complete control over:

what “news” you read,
what you can find online,
what you cannot find online,
what you write (via helpful AI-powered assistants),
and ultimately what you think.

Learning programs (intentionally misnamed “AI”) will give their purveyors the power to aggregate their preferred "news" into whatever messages you are reading. “AI” will be an unprecedented propaganda tool, exploiting people’s naive belief in the god-like powers of computers and self-proclaimed authorities. “AI” will capitalize on intrinsic human laziness; with the convenience of just asking for answers and receiving them, the sheeple will eventually stop doing their own research and seeking the alternatives that the censors are so desperately now snuffing out. With no readers, alternative media will die.

More than that, “AI” will control what you write. Are you producing a sentence with non- approved thoughts? Well then, your helpful “AI” assistant, built right into your word processor, will offer to help you fix the sentence, substituting your thoughts with approved text. Maybe your word processor won’t even let you “save” non-approved text. There now, that was much easier, wasn’t it?

Eventually, "AI" chatbots may not have to bother weeding out non-approved messages; the only remaining sources will be mainstream ones. We'll be back to the good old pre-21st century, where only approved outlets disseminated "news,” and all publicly distributed written material was curated by gatekeepers. In the end, we won't need a host of celebrities telling us how stupid we are for doing our own research, since doing your own research will be literally impossible.

Paranoia?

If all this sounds too paranoid, consider that in early 2022 Rasmussen released a poll in which “48% Of Democrats Support Fines Or Prison Time For Those Questioning Vaccines.” Note that this was not for refusing the “vaccines”; it was for merely questioning them. After voluntarily watching two years of relentless lies in the mainstream media, almost half of polled subjects identifying as Democrats were prepared to imprison their neighbors for questioning what they were being told on their TVs:

What do you suppose even more dupes will do in an “AI”-powered media environment, where the constant lies of Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Science, and Big Democrats are, once and for all, the only opinions available?

The Department of Homeland Security (thank you, George W. Bush) now has a document in which it defines a new term “malinformation” as:

“the intentional spreading of genuine information with the intent to cause harm”

So, to be regarded as a national threat worthy of imprisonment, it is no longer necessary to publish untruths or classified information; all you need do is to say anything that the DHS regards as “causing harm,” which could, of course, could be anything that anyone at the DHS says causes harm. Like, for example, questioning a “vaccine.” Or obtaining (what might soon be illegal) access to a search engine to look something up for yourself.

Why they must eliminate search engines

I retired from a 42-year career on February 20, 2020. The next day I embarked with my wife on a three-week road trip to Tucson, where my retirement party was held. We returned to Minnesota on Friday March 13. On the following Monday morning, my local gym had its grand reopening after three weeks of being closed for a remodeling that had coincided with my road trip. That same evening, my gym closed again, this time for months.

Being retired, I had some time to look into the COVID tsunami. By April 30 I had determined:

The death projections from the Minnesota Department of Health, being touted by our governor, were absurd.
Despite having previously told the truth, Fauci was now lying about the efficacy of masks in public settings.
The medical establishment was lying about deaths with COVID (i.e. from comorbidities, possibly aggravated by COVID) vs. deaths due to COVID.
These lies were part of a larger coverup hiding the fact that (supposed) COVID deaths were primarily among elderly people who likely would have died (and probably did die) from other causes around that same time.

Over the coming year I spent hundreds more hours deducing that the authorities were seemingly lying about everything:

They lied about the mRNA injections being “vaccines”, apparently to induce a false sense of familiarity and security, when in fact they are not traditional “vaccines” by any stretch of the imagination.
They lied about the “vaccines” being safe; obviously nobody could know about this because there were no clinical trials, making it impossible for anyone to know about even their short-term safety, much less their long-term safety.
They lied about the “vaccines” preventing transmission.
They lied about the “vaccines” preventing infection.

This was patently obvious to anyone using a search engine, even people like me with no medical training. I could determine these things very early because I could find and read the articles of dissenting medical professionals, and I could locate actual data (like VAERS).

Authorities quickly realized that people using search engines were a huge source of “vaccine hesitancy,” so they mounted a PR campaign against folks “doing their own research”. Watch this video, paying particular attention to the few minutes starting at 2:39:

THE UNVACCINATED: "NO ONE IS SAFE UNTIL EVERYONE IS SAFE"

So … via its paid media, Big Pharma mounted an open, public campaign against people doing online research; such folks were ridiculed, vilified, and demonized as menaces to public health. Additionally, almost every search engine and social media platform displayed warnings on posts and search results that contained viewpoints that weren’t in line with the official narrative:

Clearly, people using search engines constitute a huge problem. Do you really believe they are going to let you use search engines next time? I have some predictions:

We will soon see a massive PR campaign demonizing search engines and people who use them. Every effort will be made to steer us into using “authoritative” AI instead.
Search engines will cease to be available. The “Copilot” feature on the Edge browser, for example, will become the default for anyone typing anything into any of Edge’s search bars; you’ll have to go out of your way to use the current Bing engine. Eventually, the option to use the search engine will disappear entirely.

You will no longer be able to search among alternative opinions; instead your “AI-Powered Copilot” (as Microsoft refers to Copilot) will summarize the “correct” answer for you. And won’t that just save you a lot of time?

The Age of the Sheeple

Approved authorities will look back on the years 2000-2025 as the “wild west” of the Internet – a horrible time when “misinformation” abounded and citizens were ruthlessly accosted by non-approved information sources. “AI” will become the 21^st century version of the 20^th century newspaper editor. Our current gatekeepers will disappear. We won’t need “fact checkers” in a world where only “truth” is allowed to be seen. We won’t need self-appointed Internet “watchdogs” like “Media Matters” telling us what we shouldn’t read.

With “AI” as the modern gatekeeper, an automated version of the 20^th century newspaper editor who was firmly beholden to his advertisers, the powers-that-be will rest easy once again. Just think of how great it’ll be once you’re fully compliant, and your friendly Democrat neighbors will no longer have to think about putting you away. Because next time, there will be no argument against them.

==== ADDENDUM OF 5/6/24

Updated the name “Bing AI” to “Copilot” to reflect Microsoft’s name change.

==== RUNNING ADDENDUM

Here is a running log of articles and videos apparently intended to discourage you from doing your own research and/or encouraging you to rely on “AI” (rather than search engines or your own judgement) for your answers.

January, 2017: World Economic Forum: Klaus Schwab speculates with Sergey Brin (Google co-founder, then-president, & current board member) that AI will eliminate the need for elections; Brin does not appear troubled by the prospect: No More Elections
March 6, 2017: The Conversation: Please don’t do your own research on immunisation; you’ll get it wrong
July 2020: Forbes “Editor’s Pick”: You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science
September 19, 2021: CNN article & video: How 'do your own research' hurts America's Covid response
January 3, 2022: New York Times, Guest Opinion: Skeptics Say, ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple
July 16, 2022: Sage Publications: ‘Do your own research!’ Misinformation, ignorance, and social media
August 20, 2022: National Library of Medicine: Do your own research!
April 12, 2023: PC Magazine: When Will ChatGPT Replace Search? Maybe Sooner Than You Think
May 22, 2023: Invincible Digital: AI Assistant vs. Search Engine
June 12, 2023: Harvard Kennedy School “Misinformation Review” article of (peer reviewed, no less!): Support for “doing your own research” is associated with COVID-19 misperceptions and scientific mistrust
January 27, 2024: My Edge browser came up today with this. Let us do the browsing for you – a smarter way to browse, indeed:
February 25, 2024: LinkedIn just started offering to rewrite my posts using “AI” – even before I’ve written them. How convenient for the folks at LinkedIn. How long before I am not allowed to post there without having my thoughts pre-sanitized?
It should sober you to realize that government and corporate employees, people whose decisions may drastically affect your quality of life, are increasingly relying on answers provided by “AI” engines in order to produce quick solutions, rather than doing their own research. There is no intelligence in “AI”; such engines are learning programs that merely summarize and regurgitate whatever they were taught. With much of their info coming from wildly inaccurate articles published on sites like Wikipedia (ironically Google’s favorite go-to search result), the output they provide can easily be 100% wrong. Your AI engine will spout absurd gibberish without the slightest hesitation or reflection. Watch this disturbing video, where an “AI” called Perplexity delivers a 100% false opinion regarding who can be trusted in the Climate Change business. It turns out that credentialed herd members of the scientific community who’ve been consistently wrong in their consensus for decades are trustworthy, whereas people who point out their failures are not: Propagating Misinformation

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