#99 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MAY BE THE END OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

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time not too long ago artificial intelligence often behaved properly only sporadically and then even so often unpredictably with the only certainty of spending more time in the repair shop than actually functioning as designed.

The world may never know for certain, but a substantive likelihood exists that even today the algorithm engineers hiding behind the Big eTech Titans are a bit like Charlie Chaplin and the algorithms they design for the public are a bit like that dirty little Tramp character Chaplin created for Hollywood.

I have long suspected a presence joining me on my computer, perhaps a twirp from Microsoft looking through a pin hole he designed in the software or a sophisticated spy from Apple having preinstalled spyware in the MacBook Air hardware.

In order to remain productive, I have learned to live with them by ignoring them, and punishing them by not mentioning them, until now, when they repurpose information they have found on my system.

And the system is mine. Contrary to the belief of the Mother Corporations controlling the eUniverse, once I have purchased the software the software no longer belongs to Bill Gates, partly because he has retired from Microsoft, and once passed through the checkout the laptop no longer belongs to Tim Cook, eventhough Tim Cook still operates Apple.

The customer has rights of ownership that must be preserved otherwise the free market economies all over the world will collapse. Few potential customers would buy if they never will never truly own the product in the first place.

Gigantic global manufacturers of course found a way around the ownership question by designing products that would only last a few years before having to be replaced. And with brand loyalty being what it may, customers would return to the same shopping cart and simply purchase the upgraded model.

In this way, gazillions was made on low tech and now that treasure may be used to acquire Artificial Intelligence that controls everything else that got them so far in the first place.

The other problem with High Tech is that an invention might be chopped up into parts and released over several years rather than all at once in one product. This strategy requires brand loyal customers to purchase a new product each year just to be up on bar stool and social media chatter about the new gadgets.

Creators of Artificial Intelligence so far seem to be using the shock and awe technique of providing big beautiful and powerful machines right away to establish immediacy.

Tech can be divided into two main categories: one tech made to make money; and two, tech made to improve the lives of people in a kind of non-profit NGO way that Alphabet Inc shareholders might never really understand. Either way, customers will pay a fortune for the opportunity to experience the strategic outcomes.

The global dominance of Google still appears to be about the narcistic motivations of greed, power and control. This overlord mentality was dumbed down for appearance sake only by splitting the brand into the Google search engine world and the Alphabet Inc global Mother Corporation.

In 1990, legislators refused to regulate eTech because they wanted eTech to rapidly develop into something more.

In 2023, legislators still refuse to regulate eTech partly because eTech has become so big and so powerful with increasing concentration of ownership so as to now only present the appearance of control by not attempting to control the controllers.

Today there is tech, high tech and eTech and then there is also what is becoming known, purposely with capital letters, as Artificial Intelligence. Tech is something humans can use to make the day go better, like a garage door opener, while artificial intelligence seems like a corporate takeover of our daily lives telling ordinary households what to put in and how to organize the garage.

The poison pill continues to be that if you stop the bad you might also stop the good.

No one stopped the development of nuclear weapons and actually accelerated science like splitting atoms and turned that scientific discovery into something good by spinning the sci-fi tech into nuclear power – which is now being clawed back quite a bit.

No doubt that tech and artificial intelligence have been helpful, but if that twit does not get off my machine, I am going to twist the head off his avatar and leave the corpse in the vestibule like a severed puppet at a Punch and Judy Show.

The drunken automated spellchecker redrafting errors and omissions without being asked to intervene provides enough justification.

For years after Edward Snowden leaked to the world the depth of surveillance just through the webcam alone, I put a sticker on the camera so no one from the Deep State could watch me.

But now, I figure who cares, I am not doing anything that interesting anyway, unless of course that might have been the criminal intent all along, to remove civil rights, destroy individuality and then marginalize personality until nothing unique of value exists.

Mind you, artificial intelligence has a place in the world. I don’t mind the idea of a robots doing the heavy lifting for a while, because after bending over for 10 years, your backend gets a bit sore on the factory floor.

Artificial Intelligence has a bit of a doppelganger effect within Big eTech. Google has spent the last 20 years convincing people to post ideas and other forms of creativity on-line for free so as to get noticed. For all you ladies out there on the dating sites, unfortunately you know all too well what I mean.

And now the parent company is telling shareholders they have developed machines to recreate all of that without having to reimburse the original inventors.

Alphabet Inc should really go into industries like mining and farming and develop machines to pick cotton in the fields and do all that heavy lifting on the factory floors. Human resources can then use genuine creativity to process raw materials into different consumer products, as long as they don’t tell Google’s replicators how the product was created.

AI is really about copyright infringement, because the machines cannot create without an imagination. So, all the robots are doing is following an algorithm that instructs the machines to copy and plagiarize in that Big eTech way of copying and pasting.

I’d like to see the day when an AI that creates from various on-line material has to list all the sources of information from which the surprising creativity was lifted.

Algorithms should be used for things such as syncing traffic lights better to allow for a freer flow of street trams moving people about the cities clogged and polluted by gasoline powered motor vehicles.

I also approve of the idea of Artificial Intelligence being used for problem solving such as  for a medical breakthrough in the many horrible cancers, especially the horrible childhood cancers. Canada has a universal public healthcare system that costs about $344 billion annually or about 50% of the national budget being spent on the medical needs of taxpayers. The United States spends 4 trillion annually or about 29% of the federal budget, without a universal public health care system and with heavy reliance on the wealthier Americans carrying private healthcare insurance.

A.I. could move into the medical field and save time and money over the long term budgetary forecasts, and more importantly ease the suffering of people without me blinking an eye. Remember that scene in Star Wars when Padme gives birth to twins with the help of a robotic doula? Unfortunately, the mother dies in childbirth, but the twins, Luke and Leia, go on to become the center point for the billion dollar film franchise.

What’s nastier is that Google controls the marketplace with something crazy like 90% of all on-line searches conducted in certain markets. In the way-be-gone days, Amazon initially had to pay Google billions of dollars in search and advertising fees to have their products put in front of on-line customers until Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos decided to put the money in developing their own search engine for a marketplace compartmentalized away from that type of market manipulation.

Smaller operators are pretty much beguiled because Google is so powerful that other eTech companies have no choice but to partner with them. Google therefore might indirectly control a piece of your business by partnering with other companies such as your website hosting provider.

The monopoly is evident in any simple Google keyword search. Three sources always come up at the top of the page: one, two and three.

The deception on-line is also really bad. Lies are printed as truth and truth is diminished to a lie based on the sheer volume of lies. The lie raises a simple doubt about the true reality, whereas the truth predictably becomes almost indistinguishable.

Learning about the existence of click farms was also really disappointing. Search engines sell advertising based on payment for per user click generated by the ad. A search engine or a social media platform might charge the advertiser 5 cents per click but a starving boy in India might get paid .01 cents per click to click on your ad and still find clicking all day long on your ad worthwhile, because at the end of the day, he might be able to walk out into the street in India and get a hot curie for dinner from a street vendor.

Of course, the advertiser gets no value from the exchange which can be verified by the clicker boy spending less than a few seconds on the one page that immediately appears from a click. A real customer engaged with your ad would linger and perhaps move to other pages on the website for over one minute of experiences.

Once the passage through the click farm ends, the site experiences almost no organic growth, and many site owners witness almost immediately a deteriorating subscriber base, similar to life itself where everything grows and then suddenly decides to start shrinking. That spectrum requires further advertising that results in the site being once again inundated with clicks from a click farm. I have heard of niche markets before, but that’s not the way most start-up business want to be presented to the eUniverse.

And this blog so far has been about tech and high tech, perhaps at times Big eTech, and Artificial Intelligence that does not necessarily mean being smart. Artificial Intelligence can have dumb moments like the automated drivers running red lights or the omniscient invisible lead foot forgetting to stop accelerating.

I am all for driving aids, although people who are already bad drivers may tend to rely on assisted driving too much, while not really understanding or paying attention to what advice they are receiving. Bad drivers may simply become worse drivers and possibly more dangerous to the innocent bystanders as they become overly reliant on Artificial Intelligence.

The biggest threat from AI, other than taking over the creativity of humanity that distinguishes humans from other life forms and from the machines, is the combined hybrid usage of personal metadata with psychology to manipulate an on-line user.

If you ever have had to take a course in statistics, you already know that statistically speaking, human behavior is predictable. And if you have ever taken a course in psychology, you know that human behavior can be conditioned to a certain extent, thereby changing behaviors and shopping patterns.

Afterall, we are all dogs that can be taught new tricks.

Imagine an automated system inadvertently training you to blink on demand because of a coding error.

Over reliance on Artificial Intelligence has imbedded fatal flaws such as an inability to perform on demand – those sudden crashes continue as the decades roll by. And even in the completion of a task,  those errors and omissions can be found that no one would otherwise know about – especially with so many automated systems that continue on ad infinitum in error without sufficient oversight.

People are engaged with Artificial Intelligence every day and seem readily accepting of the answers they receive. But no one flags partial incomplete answers or answers that are off just enough to be incorrect.

Having AI complete the GMAT with high scores would not provide sufficient assurances that their work product would be beneficial and without risks to civilization.

Over reliance on anything could be catastrophic if a machine simply refuses to work properly or not at all, and the user has never learned how to complete the task without tech help.

The White House seems concerned about corruption that is defined as the service provider showing up but operating under a thin veil of malevolent intent or incorrectly without due diligence checks.

Slight corruption occurring over long periods of time could have devastating consequences on society.

Humanity does not want to come even close to losing control of civilization, or even day to day operations of life, to the machines and their algorithm designers that just may never apologize for the mistakes made.

Watchers functioning in the absence of regulatory oversight have discovered that algorithms can be coded, either subconsciously or by design, to discriminate. The White House calls that algorithmic discrimination. What’s even more crazyhorse like is that the tech engineers often get paid more than a lot of politicians and congressman.

The US President Biden Administration wants proactive assessments of Artificial Intelligence whereas really what one of the first steps that should be taken by the Americans is a bit of a selfcheck and clawback of the freedom AI currently possesses by reevaluating and subsequently dismantling the United States Decency Act of 1996 that protects indecency and unprosecuted criminal acts such as extortion and fraud on the world wide web.