By Cliff Kincaid
In an episode of the Andy Griffith show, a con man by the name of “Colonel Harvey” comes to the town of Mayberry to sell his “Indian elixir,” designed for “health and vitality” and “guaranteed” to work. Andy’s Aunt Bee tries and likes it and gets drunk. It turned out to be booze or hooch, 85 percent alcohol. It made her feel good until Sheriff Andy arrested Aunt Bee for drunkenness. Then the hangover commenced. That sums up the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Like Aunt Bee, after tasting the Indian elixir, the economy is hooked on AI spending, and the whole economy could go down with it, when or if many of the Big Tech stocks crash and burn. Like Colonel Harvery’s “Indian elixir,” modeled after “the Indian way” and “nature’s way,” AI is now something that many want to have faith in. They would rather believe in AI than their own ability to think and reason. But Colonel Harvey’s elixir was put under a microscope and a local doctor found it to be “happy water.”
Let’s put AI under a microscope.
This “happy water” has now taken the form of big money, a Super PAC called “Leading the Future,” with more than $100 million in initial funding, to run roughshod over ordinary citizens and parents concerned about the implications of using this new technology.
As a journalist, I view AI as attractive to those who don’t want to do the research themselves. Its brain works faster than their own. But do you trust it? Those who do trust the thinking of someone else would rather base their conclusions on the work of others. They trust the “Gods” of AI before their own brains, even though they do not know who is pulling the strings.
It turns out that AI is emerging as a super-sized version of the censorship industrial complex that was imposed on President Trump, my organization, and many other conservative organizations and individuals.
In practical terms, it is time-consuming to do your own innovative research and fact-finding. Why not use the various AI search engines? But aren’t these search engines dependent on what is already on the Internet? Do you trust the Internet? I do trust some sites. But selecting those sites requires careful research. Many people don’t have the time to do that. And many want research to confirm what they already believe.
In other words, people are lazy. It accommodates the needs of cheaters.
AI can be useful as a reference tool for gathering and summarized one’s own thoughts. It can quickly summarize your own documents. But using it as a blind tool to gather information from many sources you do not know or trust is a recipe for disaster. That is, unfortunately, what many people use it for.
The antidote to AI is basic journalism, “who, what, when, where, and why.” Ask the basic questions about what is important.
When I see headlines like “AI Weapons are transforming the defense industry,” I get worried. Using my own brain and not AI, my reaction is that we should concentrate on national security in the sense of guarding against such weapons.
Veteran television producer Jerry Kenney, who has studied the evolution of what philosopher Jacques Ellul called “the technological society,” notes that most people would be shocked to know how much they are spied on by their cars, appliances, TVs and smartphones. He says that “developing” AI doesn’t require widespread massive tech centers but that storing and analyzing data captured on all citizens does. He contends that large AI data centers are simply a way for government to “outsource” spying on us to Big Tech.
Ironically, when I consulted AI, I was told that Artificial intelligence “is fundamentally changing the landscape of cybersecurity, enabling new, faster, and more scalable forms of attacks while also providing powerful new tools for defense.” Common sense, therefore, tells me that defense should be a priority.
AI told me that “AI systems themselves are also targets of specific forms of hacking, known as adversarial machine learning.” That’s interesting. Veteran television producer Jerry Kenney was on my YouTube program recently and noted a report that a major AI company has been hacked multiple times. “If their AI is so smart,” he comments, “why can’t it keep them from being hacked?”
Perhaps we ought to focus on defending our country rather than developing new forms of federal surveillance and interference in our private lives that will result in another round of federal censorship of conservatives and Christians when Trump is out of power.
There is another problem: if hacking is a major problem, then the Chinese, with whom we are supposedly competing, will steal our AI technology anyway.
Locally, ordinary citizens are sounding the alarm. A group called the Florida Citizens Alliance has exposed how AI is being inserted into classrooms without parents’ knowledge or consent. Their plea is “Don’t let the federal government tell you how your child should interact with AI.” They want federalism, or states’ rights, to be protected.
But Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, a firm being used to compile data on Americans, has been attacking such efforts. He is a super salesman, saying on the business channel CNBC that AI will be “amazing for our civilization” and, among other things, bring down the cost of health care, reduce the prices of houses, and improve education.
He is now part of “Leading the Future,” a super PAC backed by the AI industry that launched a $10 million campaign to protect the industry from the people.
Its website claims that “Leading the Future” has a mission “to ensure the United States remains the global leader in AI by advancing a clear, high-level policy agenda at the federal and state levels and serving as the political and policy center of gravity for the AI industry.” That means outlawing state and local governments from regulating the new technology.
Like many of these salesmen, Lonsdale repeats the mantra about beating the Chinese in the AI race. But “beating” them by emulating or copying their strategies of national surveillance and control makes no sense to constitutional conservatives.
- Cliff Kincaid is president of Ameri ca’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org
