I'm going to be a bit late getting this one out this morning. I ran across an article late last night that changed the course of my original intention for today's open thread. It's about something that's been on my mind for a while now and the article that I'm going to highlight makes a compelling case.

I hesitate writing about this because I'm having as much fun as anyone else watching the greedheads squirm on Capital Hill. The article is speculative in nature, but if correct may have profound implications.

I've written several times in the past about the current iteration of AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI is marketed as a game changer for humanity with powers attributed to it beyond it's present scope. It's given god-like properties by those doing the marketing as there's lots of money to be made from its applications. It is falsely advertised by its proponents like it is a sentient entity, which in reality, it is not and may never be.

AI is, in its essence and at the present, nothing but more or less a glorified search engine. It scrapes (copies) massive amount of data from the internet and deposits it into a database where it can be cross indexed to answer queries. So far, the data base, the internet, is one that we all have access to, but because of limitations we individually lack the ability to store all of the information gleaned from the source.

But, what if AI was able to scrape the mother-lode of all data and added it to a massive database? The mother-lode being all of the data from the US government. Imagine the power one could wield with access to all of governmental information at the tip of the fingers. Sounds like it would be impossible, right? How could anyone be allowed to access that data to the point where it could be scraped?

Let's take a look.

As I was sitting at my desktop last night, wondering what I'd write about, I slipped into a daydream of memories. Memories of my youth.

I was swept back to my early childhood in the mid to late fifties, and I soon noticed I was viewing my memories in black and white. That seemed odd, but not really, having grown up in the era of black and white TV. What an idyllic world that was. Time was slow. There was less chaos, well, less chaos in my young mischievous mind anyway. Things were so much simpler. I'm sure many here can relate.

I probably spent a good five minutes in memory land.

It's strange the way a person can drift back in time, like a lucid dream, like a movie.

Fresh of the "success" of the Tesla Cybertruck Elon Musk decided that now was a great time to introduce AI into X. The product was Grok. It didn't go well.

The term artificial intelligence (AI) is being bandied about with regularity nowadays, especially in regards to chatbots, with ChatGPT being the most prolific. Hopefully this piece will help explain the concept of AI in context of its current applications and what that may portend for the future. Included, at the end, I'll let my mind run wild in a thought experiment regarding AI's potential abuse.

All of the following items are via the EFF Newsletter for May 3, 2022

Many people are perplexed by the drive towards firing workers and replacing them with machines. They ask "who will buy the products?". But, when looked at from a neoliberal/ totalitarian ideological viewpoint, robots are the "final solution" to the ruling class's problem: "who will be our servants after we kill all the grasping, uppity peasants"? Using robots to do that would be even more efficient than what Jay Gould, the crooked Robber Baron, proposed: