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.