Today in dystopia, the US government is monitoring the social media accounts of individuals who oppose the rapidly spreading installation of Flock surveillance cameras throughout the United States.
In an article titled “The Government is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts,” 404 Media reports:
“Government surveillance centers are monitoring viral anti-Flock Instagram posts, warning local police about upcoming DeFlock events including one scheduled to start next week, and have told cops to ‘increase patrols around ALPR [automatic license plate readers]’ as backlash to Flock grows, according to government intelligence bulletins obtained using public records requests. The documents also warn about devices ‘that could be used to identify the locations of Flock cameras.’”
Mass surveillance is dramatically escalating around the world as the public grows increasingly discontented with the soul-crushing, planet-devouring, murderous abuses of the imperial status quo. In order to keep us subjugated, they need to control us. In order to control us, they need to spy on us. That’s what all these surging authoritarian measures are all about.
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Today in dystopia, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says we are not far off from artificial intelligence monitoring every facet of our lives 24/7 in order to give it more “context” for the assistance it can offer us throughout our day.
“I think we are close to a world where you can have a descendant of ChatGPT watch your computer screen all of the time, watch every meeting you’re in, record every call, everything like that, have perfect context of your whole life, everything you see,” Altman said at a recent Internapalooza event.
“You can just have this thing that’s like working alongside you, and as you’re like typing out a sales pitch to a customer, or like writing a strategy doc, it’ll just say like, hey, maybe here’s another idea or I think you’re making a mistake here. You should consider this or I can do this thing for you to help and like this, I think we’re only like one model generation away from this actually being incredibly useful,” Altman 𝕏said.
Asked by host Cory Levy how long he thinks it will take before such a product is rolled out, Altman replied “sometime in the next six months.”
Again, here’s that push to have technology monitoring every facet of our lives. This benefits someone, and it isn’t us.
Perhaps more importantly, who would want to live like this? Who wants to live their whole lives being monitored by a chatbot and being fed AI advice on what decisions to make from moment throughout their lives? What a wretched way to exist.
These freaks aren’t just poisoning our environment, they’re poisoning our species. They are ruining what it is to be human. There is so much ugliness in all this.
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Today in dystopia, autonomous police drones are being normalized throughout the United States.
In an article titled “First Came the Flock Cameras. Now Local Cops Want Autonomous Drones,” Truthout reports the following:
“Police in cities across the U.S. are rolling out a pro-drone PR blitz as hundreds of local police departments prepare to deploy autonomous, AI-driven surveillance drones. The drones are capable of following a single vehicle across an entire city, capturing footage through apartment windows, and generally recording daily life from the sky without being noticed.
“As of February, more than 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies had received waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of so-called ‘drone-as-first-responder’ (DFR) programs, according to public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and released in July. While the list of waiver recipients includes fire departments and other first responders, the vast majority are law enforcement agencies, including police in cities large and small.”
Truthout explains that these police drones differ from previous iterations in that they do not have a pilot controlling them remotely from the ground. They are piloted by artificial intelligence, which makes it possible for a single cop to oversee numerous bot-driven drones at a time.
That’s right kids, welcome to the future, where the sky is filling with AI police drones while the planet burns.
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Today in dystopia, Australia experienced its first autonomous AI cyberattack when a man asked his chatbot to book him an appointment at the gym. The AI hacked into the gym’s booking software without being asked and kicked someone else off the waiting list to install its user at a convenient date.
The Australian press are having a fun, lighthearted time with this story, because it sounds cute and comical until you think hard enough about the implications of what these things could potentially wind up doing as the technology becomes more and more advanced and prevalent.
We’re opening up a whole Pandora’s box of wildly unpredictable consequences by letting these AI companies have free rein to impose these technologies on our society with hardly any regulation or oversight.
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Today in dystopia, Axios just ran an article titled “Robot book club” in which author Nicholas Johnston writes, “AI has become my reading buddy* *as I’ve plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.”
Without any shame whatsoever, Johnston describes how he’s been having a chatbot explain the books he’s been reading to him chapter by chapter because reading is too hard and complicated for his pretty little head. He describes how the AI agreed with him that the prose in Last of the Mohicans is too difficult to read without technological assistance, validating his request by assuring him that “Cooper’s sentences are long and his diction is archaic.”
This generative AI crap is making people dumber and worse in pretty much every possible respect, and mainstream media outlets like Axios are normalizing it and assuring us all that this is as it should be.
If there was ever a time to refuse to go along with the herd, this is it.
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Feature image by Tony Webster — Flock Safety ALPR Camera, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=156607027
