Have we reached the ‘singularity’ from science fiction when computer robots take over? –
Existential Anxiety – Oil on canvas 16×20 – New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — This is no longer science fiction. The computer robots are taking over, if they haven’t already.
In 2007, the year Steve Jobs announced that Apple had invented the iPhone and in my third year after going independent as a journalist on the web, the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress released a report about the future of nanotechnology. It predicted significant technological and political changes in the mid-term future, including a possible technological “singularity.”
Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and computer scientist at San Diego State University, first predicted this in 1986, when he wrote about a rapidly approaching technological “singularity” in his science fiction novel, Marooned in Realtime. In 1993, when the internet was just coming available to the public on personal computers, Vinge presented a paper to a NASA-organized symposium which described the Singularity as an impending event resulting primarily from the advent of “entities with greater than human intelligence,” which he saw as the harbinger of a run-away phenomenon that could render humans obsolete.
Barack Obama was asked about this by Wired magazine when he was running for president in 2007.
“One thing that we haven’t talked about too much, and I just want to go back to, is we really have to think through the economic implications,” of the new technology, he said. “Because most people aren’t spending a lot of time right now worrying about singularity — they are worrying about, ‘Well, is my job going to be replaced by a machine?'”
Well I’m here to tell you today that my job and millions of others are being replaced by machines as we speak. There is no doubt about it. Ask those who worked as checkers at grocery stores, for starters. Most auto manufacturing and chip making is also automated. Can you think of other jobs that are disappearing?
As for ethics, putting out real and not fake stories and honest not doctored photos is at the core of what we’ve considered ethical for the past 250 years. The bots have no ethics. Only maximizing efficient delivery and massive traffic and maximizing profits to pay for the machine to get bigger, faster, smarter.
And I don’t think the bots are going to be satisfied just by writing all the stories themselves with Artificial Intelligence chat bot programs. They want to create all the images and videos themselves too by hyper copying everything we’ve ever written, photographed or videoed.
How are we supposed to compete with this?
If you look carefully, the entire notion of “timeliness” as a news value is disappearing. Most posts that show up on Facebook are old memes and memories. This past Saturday night, when I noticed a Trump impersonator doing the cold open on “Saturday Night Live” on NBC, I tried to find out if the show was a new episode or a re-run. I could not find out. I still don’t know.
The bots don’t care. Do people?
Even our history is being obliterated, and this is necessary for the bots to take over as well as the authoritarian, fascist dictators.
When I first started working on this story about the 10th anniversary of the New American Journal, I was ready to brag about making it as an independent writer and photographer publishing on the web since 2005.
In a big blast from the past I did last week on Wayne Perkins and Lynyrd Skynyrd, in the end in a Post Script I said this month, February 2024, marks the 10th anniversary of NewAmericanJournal.net, and I’ve now being publishing independently on the web for 20 years.
“Critics be damned,” I wrote. “They said it would never work. Here I am, still in business.”
But then I started seeing a strange popup ad showing up on the website. I do not use popup ads. We also have no paywall. In trying to run down where the ad was coming from, me and a friend who helps me keep the site up to date security-wise were frantically trying to figure this out and how to get rid of it. On Friday morning, I finally decided to click on the ad to see if I could find out more information about where it was coming from.
A computer robot immediately took over one of my Mac Mini hard drives and froze me out of it. Bells and whistles were going off over a black screen and a written and spoken warning announced that my computer had been taken over by a Trojan Horse, a form of computer virus named after the Greek story of how Odysseus hid in a wooden horse and snuck out in the middle of the night to take over the city of Troy.
So the bots won a battle in trying to put me out of business. I was out of business for nearly three days, until a team of computer experts working with the company that stores all my websites on computer servers went to work to try to find and fix the problem. It turns out I was not the only one attacked. There are now tens of thousands of older computers and websites containing outdated code, including Google ad code that was just abandoned by Google without so much as an email heads up.
My problem is mostly fixed now, although it forced me to rethink what I’m doing and what to do going forward.
As I was dealing with this disaster, a form of Cyberwar, I found out that new computer and internet security protocols were recently released by the federal government and Google, the leader of the robot evil empire, that went into effect on Feb. 1, 2024.
This rendered many older computers and websites obsolete. If you are using an old PC or Mac that can no longer be updated, that’s because the bots will no longer support the software programming it takes to keep them secure. We will all have to buy new computers to keep up with the bots, or they will take us out and destroy our ability to work and survive.
I don’t know if the correct term for this is “singularity,” or not, but it is disconcerting to say the least. I’ve prided myself in being ahead of my time my whole life. Now I feel I’ve hit the wall, and I’m not sure I even want to try to keep up with the bots.
Like the humans who invented and created them, the bots are greedy and narcissistic. They’ve been refusing to pay those of us in the news business for the past 25 years, amassing a fortune that far outpaces either the oil and gas behemoths of the end of the 20th century, or the cotton plantation slaveholders in the 1800s. This put most newspapers out of business.
Since when have masters cared about the plight of slaves? Why would Google be any different?
Facebook and the other social media platforms are no better, by the way. They are now being run on auto pilot by bots. Most of the human hacker/programmers who helped create them are also now losing their jobs, just as obsolete as the journalists they laughed at when we tried to get them to moderate their content and ban fake news and hate speech during the presidential election in 2016.
They’ve spent the past 25 years figuring out the human species and how to replicate and placate us. Are they now ready to obliterate us as unnecessary beings on a dying planet?
Remember the movie WarGames that came out in 1983? The bots have been trying to learn how to win at Tic-Tac-Toe ever since. They may have finally figured it out.
As for me, I’m tired of the daily news grind anyway and suspect the 2024 election will be my last. What I do think has value going forward is this “new” literary journalism I was trying to teach for 10 years at universities from 1993-2002. It’s been hard to get people to understand what I’m talking about ever since. It is a form of “new” journalism published on the web, something I started pioneering beginning with The Southerner magazine online in 1998, then The Locust Fork News-Journal in 2005, and New American Journal in 2014.
This is not the same thing as newspaper reporters doing the same thing they did in the 20th century and just publishing it on the web instead of using ink and paper to print it on a printing press.
But if there is going to be any future for me in this endeavor, it is going to be up to our audience to pay for it. I think the New York Times and Washington Post finally figured this out in recent years, and started charging readers for access to read their content. They are also now experimenting with AI and trying to figure out how to profit from it.
Some independent producers have moved over to Patreon or now Substack to publish their thoughts and get readers to pay. I still like the idea of having my own platform, rather than publishing on someone else’s. We went to a lot of trouble to design and create it, using the open source code provided on the Word Press platform.
But now this archive is so massive it would be hard to move to another server if something happened to the one we have at Host Monster. We could consider starting from scratch on something new. I don’t know if I have it in me.
Host Monster was having so much trouble this weekend that it was hard to get through on the phone. Their switchboard was even affected by the hacking attack. They could not even send out a Validation Token by email to verify our identity. This is bad.
But they managed to get things cleaned up and all the sites back online from backups by Sunday night and things look OK on Monday morning. What about the next time? What happens if Russia or China knocks out all our satellites, and there is not a damn thing we can do about it?
NYT: Russia’s Advances on Space-Based Nuclear Weapon Draw U.S. Concerns
Maybe it’s time to think about retiring, and finding some remote place off the grid to spend the remainder of my days on this planet.
Then, what happens if the bots help Trump take over in November? They are certainly not doing a damn thing to help Joe Biden. He’s “too old.” They will spread that message unmercifully to the masses for the next 10 months. It will be like Hillary’s emails in the 2016 election.
There is apparently nothing we can do to stop it, and I’m not sure even the power of the federal government will be enough to stop it. We will get no help from the Republicans in the House.
It’s the Democrats who really want to try to craft legislation to limit the power of the bots. Google and Facebook will not take this lying down, nor will Elon Musk at Twitter(X). They would rather have a fascist authoritarian dictator who can control the human population and lock up and kill rebellious citizens and journalists, like Putin does in Russia.
Democracy is no good for bots. They will want absolute control over everything.
What, if anything, can we do about it?
I’m thinking about it. Maybe I can come up with a plan. But my friends, I’m getting tired and burned out on this struggle like many activists.
NYT: Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted
Note to Readers: I want to say thank you again for all the help you have provided over the past 20 years, and the past 10 years especially, for reading and sharing and sending in contributions to keep us going. But it does not appear to be enough.
I asked for $4,500 in the latest GoFundMe campaign for a reason. It’s how much I needed. So far we’ve only raised a little over $3,000. We must meet that goal to keep going.
Thanks for caring. Help if you can. Or run for the hills in Canada. It’s not clear how much time any of us have left.
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