Tomorrow!!

      More and more our world is seen through a screen, now with virtual meetings and virtual reality the natural world is becoming a forgotten and alien world. Even the barbarity of war can be carried out from an office somewhere thousands of miles from the horror, destruction and death. The hands-on world is slowly becoming a distant memory. Is this the direction we wish to go, to a world that suits big business and the controlling state, where you become a studied, profiled predictable entity, devoid of the right to your own social structures and interactions, without being monitored? Where communities are in a monitored virtual world?

The following from Montreal Counter Information:

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

PDF to print (11 x 17)

Poster text:

Fire to the Cybernetic Prison

It’s never too late to resist

Artificial Intelligence
     AI labs, recipients of several $100M in government funding, are working to put “machine learning” algorithms in the service of a long list of industries. Under an “ethical” facade, some applications will simply allow well-placed capitalists to further enrich themselves. Others aim to reinforce repression, whether detecting shoplifters at the supermarket with automated video surveillance, developing facial recognition tools that work even on partly covered faces, or “predicting” crime or the probability of a prisoner re-offending.

5g Wireless Networking
     The unprecedented bandwidth of 5G technology enables the deployment of AI on the scale of a city in real time. Every movement becomes trackable thanks to thousands of cameras integrated into a centralized surveillance apparatus. This vision is already in practice in more than one European “smart city”. Countless sensors dotting public spaces, in businesses, cars and public transit, and worn on our bodies aim to make every action the object of calculation, prediction and control, all under an eco-friendly label. By its pervasiveness, a web of algorithms is made invisible and therefore impossible to resist.

Robotics and Automation
     Self-driving cars. Robotized warehouses. Cashierless stores. Delivery robots that call the cops when they are attacked. An infrastructure is being deployed that will change the world of work and our living environment permanently. We don’t mourn the disappearance of back-breaking and boring jobs. A dehumanizing pace is imposed on the remaining workers, who must keep up with the machines and productivity software or be shown the door. Meanwhile, what measures of social control and what exploitative schemes await the new excluded masses of an age of technological unemployment?

Life in Front of a Screen
     Possibilities for authentic relations between humans and with our surroundings are increasingly erased in service of a virtual hyper- connectivity. Understanding, discovery, and the search for meaning are reduced to production of data. Attention deficit, memory problems, loss of emotional skills and imagination, disrupted sleep, musculo-skeletal pain, anxiety, loneliness, depression: the symptoms of addiction to online technologies are worsening as the proportion of the population that has spent their entire lives immersed in touch screens grows.

For free and full lives, open to the unknown

Be the outage in their network!

And just a thought: 

Tomorrow’s World!

See the fat cat’s grinning smile
as Corporate Capitalism runs amok,
Chasing profit as it goes
firing millions of ordinary folk.
Raping and polluting land after land,
starting bloody wars.
Toxic waste, sweat shop wages
and oil covered sea shores.
Where have all the flowers gone
beneath this ozone free sky?
To join the birds, to join the fox
on yonder plutonium field to die.
Mercury fish, strontium lamb
trees that never show a leaf,
radio active beaches, toxic streams
good lean BSE-antibiotic beef.
In a world of epidemic, plague and famine
it’s bottled water and chemical food.
Of course, it’s all tested on rats and mice
so you know its got to be good.
Beneath a sky that’s always black,
hurricane winds and endless drought,
its oxygen masks for the toxic air,
corporate profit’s what its all about.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Surveillance Epidemic.

       There is a lot of concern by several states over the coronavirus in China, with fear that it could become an epidemic, and rightly so, but there is another epidemic that most states are willing and trying to spread, it's called surveillance. This particular virus is spread by authoritarian states and seeps into ever aspect of our lives. From a few CCTV cameras it has now spread to every pub, shop, street, public transport, hospital, bank and a multitude of other places we frequent. This particular epidemic has morphed from a simple camera to an extremely complex system among its tentacles are number plate recognition, monitoring and profiling individuals as they do what ordinary people do. The latest development in this particular epidemic is "facial recognition". This new phase has been silently developing in cities across the UK, waithing for the moment it can be set among the people, and we now learn that London will be hit with a full blown version of this anti-human rights virus.

       The Met in London have just announced that they will unleash this new phase on the general public in that city. This despite the fact that EU lawmakers are mulling over a temporary ban on this part of the epidemic, to safeguard individuals rights, as part of their risk assessment to regulate AI

      When it comes to the abuse of human rights we can always rely on the UK government to go it alone.
     This technology is lurking in cities across the UK all waiting to flip the switch and and get a good look at your face as you go about your daily chores.
     I don't know if it would work, but perhaps before we go out we could all wear very large sunglasses, a large nose from a joke shop, plus very large ear muffs and paint our face various colours, and finish off with a large floppy hat. Might be worth a try, at least it would brighten up our cities and towns.
The following From TecCrunch 

       The Met says its hope for the AI-powered tech is that it will help it tackle serious crime, including serious violence, gun and knife crime and child sexual exploitation, and that it will “help protect the vulnerable.”
     However, its phrasing is not a little ironic, given that facial recognition systems can be prone to racial bias, for example, owing to factors such as bias in data sets used to train AI algorithms.
       So in fact there’s a risk that police use of facial recognition could further harm vulnerable groups who already face a disproportionate risk of inequality and discrimination.

         Yet the Met’s PR doesn’t mention the risk of the AI tech automating bias.
Instead it makes pains to couch the technology as an “additional tool” to assist its officers.
       “This is not a case of technology taking over from traditional policing; this is a system which simply gives police officers a ‘prompt’, suggesting ‘that person over there may be the person you’re looking for’, it is always the decision of an officer whether or not to engage with someone,” it adds.
        While the use of a new tech tool may start with small deployments, as is being touted here, the history of software development underlines how potential to scale is readily baked in.
       A “targeted” small-scale launch also prepares the ground for London’s police force to push for wider public acceptance of a highly controversial and rights-hostile technology via a gradual building out process… AKA surveillance creep.

Read the full article HERE: 

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Where Will It All End?

 

        Where will it all end, assuming that we manage to stop the total destruction of our eco-systems in time. Artificial intelligence, wars carried out from the office monitor, genetic modification, policing by cameras and computers, a world where we have no control, it is all sorted out for us by scientists and computer experts, whose aims are linked to the demands of the capitalist economy/war machine and would aim to shape our desires in that direction. Obviously it will not be stopped by those involved and pushing for every greater advances in these fields, those who stand to gain most from this new hi-tec world. We become its pawns or we resist, subservience is surrender, it is handing your future and your grandchildren's future into the hands of the technocrats. We are still humans with a host of natural and human desires, there are ongoing plans to shape those human desires to suit the system, our aim must be to shape the system to suit those human desires.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

 

SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY SUMMIT ITALY
GATHERING 8TH OCTOBER 2019
 From 7am to 2pm – Milano Congressi – Via Gattamelata 5
 

Trans-humanism is already here
         Trans-humanism is not some eccentric researchers’ marginal tendency or a side effect of technological development; it is the logical outcome of the techno-scientific system.
        The slogan of the meeting is: ‘Plan the future. Build the future. Be the future’. A future which is already becoming present. The logics of trans-humanism – overcoming all limits, making man better and more powerful, re-planning the living and making it artificial – are not mere abstract speculations, but they become researches, trans-genetic dreams, military drones, new apparatuses in smart cities, Medically Assisted Procreation and genetic editing.
Trans-humanism and the techno-scientific system produce imaginaries, desires, needs, they transform the world and our perception of reality.
       The most prominent world directors and researchers come from Singularity University, one of the most important expressions of trans-humanism; some of them go on to join the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), one of the most important research universities in the world, DARPA, a USA Defence Department government agency for the development of new technologies, Google, Microsoft, to mention only a few…Among the major financiers of Singularity University are companies such as Google, certainly known for information technology but less known for its investments in genetic research.
        Precisely in this convergence of high level sectors and research, a bunch of scientists, entrepreneurs, military men and politicians find their meeting point.
We don’t want to be machine men in a machine world!
Spazio di documentazione La Piralide
lapiralide.noblogs.org

Collettivo Resistenze al Nanomondo – www.resistenzealnanomondo.org

Translated by act for freedom now!

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Tomorrow's World, For People Or For Profit.

 

        (ANTIMEDIA) Technology powerhouses Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Google, and Amazon announced yesterday they have joined forces to create the Partnershipon Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Benefit People and Society.

       So the big Western technology giants have teamed together to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of people and society!!! Well let’s not forget, those big boys, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Google and Amazon, are part and parcel of the big corporate cabal that is in constant overdrive to control everything in this world, benefiting people and society is not high on their agenda, profit is. It is obvious that in a capitalist society, as robots and hi-tec appliances grow in number and sophistication, employing people will go down, but profits will go up.

      All this hi-tec growth, reducing labour, would be a wonderful thing, if society was organised to benefit all the people and see to their needs, on an equal and fair basis. However that’s not the way our society is organised, as production improves, more labour will be flung on the scrap heap, after all, capitalism is about profit for the corporations, not about people’s needs. So we should be extremely worried by this coming together of some of the biggest corporations on the planet, to plan for a world where people are superfluous. Added to that there is a great deal of anxiety among lots of scientists and other experts on this drive for artificial intelligence, with a belief that we are opening an uncontrollable can of worms.

This from Tarcoteca 

--------- It should come as no surprise that software programmed by humans, who are flawed, will reflect and even amplify those human flaws. The White House released a report in May highlighting the major potential for discrimination in “Big Data.” A quick look at the table of contents shows that mitigating discrimination is a challenge in every area. A report published byProPublica showed risk assessment programs used by courtrooms across the nation turned up significant racial disparities, falsely labeling black defendants as future criminals at twice the rate of whites.
        Though the public is skeptical of AI, most people are unaware of these shortcomings.
        Even so, a poll conducted by the British Science Association shows “60 per cent think that the use of robots or programmes equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to fewer jobs within ten years, and 36 per cent of the public believe that the development of AI poses a threat to the long term survival of humanity.”

Read the full article HERE:

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