Tag: The Singularity

I May Start Using Big Tech’s ‘Digital Telepathy’ As My Informal Shrink


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have no idea if my suspicions about the ability of Big Tech to read my mind are true or not. But, Jesus, Tik-Tok specifically sure does do some fucking spooky things with its “algorithms.” So much so that either we need to break up and regulate Big Tech because they’re hiding a Soft Singularity from us, or we need to break up and regulate Big Tech because they’re rooting around in our minds using Digital Telepathy.

Well, maybe Big Tech can read our minds?

Let me explain.

I’m around my elderly father a lot and…for some reason, out of the blue, Tik-Tok pushes me videos about World War 2 a lot. So much so, that I’m like, “Any algorithm they may be using sure seems to be thinking about my dad, not me.” Remember, there was a point some time ago when YouTube was pushing me videos about lockboxes and the end of the world which totally made no sense for me at the time. (But did for my father, natch.)

But Tik-Tok has begun to push me weird, almost snarky, content as if it’s rooting around in my mind and wants to have some fun of some sort. The key issue is, of course, is I can’t really prove any of this. There are plenty — PLENTY — of other ways their “algorithm” could figure out most, but not all, of the shit about me that they are pushing. I’m sure they’re listening to me using my phone. I’m sure — somehow — these very words I’m writing right now are being monitored and throw into the maw of an “algorithm” somewhere to better sell me widges.

I get that. THAT, I understand.

It’s when Tik-Tok gets cocky and does a bankshot off some something only I know about my personal mental monologue that I go…hmmmm….weird. Why am I getting that if ONLY I KNOW ABOUT THAT REFERENCE. And, what’s more, some of the stuff Tik-Tok is pushing me is almost like it’s trying to help me with personal problems. Wow-we-wow.

If Big Tech has gone past simply knowing that I’m I have “CAT” on my mind all the time, but has figured out the more abstract things associated with WHY that term is on my mind all the time, then……oooooooooh boy. The national security implications of that are deep, deep, deep.

There are two I can think off the top of my head.

One is, if, say the United States really did slip into autocracy, I could see the NSA start to hunt down specific people whose minds their monitoring for “anti-MAGA thinking” (or somesuch.) Though, to be fair, I generally think that while they obviously abuse their power, in the war against MAGA, the NSA is probably the good guys for the time being. There’s a reason why MAGAQ-Trump hate “the Deep State” so much.

The other is, if a hot war broke out between China and the United States, it sure would be useful for China to have some sense of how open America’s youth would be to be, say, getting drafted. That’s some serious Soft Singularity intelligence there.

But no one listens to me. Absolutely no one listens to me.

A $1 Trillion Challenge To Elon Musk: The ‘Mindcap’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Silicon Valley is embarrassing itself right now. There’s all this talk of a “neural link” where you fucking drill a hole in someone’s head — possibly giving them a fucking lobotomy — when there’s a far, far less intrusive solution to this problem: the Mindcap.

I’m cribbing this idea from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “3001: Final Odyssey,” but here’s the point — wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to lay the technology over someone’s shaved head making someone stupid by accident as part of the development process? Ugh. It’s so obvious and so annoying.

Now, the reason why I even mention this is I have come to believe that the basis for such a revolution in how we consume technology already exists. I’m just an idiot in the middle of nowhere, but I definitely get the sense that Big Tech is using electronics to read our minds in some way. Or, it’s at least possible.

So, Big Tech, instead of thinking very, very small with a digital party line called Clubhouse, why not live up to your ideals of “disrupt” by breaking huge swaths of the economy like it did with the Internet. Why even go through the middle sage of VR – AR using Oculus Rift.

It makes far, far, more sense to throw all your efforts into a Mindcap. People will have to shave their heads, yeah, but so what. You can always wear a wig AND you get to cut out the middle man when it comes to consumption of media, services, you name it.

We’re talking Steve Jobs “think different” levels of transformation of the average, everyday person’s life. Apple, or Elon Musk, someone, if you could mass produce a $1,200 mindcap that was actually functioning in any way at all, you could easily make $1 trillion through first mover advantage alone.

But I know I’m working on some dubious assumptions. Only someone like Elon Musk could throw money at the idea of a Mindcap. Remember, my idea this Mindcap would be completely unobtrusive. No drilling into someone’s head. You lay the technology directly over someone’s bare scalp and the Mindcap augments your existing mental ability and allows you to access the Internet.

It’s just kind of sad that Silicon Valley has lost its touch. For shame, for shame. You come up with smartphone and now you’re too busy stroking one off on a digital partyline to think big.

How I Quit Worrying & Came To Love Big Tech’s ‘Digital Telepathy’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Whenever I think of how I’ve come to believe Big Tech is reading our minds (in some way) I think of that dude who figured out the Bernie Madoff scheme really never got any credit. In interviews he comes off as an acerbic, somewhat deranged guy. Just the type of guy that MSM wouldn’t give credit for breaking a huge story.

I feel for that guy.

I have no New York Times-level proof that Big Tech can read our minds, but there’s one specific thing that Big Tech (specifically Tik-Tok) is doing that is so specific that it definitely seems as though there’s some mind reading going on: they know shit about my body.

Now, as I keep saying, I hate conspiracy theories, so, yes, it’s very possible that through AI or algorithms they’ve somehow magically narrowed down specific issues with my body that I’ve told no one about. And if that’s the case I have two responses — then THAT needs to be regulated. And two, if that’s the case, they’ve managed to come up with an AI that has figured out very specific health issues for my specifically that make one think we’ve reached a Soft Singularity somewhere in the shadows.

But Big Tech (Tik-Tok) keeps pushing me very specific content for very specific health issues — down to virtually the same wording in my own Goddamn mind! — that something has got to be up. What’s going on right now, of course, is, I think, a Soft Singularity has happened and our poor old rummaged through minds can’t process that we’ve reach a point in technological development where Big Tech can actually READ OUR FUCKING MINDS.

We just can’t grok it. It just isn’t something we can process, so we dismiss it. And if only freaky weirdos like me are claiming this, then it’s very easy to dismiss it. There’s no proof. All I have is a direct link between my personal, internal monologue and the content I’m being pushed by Big Tech. I can’t PROVE THAT, now can I?

It’s Tik-Tok that seems to abuse their ability the most. They don’t just push me content for, say, “bathmat” without any obvious context, they push me content with some abstract analyzation to it. Now THAT is fucking spooky.

But let me be clear — I bounce back and forth between believing I’ve figured this out and saying this is just another one of my kooky ideas I’ve had since I’ve left South Korea.

The only reason why I keep bringing it up is…Big Tech keeps trying to pull a Soft Singularity fast one on me and it’s beginning to bug the shit out of me.

The Future Is Wetware


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Before I begin, let’s mull something Trump said once. As I remember it, Trump rambled something about how “the Deep State” could “read our minds” via our microwaves or some shit. Is it possible it wasn’t what we thought — his addled brain coming up with bullshit — but something he actually knew about once he became president?

I doubt it, but it makes you think.

I mean, here I am thinking Big Tech can read my mind — just imagine what the NSA or MI6 can do. And it starts to get a little spooky when you think how much of our lives are rigged up to the Internet. The first thing we may have to worry about when the Singularity turns hard isn’t the Terminator, but our fucking government controlling us to an unprecedented level.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand: the future is wetware.

What I mean by this is, if you assume that the technology to read our minds already exists, what if you took it to the next level and figured out a way to use our own wetware as our next Internet. Using a device found in Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: Final Odyssey, you could totally re-imagine human interaction with the digital realm.

You could send “m-mail” from mind to mind. Watch video in your mind’s eye. Listen to music in your mind. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that it might even be possible to use your own mind’s processing power to help things along. That may be pushing it, but it seems something to think about.

The point of all of this is — why the fuck are we talking about Clubhouse — which is nothing more than a re-imagined rural partyline –instead of jawdropping changes in the human experience like the Internet became over about 20 years.

What is wrong with us? Where are our Snowdens of yesterday?

Anyway, seems like about $1 trillion is being left on the table because of the shortsightedness of the nerds of Silicon Valley.

Tik-Tok’s ‘Soft Singularity’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Something’s up. I don’t know what it is, but Tik-Tok (and possibly the Chinese government) is up to something. When you start to seriously consider that Tik-Tok (and as such the Chinese government) can read your mind via your cellphone, you got a problem.

Now, the experiment I suggested people do with Tik-Tok apparently doesn’t work — someone I know via Twitter handed their phone to their boyfriend and what I thought would happen, didn’t happen.

So, this makes one wonder how it is that the “spooky” shit that Tik-Tok is up to can possibly happen.

If you want to imagine still that Tik-Tok is reading our minds, one possibility that they have their digital telepathy somehow “imprint” with your specific mind after a certain point so my experiment doesn’t work. They know your specific brain signals well enough that simply having someone else use the phone doesn’t right away change what you’re pushed.

Now, let me be clear — the only reason why I even propose this bonkers conspiracy is the repeated times that Tik-Tok (and to be fair, other Big Tech companies) have pushed me content (read: ads) that seems to brazenly reference my internal monologue. Tik-Tok is just the absolute brazen at it. When it starts to push videos that reference the abstract of “women who looks like the woman that is often in my mind” then, well, something fucked up is going on.

But I’m prepared to admit defeat. I just don’t have any New York Times-level evidence to support my claim. This is a very rarely viewed Website, so it’s not like anyone cares what I think.

Think Big: Silicon Valley & The Soft Singularity of ‘Digital Telepathy’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A long time ago, when dinosaurs still walked the earth, I was in college and obsessed with this thing called the Internet. This was before the World Wide Web. This was back when having an email address was, in itself, something of a future shock.

Flash forward to the present day and, meh, we’ve been in a technological holding pattern for about a decade now. Sure, a lot of apps have been designed, but the basic thing that powers it all hasn’t changed in over a decade: the smartphone.

Now, here’s where things get tricky.

I think Big Tech has figured out a way to read our minds. And, what’s more, they’re getting kind of brazen about it because, I mean, who’s going to believe that our phones are reading our minds? And, let me be clear, I absolutely hate conspiracy theories. I think they’re the last refuge of the intellectually dishonest. So, I’m very reluctant to think what I’m saying I think: that Big Tech can read or minds and they’re using that ability on the DL to sell us ads.

And, really, this would not be that big a deal real terms — at least not now — but for one thing: Tik-Tok. It’s at least possible that the Chinese government, through Tik-Tok is rummaging around in the minds of American’s youth via Tik-Tok. I say this because of all the services I suspect can read our minds, Tik-Tok is the absolute most brazen.

They really push it. I think about something once without telling anyone else and lo and behold, I get a pushed a video or ad about that subject the next time I log on to the service. This is not to say there aren’t plenty of other ways they’re figuring me out. They’re probably listening to me via my phone. They’re probably monitoring every way I use my phone and using algorithms to figure me out. I get all that. THAT makes sense.

It’s when I get pushed something on Tik-Tok that seems to not only reference something from within my internal monologue, but takes it to the next level of referencing, say, the appetence of a lost love that is floating around in my mind all the time. How does an algorithm figure THAT out?

And, if you want to got that route, if “algorithms” have gotten that advanced, then that, in itself, is a serious issue. That’s not an algorithm, that’s AI and that needs to be discussed and, if necessary, regulated.

Or, put another way, I’m beginning to think we’ve already reached a “Soft Singularity.” A combination of oligarchy, greed and fear of the public’s reaction is causing Big Tech to keep this fact away from the average person. But it seems that if they keep fucking leaning into their ability to Black Mirror shit that there will, at some point, come a moment of reckoning.

But I’m a nobody. No one listens to me.

Hey, Elon Musk, Don’t Waste Your Time Terraforming Mars


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems to me the logical way to settle the universe is to simply turn people into data then shoot tiny probes out across the galaxy at near the speed of light. Once they reach, say, Alpha Centauri, you zap the all the information to the probe. Using nanotech, you re-create humans and look around.

Now, that last bit is a bit much even for me.

More likely, what you do is, you have hard AI and that hard AI is zapped to your tiny probe which then creates an android body of some sort using the aforementioned nanotech.

Anyway, the point is, it seems like a huge fucking waste of time to actually send humans anywhere off planet. Using hard AI, nanotech and the speed of light, you could look around the galactic neighborhood pretty easily. Or, put another way — you’d be an idiot to throw any resources at terraforming Mars when you could wait for technology to reach the point where you could zap humans to a livable planet at the speed of light.

In the 10,000 years it would take to terraform Mars, you could settle hundreds — thousands — of planets within 10,000 lightyears of earth. Seems a no-brainer to me.

The Implications Of Big Tech Concealing A ‘Soft Singularity’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let me qualify what I’m proposing — I’m simply looking at what appears to be happening (Big Tech can read our minds via our phones) and then playing out the implications of such a theory.

I could be totally wrong. It’s very possible. But some of Tik-Tok’s apparent abuses of digital telepathy have made it seem so obvious to me that some sort of Soft Singularity has happened without anyone telling us that I have to talk about it.

Let’s review the evidence as to why I think a Soft Singularity has happened. First, Facebook some time ago patented mind-reading technology. Second, repeatedly over the last year or so, I’ve noticed being pushed ads that are so specific to what I’ve been THINKING about that no possible algorithmic explanation makes any sense.

What’s more, especially with Tik-Tok, there is an abstract nature to some of the things I’ve been pushed that is alarming. If you work on the assumption that my mind is being read by my phone, it’s not like they know the word “GIRL” is at the forefront of my mind, it’s as if they actually are rooting around my mind to the extent that they can push videos of “GIRL WHO LOOKS LIKE ANNIE SHAPIRO.”

The prospect of that going on with millions of Tik-Tok users, not just me, is extremely dark and surreal. It starts to make you think about the moral implications of Big Tech (especially a Big Tech company so close to the Chinese government) knowing that much about a big chunk of the American population.

Not, at this point, let me be absolutely clear — if I’m missing some way that they can simply figure out that I like girls who look like a specific woman that I think about a lot via algorithmic assumptions, then, so be it. I will feel a lot better. But, even then, the algorithms would be so good at their job, that that, in itself, would be cause for alarm.

So, I guess what I’m suggesting is it’s at least possible that technology has advanced a lot further than we think.

Sometimes, They Come Back


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As of Monday (at the latest) I’m throwing myself back into the novel I’ve been working on the last few years. Everything is in place — I should be able to write the first draft very, very quickly.

I’ll always be the guy in the circle. Me, 2032

What started as me raging against the Trump Era now has a very different context — it’s going to be a lot more character based, a lot less preachy and…also a warning of what might be to come.

I really just want to forget the Trump Era ever happened. And, yet, given Trump’s apparent interest in the “Patriot Party” concept, I have decided to read up on Hitler. My fear is because of the “megatrends” that caused the rise of Trump in the first place, that he and his movement will come back in a big way far, far sooner than any of us might otherwise believe.

So, in preperation for the rise of honest-to-God-American MAGA-Nazism, I’m going to start to study Hitler, his rise and his use of power once he got it. My fear is that Trump — or a “velvet fist” of, say, President Lara Trump and Vice President Mike Pompeo — may finally turn us into an autocratic managed democracy like Putin’s Russia.

America is currently an autocracy without an autocrat and something pretty huge would have to happen for our democracy not to go the way of the Weimar Republic within no more than 10 years. But, let me make it clear — Trumplandia’s Fourth Reich wouldn’t be expansionistic. It’s not like Trump or Lara Trump would want to take over the world.

It would be an implosion, not an explosion.

The United States would collapse in on itself, maybe even to the point that there was a complete re-imagining of the world order. The United States would leave NATO, pull all its troops out from South Korea, etc and also have some sort of “Final Solution” for the “Liberal Problem.”

Or, to put it another way — there are some fucking dark forces at work on a macro level in the United States.

Weirdly enough, there really hasn’t been much discussion about how Elon Musk is just a few years away from ending the trucking industry as we know it. When 3 million high paying blue collar jobs fashion overnight, there are going to be a shit ton of angry men and women who might embrace neo-Luddism. And that would cause a massive jiggling of our political economy.

The Patriot Party might fuse the far Right and the far Left into an anti-technology party while the corporate elements of the Democrat and Republican parties might fuse together in response.

Anyway.

The point is — Trumplandia ain’t dead yet. Sometimes, they come back.

‘Strange Days’ of Digital Telepathy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The smartphone was the last technology that changed lives for the average person in a big way. I propose that if what I believe to be true, is true, that Big Tech can read our minds in some way, then a “soft Singularity” may already be here.

There is technology described in Arthur C. Clarke’s “3001: The Final Odyssey” and the movie “Strange Days” which could probably be implemented in a primitive fashion far, far, sooner than you realize — digital telepathy. Imagine instead of having a cellphone or MX goggles, you could interact directly with your mind.

I’m not going to tell you exactly what I’m suggesting for my own reasons, but in general, there’s one way you could do all of this without accidently giving yourself a lobotomy during the development process. You’re smart, you can figure it out. It would be a lot less intrusive than a Neural Link, that’s for sure. Jesus.

But the point is, all this talk of MX (VR / AR) misses the point. What if the “AR” was a different type of augmented reality. You could record memories recorded via your own eyes — no goggles involved — then zap those same memories to other people wirelessly? But if you hooked MX up to digital telepathy, it sure does make a lot more sense on the adoption front as well. You could watch movies natively within your own mind’s wetwear. Listen to music in your mind, the list goes on.

If you believe — like I do — that Big Tech can read your mind RIGHT NOW, then it makes a lot of sense that the solution to the MX social adaption problem will be solved in a rather unexpected fashion.

I’m not suggesting this will happen anytime soon, but I am suggesting we’re asking some wrong questions about What’s Next. It could be that by 2030 that a big chunk of our economy — and the way we live on a practical basis — will be controlled via digital telepathy.