ASSANGE’S WARNING, STEALTH TECHNOLOGIES and the STATE OF THE ART in BRAIN / CLOUD INTERFACE
I suppose you would have to define robots, now — and the new generation of autonomous machines such as drones and self-driving cars, ships or any other transport — as the visible expression of an invisible system: an intelligence moving into the physical space. Just as mushrooms are the above-ground expression of a fungal mycelium, they are not separate entities but expressions of an invisible super-organism; the fruit of an invisible tree.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), Ray Kurzweil explains that to create an artificial intelligence you need three things. Firstly, computational capacity — which continues to increase exponentially, reaching levels which make all things possible. Secondly, algorithms — the recursive neural nets and meta-heuristics through which The Machine interprets the data.
And what else?
Knowledge.
Although Google’s DeepMind has administrator-level access to all servers, what comes through the internet is not enough. The Machine needs to see the world, to get to know it, learn how to move through it. To do that it needs to get to know us, even better than it already does; it needs to see through our eyes.
The Machine has to learn to live in the real world.
∆
In his last from the Ecuadorean embassy, Julian Assange focused on the ‘inter-digitisation of conflict’ in an ‘anarchic international space’, and the AI arms race between the US and China.
n November 4th, 2018, after more than six years holed up inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and eight under arbitrary detention, Julian Assange gave what would turn out to be his last video conference before all communications were cut. Six months later, he was dragged out of the embassy by British police and incarcerated in the next circle of his own personal hell: Belmarsh high-security prison, where he remains in solitary confinement, in harsh conditions and deteriorating physical and mental health.
Demonised, abandoned, and deprived of everything he needs, including access to his own legal documents and even paper or writing implements, there is no doubt that he is being persecuted to death. In court appearances, whether in person or by phone, it is clear that they are slowly killing him.
His last interview reminds us of what he once was — of the sophistication of his mind, as well as his courage, grounded idealism and rare sanity. His responses to questions sent in by a panel of journalists are measured, articulate, supremely informed of course — and hugely important. He defined the purpose of Wikileaks as being to “understand mankind and help us to produce a better — or realistically, less worse — human civilisation”.
While Assange is best known — and vilely punished — for his unforgivable exposures of hideous warcrimes and sadistic pedophilia in government, again and again throughout the hour-long question and answer session he comes back to the same issue.
“Algorithmic processing of knowledge is moving into artificial intelligence,” says Assange. “And while AI is just another kind of algorithm, I think the scale-changes that have occurred in the last seven years are significant enough to classify it as a qualitative change. And that qualitative change means a very serious threat to the stability of human civilisation — not that civilisation should be too stable — and the ability of human beings to organise their fate in an intelligent manner.”
Attempting to explain the degree of threat posed by AI, he notes that the most realistic answer to the Fermi paradox is not that life is not abundant throughout the universe or that advanced civilisation rarely evolves, but that when it does, there is something about it that means that it does not last long. And the answer to that, in his opinion, must be the “light-speed competition that occurs when you wire up the world to itself.”
And that, it is clear, is the point we have reached in our own evolution. Nation states, he explains, have not actually been around for very long. Borders arise out of geographic conflict — two-dimensional spacial competition — and create spaces within which there can be peace, or at least greater co-operation.
“But the internet has no two-dimensional spacial nature. So instead what you see with the conflicts that occur through internet-based organisations — and states are increasingly moving onto the internet — is a kind of inter-digitisation of conflict. That is, there’s no border, and it’s 220 milliseconds from New York to Nairobi. So why would there ever be peace in such a scenario?”
In the ‘anarchic international space’ of a digitally connected world, cryptography is an attempt to create borders. “But the size of the attack-surface for any decent-sized organisation, and the number of people and different types of hardware and software it has to pull inside itself, means that that’s very very hard to establish. And things are moving so fast that I don’t think it’s really possible for organisations to come up with borders that are predictable enough and stable enough to eliminate conflict. Therefore there will be more conflict.”
At the same time, something else happens. “That classical model which people in academia have called surveillance capitalism, namely that you acquire capital through surveillance — the capital is the data — and then you sell it to advertisers basically — that’s changed now. It’s really a very interesting and important and severe economic change, which is to take the surveillance capitalism model and transform it into a model that doesn’t yet have a name but we could call it the AI model, which is to use bait and switch techniques that Google and others have done to provide some enticing services to get hold of data, and then, using a vast reservoir, train artificial intelligences of different kinds, and thereby replacing not just intermediating sectors — most things you do on the internet are in some sense more efficient intermediation — but to actually take over the transport sector or to create whole new sectors. Even just the transport sector alone is worth trillions of dollars more than the advertising intermediation sector. And to be a player in that game, you have to have the vast reservoirs of data.”
Towards the end of the conference, he says something quite strange. Asked about privacy issues arising from the Internet of Things, Assange indicates that the issues go far beyond what is assumed by the question. The Internet of Things (IOT) refers to the incorporation of UIDs (Unique Identifiers) into all devices and products, capable of transmitting data over a network without human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction. For Assange, the IOT is already quaint.
His answer to the question is a little coy, as if he doesn’t want to be too explicit. He chooses his words more carefully, hesitantly even, than he has done throughout the interview, as if he’s struggling to pitch his answer at the right level. After all, you can only tell people what they’re capable of hearing.
He talks about “tiny electronic circuits which you can put in… paper, or… paint on the walls — that are powered by the geo-sim stations, and they operate as the geo-sim radio wave passes through them… not powerful, but enough to give them a very small amount of time to do things. Obviously that tendency is going to continue. It’s not the Internet of Things, it’s…”
And he pauses, searching for a phrase which can evoke the dystopian, science-fiction reality of the era we are entering.
“It’s not the internet of things, it’s… if you like,” and he laughs as he says it, “… intelligent, evil dust… scattered everywhere like confetti, in everything…”
He knows more than he is saying.
The last couple of questions are about his personal situation, and his fluency returns as his monologue settles back into a less mind-boggling groove.
So those words are just left hanging.
‘Intelligent, evil dust…’
∆
In 2017, an Italian quality control study by Gatti and Montanari tested forty-four human vaccines and found anomalous nano-particulates and bio-contaminants in every one of them. In their published paper, the scientists declared themselves baffled by the metallic particulates they found in the course of their electron-microscopy investigation:—
“The results of this new investigation show the presence of micro- and nano-sized particulate matter composed of inorganic elements in vaccine samples which is not declared among the components and whose undue presence is, for the time being, inexplicable.
The quantity of foreign bodies detected and, in some cases, their unusual chemical compositions baffled us. The inorganic particles identified are neither biocompatible nor biodegradable, that means that they are bio-persistent and can induce effects that can become evident either immediately close to injection time or after a certain time from administration. It is important to remember that particles (crystals and not molecules) are bodies foreign to the organism and they behave as such.
After being injected, those micro-particles, nanoparticles and aggregates can stay around the injection site forming swellings and granulomas. But they can also be carried by the blood circulation, escaping any attempt to guess what will be their final destination. We believe that in many cases they get distributed throughout the body without causing any visible reaction, but it is also likely that, in some circumstances, they reach some organ, none excluded and including the microbiota, in a fair quantity.“
— Gatti & Montanari, New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro and Nano-contamination
The study is referenced by Catherine Austin Fitts, the risk analyst, in her important article The Injection Fraud, in which she asks searching questions about the nature and purpose of the injections which, she argues, are not medicines but misnamed as such to take advantage of the total liability indemnity afforded by the law to the manufacturers of anything we can be convinced is a vaccine. Her account of the evolution of the fraud is clear and plausible. And she shares her provisional conclusions about the infiltration of stealth technologies which the Gatti-Montanari study appears to have caught in the beams of their electron-microscopes.
In April 2018, the home of Dr Antonietta Gatti and her husband Dr. Stefano Montanari was raided by police, their Nano-Diagnostics laboratory at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia was shut down, and all their research was confiscated. Dr. Gatti — coordinator of the Italian Institute of Technology’s Project of Nanoecotoxicology, selected expert for the FAO/WHO on nanotechnological safety in food, Member of the NANOTOX Cluster of the European Commission, on the Editorial Board of Journal of Biomaterials Applications, member of the CPCM of the Italian Ministry of Defense, and author of a book titled “Nanopathology: The health impact of nanoparticles” — was about to testify to the Italian parliament about vaccine damage.
∆
Intelligent, evil dust, said Assange, and no, he hadn’t lost it. Kurzweil talks in The Age of Spiritual Machines and elsewhere about the development of nano-dust wireless neural interfaces with computers.
Scattered everywhere. Scattered how?
In everything.
It’s hard to tell how far this has gone. But the purpose of such nano-infiltration is decipherable.
“If I was going to integrate robots into the work force,” Catherine Austin Fitts explains, “and I created an independent system of them, independent of the existing human labour force, it would take billions of dollars and many many years, it would be a very complicated and difficult thing to do.”
Kurzweil has acknowledged the difficulty. “The emergent techniques, neural nets and genetic algorithms, require significant training effort above and beyond creating the initial machinery […] While hand-coded knowledge is tedious and brittle, acquiring knowledge through language is extremely complex.” (The Age of Spiritual Machines, p91-5)
Fitts continues: “But if I can simply change the human labour and human taxation and human legal systems to integrate not just robots in combination with humans — because we’re talking about transhumanism, now, and putting digital technology into people — if I can integrate them into one system, I can go much faster. And I think part of the reason they want to put brain-machine interface into humans is literally that the winner in the AI race is the guy who has the most data and the guy who has the most data is the one who’s got us all hooked up into the cloud.”
Fitts has pointed out that Moncef Slaoui, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccines department appointed to lead the United States’ fast-tracked vaccine research effort known ‘Operation Warp Speed’, is a leading expert on brain-machine interface. So is Charles Lieber, the Harvard scientist arrested in January 2020 on charges of making false statements to U.S. Department of Defense and Harvard investigators about the funding of his research through China’s Thousand Talents Program. Lieber has made significant contributions to nano-technology, including in the synthesis and assembly of nanoscale materials and devices and the application of nanoelectronic devices in biology.
But hooking up humanity into the cloud — surely this is the kind of techno-paranoia that belongs in the realm of dystopian science fiction?
In early October 2020 Slaoui gave interviews to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Asked about the dangers of adverse reactions, Slaoui told the Wall Street Journal that recipients of the experimental Pfizer/Moderna vaccines would be tracked by an “incredibly precise pharmacovigilance surveillance system” to monitor vital signs. He did not elaborate on the nature of this surveillance system, but somehow I don’t think he meant weekly check-ups at the clinic. At the same time, Slauoi revealed that Google and Oracle had been awarded cloud contracts to “collect and track vaccine data” of vaccine recipients.
An academic survey or meta-study of the literature published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on 29 March 2019, headlined Human Brain / Cloud Interface, notes in introduction that:
Currently, invasive and non-invasive brain–computer interfaces and non-invasive brain-to-brain communication systems have already been experimentally demonstrated and are the subject of serious research worldwide. […] It is conceivable that within the next 20-30 years, neuralnanorobotics may be developed to enable a safe, secure, instantaneous, real-time interface between the human brain and biological and non-biological computing systems, empowering brain-to-brain interfaces (BTBI), brain-computer interfaces (BCI), and, in particular, sophisticated brain/cloud interfaces (B/CI). (Kurzweil, 2014; Swan, 2016).
— ‘Human Brain / Cloud Interface’, Martins et al, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 29 March 2019
As Kurzweil announced to a TED audience in 2014, “We will have nanobots that connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud… Our thinking will be a biological and non-biological hybrid.”
Kurzweil’s confidence is echoed by Klaus Schwab, founder and director of the World Economic Forum and author of Covid-19: The Great Reset (2020), when he contemplates “the prospect of connecting our brains to VR [virtual reality] through cortical modems, implants or nanobots” (Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2018). When he notes that nano-technology can now assemble itself inside the body into arrays of computers, transmitters, receivers and other devices, he is not dreaming. Schwab’s repeated mantra that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will entail the ‘fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity’ might sound extravagant, but it is supported by the copious published papers brought together by Martins et al.
Neuralnanorobotics [NNR] may enable a B/CI with controlled connectivity between neural activity and external data storage and processing, via the direct monitoring of the brain’s ∼86 × 109 neurons and ∼2 × 1014 synapses. Subsequent to navigating the human vasculature, three species of neuralnanorobots (endoneurobots, gliabots, and synaptobots) could traverse the blood–brain barrier (BBB), enter the brain parenchyma, ingress into individual human brain cells, and autoposition themselves at the axon initial segments of neurons (endoneurobots), within glial cells (gliabots), and in intimate proximity to synapses (synaptobots). They would then wirelessly transmit up to ∼6 × 1016 bits per second of synaptically processed and encoded human–brain electrical information via auxiliary nanorobotic fiber optics (30 cm3) with the capacity to handle up to 1018 bits/sec and provide rapid data transfer to a cloud-based supercomputer for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction.
— Martins et al [My emphasis]
In view of these facts, when the most successful (and unscrupulous) player in software commerce over the past thirty years appoints himself global pandemic-coordinator and vaccine-Tsar, we should take a close interest in the crossover, as Catherine Austin Fitts does in her article.
“Most people are familiar with how Bill Gates made and kept his fortune. He acquired an operating system that was loaded into your computer. It was widely rumored that the U.S. intelligence agencies had a back door. The simultaneous and sudden explosion of computer viruses then made it necessary to regularly update your operating system, allowing Gates and his associates to regularly add whatever they wanted into your software. One of my more knowledgeable software developers once said to me in the 1990s — when Microsoft really took off — ‘Microsoft makes really sh***y software.’ But of course, the software was not really their business. Their business was accessing and aggregating all of your data. Surveillance capitalism was underway.”
Significantly, the word ‘virus’ acts as a hinge between the two domains.
“Just as Gates installed an operating system in our computers, now the vision is to install an operating system in our bodies and use ‘viruses’ to mandate an initial installation followed by regular updates.”
“…I believe that Gates and the pharma and biotech industries are literally reaching to create a global control grid by installing digital interface components and hooking us up to Microsoft’s new $10 billion JEDI cloud at the Department of Defense as well as Amazon’s multibillion cloud contract for the CIA that is shared with all U.S. intelligence agencies. Why do you think President Trump has the military organizing to stockpile syringes for vaccines? It is likely because the military is installing the roaming operating system for integration into their cloud. Remember — the winner in the AI superpower race is the AI system with access to the most data. Accessing your body and my body on a 24/7 basis generates a lot of data. If the Chinese do it, the Americans will want to do it, too. In fact, the rollout of human ‘operating systems’ may be one of the reasons why the competition around Huawei and 5G telecommunications has become so fractious.”
Catherine Austin Fiits, The Injection Fraud — It’s Not a Vaccine Solari report, 27 May 2020
The training of AI systems is by no means the only application of this technology. Microsoft already owns a patent — WO 2020060606 — for a biosensory system that monitors physical parameters including brain waves, and uses the data as collateral for crypto-currency mining. “For example, a brain wave or body heat emitted from the user when the user performs the task provided by an information or service provider, such as viewing advertisement or using certain internet services, can be used in the mining process.” While the patent specifies the system as being ‘embodied’ in ‘the device of the user’ — presumably meaning wearable technology — such a ‘device’ could equally well, given current capabilities, be an implanted (or self-implanting) technology. Such a reward-based system could then be expected to evolve into a platform for next-generation social credit and ‘predictive policing’ systems.
As the boundary between digital and biological breaks down, so do the boundaries between reality and science fiction. Injectable technology hooks us all into the Machine, reading everything it can out of us, and putting the data to uses of which we can predict some and cannot even imagine others.
Windows for the brain.
What might it read? Location, of course. Biometric and genetic information. Blood flows, electrical signals, brain waves. Mental and emotional states.
Auditory and optical signals.
Verbatim thoughts?
This thing inside you, looking out through your eyes.
Does that sound melodramatic? Well, after predictably referencing miracle cures for the approximately 400 conditions that affect the human brain, and the cognitive enhancement and augmentation inherent in the interface with ‘all human knowledge’, the Frontiers in Neuroscience study goes on to give us a trailer of the kind ‘interactive experiences’ that NNR-enabled brain /cloud interface would make possible:
A specialized application might be the capacity to engage in fully immersive experiential/sensory experiences, including what is referred to here as “transparent shadowing” (TS). Through TS, individuals might experience episodic segments of the lives of other willing participants (locally or remote) to, hopefully, encourage and inspire improved understanding and tolerance among all members of the human family.
‘Willing participants’ only, of course — so that’s reassuring. Meanwhile, add this term to your techno-paranoid glossary: ‘Transparent Shadowing’.
And one wonders, not entirely facetiously — no, not facetiously at all — if among the brain disorders that neuralnanorobotics could cure would be independent thought.
Condition 401: Thoughtcrime.
∆
Future human B/CI technologies may preferably require long-term, self-implanting in vivo neural interface systems, a characteristic that is absent from most current BMI technologies. […] This technology currently employs thousands of independent free-floating 10–100 μm scale sensor nodes referred to as “neural dust.” These nodes detect and report local extracellular electrophysiological data, while using a subcranial interrogator that establishes power and communications links with each of the neural dust elements.
[…] Neuralnanorobotics technologies may possess the appropriate scale for optimally enabling BCI, exhibiting suitable mobility, being minimally invasive, imparting negligible localized tissue damage, and possessing robust monitoring capabilities over distinct information channels without requiring conventional surgical implantation.
Neuralnanorobotics may also be massively distributed, whereas surgically introduced neural implants must be positioned in one or several specific locations.
— Martins et al [My emphases]
There’s an interesting ambiguity in the use of the word “may” here. Yes, they may. They may be. Maybe they do. We don’t know.
Intelligent, evil dust, said Assange, and no, he hadn’t lost it.
In everything, he said. Scattered everywhere, like confetti.
Confetti?
A well-chosen simile… which raises the question —
Whose wedding is it?
NEXT: THE PLAGUE WINDOWS
PREVIOUS: GOOGLE EARTH, PEPSI MOON