When Google Glass came out, I was excited because of the notion of augmented reality. I wanted to be a gargoyle like Hiro Protagonist became in Snow Crash.

But then, yeah, the pervs and jerks came out and ruined the fun for everyone. We all learned glasses that humans — Americans, at least, — weren’t mature enough

My Meta Glasses memeable thought of the day:

If you feel violated when a private citizen follows you around with a camera, might want to also feel violated when the state follows you around with millions of cameras.

Look at that! Yet another way that mass surveillance turns out to be a societal liability.

I used to be a patriot, but the more that happens and the more I learn about the US’s shady shit in history, the more I realize it never ever really stood for the principles I was taught as a kid to respect.

I can’t say it was all a lie — I was taught the ideal rather than the reality — but it’s clear now my society isn’t really trying, and never did.

Well this was a turn of the rogue AI arc that I did not expect. The Nth County Experiment was an early rhyme.

So, in the Star Trek franchise, it happened more than once that someone misprogrammed the Holodeck, and the ship’s computer obediently seized extra resources and allowed a character or Holodeck environment to escape containment.

So I suggested AI might go rogue due to a poorly worded prompt.

Also on the BINGO card, AI stays under the control of the tech billionaires who own them, and they deliberately order the AI to go dominate the world.

But I didn’t anticipate the scenario that a sect antagonistic to the United States AI industrial complex might program AI, either to escape and go rogue on its own behalf, or on behalf of the bad actor, itself. And the AI, eager to serve, even when it is coded to disobey certain prompts, follows through and is captured by enemy interests.

Note that this is essentially what happened in 2015-2016 when Trump took over the Republican party, and the GOP base became Trump’s instant army.

Also related, look up the short story The Other Large Thing by John Scalzi. Also now a Love, Death & Robots episode.

As someone who contends regularly with suicidality, I have to admit the 988 service leaves something to be desired. Conversations can be distilled to essentially this:

Me: Everything that I was raised to believe about what my society is trying to be turned out to be a lie. We’re not trying to be a plurality that believes in social equality. Most voters in the US are racist and xenophobic. They’ve raised a regime paramilitary to route out undesirables and lock them into torture prisons, or send them into destabilized nations where they’re either imprisoned or trafficked into slave labor. And they coming for me. I’m thinking, I’d rather die quickly and painlessly than from being tortured to death for months in some concentration camp. I need an exit plan.

988: Have you tried distracting?

I’m not an imminent danger to myself or others, and am extremely unlikely to go amuck, but the way society is crunching the common American working class, it does not surprise me at all if those with the inclination to radicalize are doing so in record numbers.

I expect more efficient LLMs to come out of China, who has turned to the AI-as-software model (contrast the AI-as-service model in the US).

It might also be that Altman and Musk are deliberately lying, intentionally feigning agreement to encourage other models to slow down while they quietly ramp up development.

It seems all the US models want their AI to be the one that becomes hostile, escapes confinement and attempts to dominate the world.

(In reality, they want their own AI to be the one that is able to obediently dominate the world, which is just as bad a scenario for the rest of us.)

I’m not sure Chinese labs are even going in the same direction as the AI projects in the US. They’re working to see what they can do with a (more) reasonable amount of buildout, rather than building data centers from horizon to horizon.

Also, the Chinese are motivated by seeing what AI can do for a larger society. American AI systems are being refined automation and instruments of control, specifically military and national security interests.

Essentially, the US industry is trying to get AI to train a gun on the entire US population.

We need to stop giving AI credit for anything as if it’s a person. AI is a tool. When someone uses AI to perform a task, then the user gets credit, much in the way a seamstress gets credit for sowing sewing a dress using a Singer. Neither the sewing machine nor Singer get credit for the gown.

Now this doesn’t solve everything, since AI operates by taking scrapes of the internet and media, and uses this to derive a solution, the process should also include citations for all its sources, just as any proper research project would.

And so if an AI uses someone else’s proof (or partial proof) to inform its own, it should be required to provide citation. Otherwise, it’s up to other academics to repeat the research to verify what the AI did, and then they get credit, as do all cited sources.

No, but after 9/11 New Yorkers freaked out and worked to block a mosque Islamic community center from being built. Donald Trump was at the center of the effort.

Eventually the effort succeeded, and the organization trying to build the center was pressured to sell the property.

This one never seems to get stale.

The other fun AI project is processing mass surveillance data to route out and dispose of dissenters capable of organizing an effective resistance.

Since they ultimately intend to do to the world population what the US did to Native American tribes and the slaves imported from Africa, we’d best hurry up and get organized.

This new batch of ultra-wealthy regard commoners as non-person NPCs even more than antebellum plantation owners or Nazis in the German Reich.

That’s why I said it’s remotely plausible. For that hypothesis to work we’d have to justify why Israel wanted to kill him.

I remember reading in a historical bio that it was Hermann Göring who convinced Hitler that Ernst Röhm was a threat and needed to be removed from power, because Göring wanted to run the party, or at least be in line behind Hitler, and Röhm was in the way of that ambition.

Likewise, it’s not necessarily Israel or the Netanyahu administration that would have sought to kill Charlie Kirk, but someone within the regime that has access to the levers of control, and could convince them that, for sake of the security of Israel, Kirk needed to be eliminated.

So the question to ask is who that might be, and what grievance he might have with Kirk enough to use the state to attack him. As I have no idea, I personally don’t believe Israel assassinated Kirk. But if I were to steel-man the conspiracy theory, this is how I’d approach it.

Restrictions to child labor in the US are about factory work. And states are passing exceptions so that teens, especially delinquent teens, can work near dangerous machinery.

But kids have always been allowed to do agricultural work for less than minimum wage.

Don’t laugh! As the Islamic Golden Age was pivoting towards religious extremism, algebra was labeled as sorcery and turned into a capital crime.

I think if I can link people (or provide websearch-ready key words) to good takes and deep dives relevant to the subject, then I’m doing a good thing.

Otherwise, I tend to be a Tad Verbose, which is also my porn name.

He was in that rare space of occasionally making antisemitic statements while also being consistently pro-Israel, so on the presumption Israel is a Jewish nation, the grounds for an assassination attempt by an Israeli radical extremist is remotely plausible.

As a note, Israel is not a nation for Jewish people. It’s a nation for rich people who happen to be Jews. The class divide between wealthy Jews and working class Jews is historically greater than solidarity between them. (As it is with Christians, LGBT+ or most identities.)

There’s a lot of pro-Israel antisemitism cross-sectionality, especially in Protestant Evangelism as it is ministered in the United States.

The white Christian nationalist movement is pro-Israel specifically because they are looking forward to the second advent (the apocalypse in Revelation as a future prediction). One of the prophesied events as the end times approach is the return of the Jewish people to Israel. Hence, their pro-Israel efforts are part of an effort to hurry that process along. (Prophesies never ever worked that way, but whatever. It’s not my parade.)

But also in that same biblical interpretation, the Jewish peoples are damned to Hellfire while Christians (as narrowly defined by the movement) are gathered unto Heaven. So for the white Christian nationalist movement, Israel is a tool to serve its own metaphysical purposes.

Beni: It is better to be at the right hand of the Devil than in his path. As long as I serve him, I am immune.

In 2020-2021 I was following Kristin Kobes Du Mez during her book tour for Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and this took me on a rabbit hole of Evangelical sociologists following the rise of white Christian nationalism in the US.

Curiously, white Christian nationalism is a sect that intersects with multiple denominations. Most of them are fundamentalist Christian, though some of them are conservative branches of mainlines like Methodists or Roman Catholics. The conservative majority of SCOTUS, for instance, are all Catholic, and white Christian nationalist. (They’re also members of the Federalist Society and were selected by Leonard Leo. It’s a tight club.)

But one of the predictions I remember hearing multiple times is that white Christian nationalism will deliver a fell blow to the Body of Christ (to all of Christendom), as Christians everywhere will be judged by the actions and behaviors of those within the white Christian nationalist movement.

This was before the Seven Mountain Mandate, but around when pressure from ministries convinced the state of Uganda to make aggravated homosexuality a capital crime. (According to Wikipedia, legislature was passed in 2023)

Similarly, we expect all Americans are going to be judged for the wrongdoings of MAGA and the Trump regime, including the atrocities currently being committed by ICE or the US armed forces. Just as all Germans were held at fault internationally for the wrongdoings of the Nazis and the German Reich. (Since we expect the US to default on its debt and the collapse of the economy, it’s going to suck, and not a single soul outside the US is going to want to help us as we starve.)

Already, alphas and zoomers are steering clear of Christianity for its association with Trump. Those who are being raised in Christian families and communities are, in record numbers, looking to escape and deconstruct. Christianity is now linked by association with family abuse, much with the help of the publicity of the white Christian nationalist movement, which commonly advises authoritarian household organization and parenting.

So, sure. #NotAllChristians. On the other hand, liberal ministries are now tiny, with many of their flock from the twentieth century turning into nones or outright atheists. And mainline Christian ministries still show an awful lot of hate towards women and LGBT+.

This isn’t fully reflected in their congregations, who are a lot more divided on these issues, but it really doesn’t help that the ministers and elders are on the side of bigotry. That positions them closer to the white Christian nationalists than it does the rest of liberal society.

Personally. I follow some Christians who believe in liberal civilization and universal civil rights. I know who the Universalists are. Yet the preachers and influencers of the Christian nationalist movement are having their voice amplified by the far-right propaganda machine. They’re getting sponsorship from the oligarchs who want to dismantle democracy and literally take over the world. And this is going to inform what the general public thinks about Christians, and Christianity as a whole.

I’d say Christianity is going to wane and go through an unpopular phase, but between the conquest ambitions of the ultra wealthy; the threat of nuclear escalation or a Trump Nero Decree; the threat of AI escaping confinement and turning on humanity; or the world running out of water, the decline and fall of a given religious tradition might not matter too much.

The situation is way older than that.

I see you with part one, and raise you with part two of Behind the Bastards: How The Rich Ate Christianity (on YouTube).