In my previous post I described a third element to my #gutenbergofintuitivethinking: the #ripple team – or “rewind intuition people”. These would be highly creative individuals, with the relevant tech tools, able to read back and reverse-engineer every step of a what-to-date has been unpredictable crime: #neocrime.

But what if the same configuration of humans and tech could be used to #gaslight, using very 21st century technologies such as #ai, the lives, work trajectories, and real-world experiences of everyday citizens as they went about their ordinary lives?

Let’s imagine the following scenario: say you want to make a key potential future societal disruptor become mentally unstable. One of the things that most distresses human beings is surely that feeling of hopelessness that comes from poverty – either of finances, or just as importantly of spirit. And that distress, it is my judgement, will mainly be sourced in a fierce and depression-generating lack of agency – in other words, that growing and seemingly uncontrollable absence of free will. That is to say, believing we have no ability to shape or forge our own futures, never mind our wider society’s.

It’s true. There are many, perhaps the majority of, #ai companies at all levels which love to transmit the idea they can already predict – maybe even forcibly make “predestinable” – those years-to-come that will offer huge competitive advantage to the outfits that manage to achieve such technologies.

But let’s say, whilst a legitimate goal, it’s not yet as usefully in place as it could be. And let’s say some of these companies – out of a more or less criminal impatience – cannot wait for what they argue is inevitable: that every step of every person, organisation, and in their world always enemy, will become utterly predictable in all their most human – and suddenly inhuman – ways.

What I am suggesting here is that the gaslighting that is being carried out, this #neoterrorismontheindividual which tracks specific human beings over decades, is delivered not via immense predictive capacities but, rather, through huge observational activities. I see you look at a clearly significant word as you walk down the street, and so later in the evening I engineer a social-media event which replicates your inevitable memory of that word, and makes you inevitably feel you have zero agency, zero free will, and zero human – where not human(e) – capacity for true spontaneity.

Some criminal companies and associations in the field of #ai simply cannot wait to remove agency from all human experience. Tbh, many politicians, perhaps all to some gently terrifying extent, being the salespeople by nature that they always have been, have attempted to deliver the same effect throughout the sometimes horribly variegated history of Western liberal democracy. So it’s hardly surprising that business may follow the example so rigorously.

What can we do? First, become savvier “observers” and “consumers” of our environments, both real-world and virtual. Yes. It’s aggressive, it’s fascist, and it’s quite wrong what they are doing. But we can educate ourselves, and each other, much better.

Second, help me develop the #gutenbergofintuitivethinking: the #intuitionvalidationengine, the #ivepics frontend with integrated #ai, and the newly conceived #ripple team tools.

WDYT? Are you ready?

#artificial-intelligence, #gaslighting, #observation, #prediction