In case someone was emotional during Obama’s farewell speech… here’s something to wake you up.
With only days until Donald Trump takes office, the Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Under 12333, the NSA taps phone and internet backbones throughout the world, records the phone calls of entire countries, vacuums up traffic from Google and Yahoo’s data centers overseas, and more.
Yeah I know, the Singularity and all that. Listen, sentience isn’t the really big issue with AI. Forget about it.
The big issue with Artificial Intelligence (and by extension robots) is that it gives superpowers to the ruling class. It tilts the balance of power in society in favour of the already powerful and significantly weakens the power of everyone else.
Granting personhood to machines makes about as much sense as granting personhood to corporations. Maybe that’s the point.
Level-headed journalism like this is almost non-existent in American media. It’s why I have remained sceptical of all media claims about the Trump-Russia connection this far. It’s not to say that Russian interference is not possible or that Trump is not personally a compromised player, it’s just that it is very unlikely that the reality is anything like the script of a Hollywood movie. The American political scene has been so influenced by fictional accounts produced by its own cultural institutions that that many journalists have fallen for narratives that are so transparently false that they could have only been written by screenwriters. As John Le Carre has said many times, his stories, for example, are based on his imagination and not on some deep insight into the way the intelligence services run. People in the information business by definition do not operate the way people imagine they do, especially in fiction. That’s part of the way they manage gather information, vet it for authenticity and keep it secret.
Originally shared by Jeff Zahari
“The trouble is that this is too tempting for the anti-Trump camp to ignore, too damning for the pro-Trump camp to accept. At present it is just empty allegation, and such is the deterioration of Trump’s relationship with the US intelligence, but also its credibility in general, that the airy claim that they have investigated the source and find it believable, are not enough. In the absence of any evidence, this will do nothing but widen the dangerous divide within American society.”
Never Stop Posting 