A I IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.

All great advances are at best a mixed blessing. Civilization for tens of thousands of years was spread, not by nice people knocking at the door of you yurt purporting to save your soul, but at the edge of a sharpened sword, scimitar, spear, or arrows launched from a galloping horse. Later, as civilization advanced, the killing power of the weapons we used to spread civilization advanced with it. Sometimes the leaders of those civilizations could be somewhat trusted. Others, whose motives could not be trusted, used the new weapons technology provided to accrue power beyond what they were allotted. That is the dilemma that now confronts us. 

Ukraine, a country fighting an invasion from a bigger and more powerful neighbor, illustrates the qualities of advanced weaponry to fight off its attacker. Russia was convinced Ukraine could be conquered in a matter of days. They had powerful tanks, a great Navy, and an inexhaustible supply of young people to risk death and injury in a quest to bring Putin and his oligarchs more power that the rest of the world would wish. And they had been training their armed forces in the tactics of war since they were the aggrieved nation fighting off a grasping nation's ambitions in WWII. Ukraine has used innovation in drone warfare, and Artificial Intelligence to not just even the odds, but to confront Putin with the looming end to his quest for power. With A I, Ukraine has been able to aquire intelligence exposing Russia's most closely-held battlefield secrets. With A I, Ukraine has managed the battlefield, sparing the lives of their soldiers while stacking up Russian corpses and neutralizing the military advantage of its battlefield weapons. AI has revolutionized the battlefield. 

A I has also revotionized the collection of data, and allowed maga to rite gooder. Term papers are now written by Artificial Intelligence. Podcasts are done by A I algorithms using the computerized image of the the Podcaster. George Will has never looked more wooden. All of these things have been good. There are likely more good things to come from AI. People who think , but not very deeply, can appear to be deeper thinkers. Good news for Republicans. But A I can be turned around. If term papers can be written, peudo-scientific propaganda can be spread more effectively. If podcasts can be done using A I, news, science, even advertising can be manipulated towards a hostile outcome. You can figure out who benefits most. Since all of these spirits have been released by all of us Pandera cosplayers, they are a gift of the gods for corporate America. People are once more being replaced by machines. This time, those machines can be used in hostile ways. But there's more. We have long had the ability to follow people in the crowd. It was called, the panoptic society back in the eighties. Street lights capture your license plate, store security can watch you stuff groceries in your loose clothes, probably to feed the kids when you were replaced by a machine at the Amazon Opertunity Center. But until recently it had weaknesses. For one, people of color were not read  by Facial Recognition as efficiently as us white faces. A sort of ironic take on "they all look the same". ICE is using A I to target brown people of interest, which literally is just brown people. The company who contracted with Homeland Security to create this algorithm, for $30 million, is Palantir, it is a defense contractor that provides platforms for whatever the generals want. It's owner, Peter Thiel is a modern-day Bond villain. Seeking world domination. His friends, among them Elon Musk, are SMERSH. They will do anything to make a buck. And their only loyalty is to themselves. Smart Republicans, if any still exist, should tattoo that on their their backsides so they can read it on the rare occasions when they pull their heads out of their ass. 

The spirits have been released. Every last one. We can do nothing to stop this, but we must. The clock on the wall could have an intelligence chip to follow your movement. It could track every one of us at once, and never stop for donuts and coffee. Anthother chip could capture your voice and use it to literally, 'put words in your mouth'. Do you want that? Do you want Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk, or Steven Miller, or Todd Blanche, or anybody clinging to right-wing fascism as their path to unlimited power to be unregulated? We could ask the same from the left side of the spectrum but we would more likely be the ones wanting regulation. But if we succeed we will jam Medicare for All down your throat.