{"id":25,"date":"2021-05-05T12:55:32","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T12:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/?p=25"},"modified":"2021-05-06T09:57:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-06T09:57:48","slug":"the-power-of-our-new-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/the-power-of-our-new-gods\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Our New Gods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In \u201cThe Arbiter\u201d, I also focused on exploring new types of power. And more precisely \u2014 the power of Artificial Intelligence.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As Nietsche said: God is dead \u2014 we have killed him. And in its stead we have invented an all-knowing and all-seeing God whose spirit resides in the machine, in some distant server in the cloud.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Truthbringer A.I., mentioned in \u201cThe Arbiter\u201d, is not just some malicious artificial intelligence that I imagined. It is a direct descendant of the surveillance systems that we already have in our own lives. As we have seen so far, some of these panopticons are state-run, while others are owned by corporations.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>SkyNet from the <em>Terminator<\/em> movies reflects fears and nightmares of a nuclear holocaust, but Truthbringer is no hypothetical paranoia or some kind of a dream \u2014 it nowadays exists in various forms. It lives with us. The question is to what degree. It might be just a matter of time for an artificial intelligence to evolve and reach sciescence \u2014 real life versions of the Truthbringer AI don\u2019t seem so far off.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So much of our personal information do we willingly submit to various corporations online, there may not even be a need to build a separate Cybernetic Panopticon. But, what is more important, and scary, is the construction of a machine whose aim would be to achieve ideological goals, which in most such cases corresponds with the end goal of retention of power.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Analogue machines of this sort already exist \u2014 just check out how one can win an election in Russia by 120%. It is just a matter of porting these kinds of systems and processes into computer code.)&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A truly horrific scenario would be if an artificial intelligence is supplemented by some kind of cyber-immortality. What would happen if one of the dear leaders \u2014 in \u201cThe Arbiter\u201d story there is a jocular reference of this being Edi Rama, the current Prime Minister of Albania \u2014 uploads their consciousness into the AI, and continues to rule from their cybernetically enhanced throne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Biological limits of our physical bodies still seem to be the best guardians against dictatorships. Our mortality may yet be our best defender of democracy and an agent of change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe Arbiter\u201d also explores new types of power \u2014 that of Artificial Intelligence, more precisely.<br \/>\n&#8220;God is dead \u2014 we have killed him.&#8221; And in its stead we have invented an all-knowing and all-seeing God whose spirit resides in the machine, in some distant server in the cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bonus","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storylab.al\/arbiter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}