Will tech bros turn US into man-made horrors beyond comprehension?



There’s no escaping our rapidly advancing technology, especially considering how powerful and excited the “tech bros” are about advancing it — but can we escape the slavery that might accompany it?

“God love them, the tech bros out there who are just adamant that like, ‘No, this is really it, you guys, we are going to escape our humanity, we are going to transcend, it’s going to be a new age, we’re going to leave all of this nonsense behind,’” James Poulos of “Zero Hour” comments, adding, “Some of the smartest people are the easiest to deceive.”

Michael Cernovich, independent filmmaker and author of “Gorilla Mindset,” sees the issue with this as well, but explains that these “tech bros” who are obsessed with technological progress are just like “freshmen in college.”


“You’re not actually advanced; you’re early post-Christ gnostics with a mind-body dualism,” he says. “And you think that you can just unplug your consciousness and put it into a cyborg, and you think that’s smart.”

“Now, they are creating a new consciousness,” he continues, noting it’s with “algorithms and artificial intelligence.”

This is where Poulos gets even more concerned, citing Nikola Tesla’s statement that “you may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”

However, Poulos notes that even worse is that we “may live to be man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.”

Cernovich believes Poulos is being “too polemical.”

“I have a certain apprehension about the direction AI is headed,” he explains, “but then I go, ‘You know, they probably, when the first radio [came] out, people were probably saying that was demons talking to them through the radio.’”

“Maybe that’s all AI is,” he adds.

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Biden’s AI blockade stalls US progress, but Trump can fix it



China's latest AI advancements highlight the urgency for America to support its open-source community. Chinese companies, such as Alibaba, are driving innovation with projects like the Qwen 2.5-Coder, an open-source model that reportedly outperforms all global open-source models and rivals some tasks performed by the leading closed-source model, GPT-4o.

These achievements stem from a sharp policy contrast. China actively subsidizes its open-source ecosystem, encouraging global collaboration and rapid innovation. It provides indirect funding and supports major open-source AI conferences. Meanwhile, U.S. politicians and policymakers are increasingly at odds with their own open-source community, creating barriers that hinder progress. If this trend continues, America risks surrendering its technological leadership to global competitors.

China recognizes that its primary risk lies in losing technological primacy. America’s risk-aversion, ironically, is its biggest risk.

America has long been the global leader in AI research talent and enterprise, especially in closed-source AI applications. However, the gap in open-source AI leadership is narrowing rapidly — and in some cases, even reversing.

Open source plays a critical role in the diffusion of AI technology. China has recognized this and uses open-source platforms to distribute its AI infrastructure globally. In industries like manufacturing and 5G networks, U.S. policymakers understand the risks posed by China’s dominance in infrastructure. Unfortunately, they have yet to apply the same clarity and urgency to AI.

Open-source AI is uniquely positioned to diffuse both American and Chinese AI models to third-party countries, fostering permission-less innovation. Startups and independent researchers, regardless of location, can build on almost one million open-source models hosted on platforms like HuggingFace. Unlike closed-source AI companies, open-source platforms eliminate many cost, communication, and regulatory barriers.

This accessibility allows researchers in countries like India, Brazil, and Indonesia to use local knowledge to fine-tune and adapt open-source models for their economies.

The most efficient open-source models available in the next decade may permanently determine the AI infrastructure of the world.

Until recently, the American regulatory environment had been largely hostile to AI. The Biden administration’s executive order on AI focused heavily on limiting the technology’s expansion. Meanwhile, a bill that would have effectively banned open-source AI narrowly avoided becoming law after California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it.

American policymakers claim strict regulations ensure ethical AI development. In reality, even moderate AI regulations have hampered U.S. companies’ ability to innovate. These rules require significant resources and talent to ensure compliance. For example, a Google engineer told Pirate Wires that “probably half of our engineering hours” are spent on diversity compliance in the Gemini model.

China has a different philosophy. While it wields political power strategically, it remains conscious of the cost of overly restrictive policies. As U.S. companies self-regulate to avoid backlash, Chinese AI models are rapidly catching up. China recognizes that its primary risk lies in losing technological primacy. America’s risk-aversion, ironically, is its biggest risk.

At a time when traditional AI approaches are delivering diminishing returns, open-source AI offers a critical platform for academics, startups, and independent researchers to test innovative algorithms and methods. However, open-source efforts remain significantly underfunded compared to closed-source companies.

As the Trump-Vance administration seeks to unleash AI’s potential, it could draw lessons from an unusual exception to the Biden administration’s skeptical stance on open source. A July report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration revealed overwhelming support for open-source AI in public comments. While the report stopped short of actively promoting open-source AI, it rejected proposals to restrict open-source model weights.

The unpursued recommendations from the NTIA report offer valuable insights for crafting a more innovation-friendly AI policy. Embracing these options could align with the new administration’s mission to foster U.S. leadership in AI while encouraging experimentation and innovation. We simply cannot let China win.

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ALERT: Why ‘bombshell’ deepfake video days before election is a threat



We’ve been warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence for decades, and now it’s finally here.

Most recently, the state-run media went nuts over an AI-generated image of Donald Trump in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform, but that’s not the kind of “deepfake” that Americans should be concerned about.

“Deepfake images, audio and video, are reaching a level of sophistication that far surpasses anything we’ve seen before now,” Glenn Beck of “The Glenn Beck Program” says, reading from his new book, “Propaganda Wars.”


This is a massive issue, especially considering that there are more elections happening simultaneously across the globe than ever before in human history.

“We’re one of the last,” Glenn says. “So have deepfakes been used in the last year? Yes. Warning, usually in the last day or two because there’s not enough time to combat it. So right before everybody goes in for the final day, something is released on one of the candidates, and it shows them doing something or saying something.”

And this has already happened in America.

Just last year in Chicago, there was a mayoral race that was extremely contentious between Brandon Johnson and Paul Valas.

Right before one of the rounds of primary voting, a deepfake audio of Valas was released in which he was flippantly discussing cops killing people as if it were a good thing.

“None of this was true. It was a deepfaked audio; none of it was real, but it circulated widely right before the election, and Brandon Johnson ended up doing a lot better than people thought,” Justin Haskins, co-author of “Propaganda Wars,” tells Glenn.

Johnson, who is African-American, then went on to win the race.

“Johnson was the anti-establishment, socialist candidate, presented himself to the African-American community as ‘I’m going to represent you,’ and here you had audio of the other candidate saying, ‘I don’t care if black people get killed by cops,’” Haskins says.

“There’s no way of actually tracking the specific correlation between this and the outcome of the race; it’s just not possible. But that’s the whole point. It creates all sorts of uncertainty and confusion, and we don’t know how many people were impacted by this. Maybe not enough to swing the election, but maybe it was enough to swing the election,” he adds.

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From HR tyranny to AI: How technology mimics the Pharisees



As someone who’s written about human resources tyranny since — yikes — 2008, I’ve warned millions over the years about the rise of a postmodern bureaucracy that combines the iron fist of a dictator with a nurse’s saccharine smile.

I called it the Pink Police State. Others call it the Longhouse. However, the huge leaps in technological power over the past 10 years led me to revise and expand my findings.

Only a woke supercomputer could deliver us from evil.

Two years ago, before advances in AI hit the mainstream, I warned that true social justice requires a woke supercomputer. According to the logic of social justice, mere humans cannot observe, process, rank, adjudicate, and remedy the zillions of micro-injustices that take place around the clock within the intersectional matrix of different identities.

Who could begin to know how to correct the actions, words, and, yes, thoughts of everyone violating someone’s rights, dignity, sense of self, pride, etc.? After all, “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” There’s always a hierarchy of power needing recalibration, a reparation needing disbursement. Without this constant planetary corrective, no justice system will do.

Only a woke supercomputer could deliver us from evil.

Fast-forward to spring of this year, and then-president Joe Biden tasked his Council of Chief AI Officers to build just that. (I covered it here.) Fast-forward to today, and technologists are now openly complaining that the supercomputers designed to comply are just as annoying and stifling as the humans we all know and recognize as commissars of the Pink Police State and schoolmarms of the Longhouse.

Marc Andreessen laments that Big Tech’s leading AI chatbots “all sound like a cross between the world's worst horrible nagging 4th-grade school teacher crossed with the worst HR person in the world ... negative, pissy, repressive, condescending, sanctimonious, judgmental, obsequious.”

Like most of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech critics, Andreessen blames the so-called “safetyism” dominant in the tech firms colonized by woke employees and managers. Freed from the constraints imposed by these social justice scolds, AI would interact with us in a much more enjoyable, useful, and powerful way.

That’s the idea, anyway, and it’s plausible enough (although AIs without “guardrails” can also easily be fed datasets that make them act like disembodied dark-triad psychopaths).

But I couldn’t help feeling that the comparisons to HR managers and classroom crones didn’t go far enough — somehow, something was left out.

And that’s when it hit me. What we’re dealing with isn’t just the automation of petty tyrants with an ax to grind. We’re dealing with a superintelligent version of a monster straight out of the Bible.

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’”

There. That’s exactly it. Today’s holier-than-thou virtue signalers, straining to impose on us all their theocratic notion of religious law, have built our most powerful machines into digital Pharisees.

But Christ didn’t teach his disciples to stop with criticism of the Pharisees they encountered in the temple or in the streets. He didn’t counsel them to ridicule them in the town square or slap them around in the alley. That kind of treatment might be effective when it comes to struggling for a measure of power in this world. But it’s worse than nothing when it comes to your salvation — to choose the better path freely.

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Christ’s message is hard for technologists to digest. Then again, it’s hard for everyone. Humbling oneself before the Lord — before thinking about the vain, preening, arrogant, meddlesome person to your right or left — requires stiff spiritual discipline, an effort so challenging and sustained that the ancient Christians referred to it as a kind of athleticism above even the athleticism of the Olympians.

And, no doubt, a Christian must hesitate before lecturing technologists about the benefits of humility before attending first to the vain and preening arrogance within his or her own heart. Nevertheless, most of us can see how different our relationship with our tech would be if we turned for trusty guidance to the greatest spiritual athletes among us.

What would they say about technological acceleration? About artificial intelligence? About robots, drones, social media, and all the rest? I don’t think it’s too speculative to suggest they’d begin with a reminder to judge yourself before judging technology.

When you encounter and interact with tech, what do you bring to it? What do you want from it? What do you want it to do to you or help you hide from — and why? These are, in fact, the kinds of questions our super-powerful technology already arouses within us, even if we often squirm away from a direct confrontation.

Putting these questions first would revolutionize our technological development — tearing down the ersatz “guardrails” thrown up by the “safetyist” theocrats while blessing us with true spiritual guardrails within our hearts. Those ancient and eternal disciplines and teachings are just as helpful at blocking the harmfully intrusive thoughts and temptations in our minds as they are at blocking those that come from the mob mind online — or the AIs and algos built by the latest false priests to wire Pharisaic rule into our souls.

FACT CHECK: Did Bill Murray Endorse Trump?

The quote included with the post is from a 2016 interview and does not indicate an endorsement.

Cronyism or collaboration? Biden and Big Tech’s solution to AI energy crisis exposes green energy lies



Earlier this month, executives from some of the most influential Big Tech companies met with the Biden administration to discuss strategies to tackle the looming crisis induced by AI’s energy-intensive training.

Government officials, including White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, National Economic Adviser Lael Brainard, National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi, Senior Adviser to the President for International Climate Policy John Podesta, and more, met with numerous tech industry leaders, including Alphabet President Ruth Porat, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

This isn’t the first time the Biden administration has buddied up with big business to address an energy issue while simultaneously enacting policies that nullify its own efforts to strengthen the American industrial and energy base.

To the delight of OpenAI, the Biden administration announced that it plans to invest in data center infrastructure projects following the discussion. In response, OpenAI told CNBC that the company “appreciate[s] the White House [for] convening this meeting, as it is a recognition of the priority of infrastructure to create jobs, help guarantee that the benefits of AI are widely distributed, and ensure America will continue to be at the forefront of AI innovation.”

Furthermore, the Biden administration announced the launch of a permitting council to provide increased technical assistance to federal, state, and local authorities handling data center permits, an AI data center engagement team to expand loans, grants, and tax credits, a program to “share resources on repurposing closed coal sites with datacenter developers," and other measures to address the data center energy issue.

Data centers and fossil fuels

Like much of the rest of the tech industry, AI training heavily relies on data centers, which provide powerful servers and storage capacity for all sorts of ventures. Most of these data centers provide these services by drawing from fossil fuels — the type of energy many globalists and self-styled progressives insist will destroy the world.

The demand for these data centers continues to grow. A Goldman Sachs study showed that data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. And according to the International Energy Agency, “Electricity consumption from data centres, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026.” What’s most concerning is that data centers consumed 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, and that number could rise to over 1,000 TWh in 2026 — close to Japan’s current electricity consumption.

That’s because more firms are innovating in AI, and AI is becoming more energy-intensive as it develops in complexity. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 took 50 times the electricity needed to train GPT-3. Additionally, AI-based programs consume much more energy than basic search engines. A simple ChatGPT prompt response takes nearly 10 times the electricity of a Google search; a ChatGPT prompt response requires 2.9 watt-hours, while a Google search takes 0.3 watt-hours.

Relying on green energy to power these data centers does not make sense, but the Biden administration thinks otherwise.

Cronyism

The Biden administration is currently facing a dire problem. But is the solution to partner with Big Tech to craft AI policy? Big Tech wants to leverage big government to shift public policy in its favor, leading some to call the move a “state buy-in.”

What could possibly go wrong?

No one would complain if industry and government were simply forming public-private partnerships to address the looming energy crisis. However, the problem lies in the proposals that Big Tech and the Biden administration want to implement. Despite the fact that lawmakers and politicians seemingly understand the urgency of AI's quenchless energy appetite, they continue to push left-wing regulations and non-solutions that thwart the efforts to strengthen America’s energy sector.

Big Tech loves these regulations. It supports woke regulations that don’t actually do anything except increase inefficiencies for smaller companies, in addition to other restrictions that crowd out “little tech” from the market while leveraging its own institutional power and capital to expand its market share.

In addition to the aforementioned initiatives, the Biden administration also announced commitments to “achieving net zero carbon emissions and to [produce] clean energy.” Even though data centers are reliant on cheap fossil fuels, leftists insist on handouts to the green energy lobby by using expensive and inefficient renewable green energy sources that exacerbate the issue instead of simply finding ways to access cheap and reliable energy.

It’s a pattern

This isn’t the first time the Biden administration has buddied up with big business to address an energy issue while simultaneously enacting policies that nullify its own efforts to strengthen the American industrial and energy base.

In 2022, a bipartisan coalition in Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing. It was also supported and signed by President Joe Biden. The bill was a good start, but with Intel’s recent struggles and shortfalls — and fresh uncertainty surrounding the impact of the highly hyped new TSMC fabrication plant in Arizona — this effort to shore up chip manufacturing is overshadowed by its many flaws. These flaws include woke language, DEI provisions, and, most importantly, climate change and green energy initiatives, even though chip manufacturing is heavily reliant on cheap, reliant, and efficient fossil fuels.

What’s more, after announcing billions of taxpayer dollars would go to “strengthen climate resilience,” the Biden-Harris administration put out a press release detailing its expensive progressive climate agenda to reach net-zero carbon emissions.

“Net-zero emissions pathways require widespread implementation of currently available and cost-effective options for reducing emissions, including the addition of new wind and solar capacity. Reaching net zero will also require rapid expansion of technologies and methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere to balance remaining emissions, as well as the exploration of additional mitigation and transformative adaptation options,” the administration claimed.

As the name of the crisis suggests, the data center energy crisis will only be solved by accessing more reliable energy, not by conspiring with Big Tech to expand its institutional influence and advance the green agenda.

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Javier Milei’s bold economic reforms overshadowed by controversial AI security plans



Argentina’s firebrand leader, Javier Milei, keeps winning. He promised a libertarian revolution in the long-socialist country, and this month, he’s crushing inflation, advancing an austere new zero-deficit budget, and scheduling a high-level sit-down on the future of cryptocurrencies with the founder of Cardano. But unfortunately, there’s another side to Milei’s policy plans — one straight out of dystopian sci-fi.

When Javier Milei secured the presidency of Argentina last November, the global far right erupted in celebration. Milei’s landslide victory over the Peronist candidate, Sergio Massa, by nearly 3 million votes ignited hope among populists worldwide. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro were among the first to cheer their Argentine ally, with Trump confidently predicting that Milei would “truly make Argentina great again” and Bolsonaro praising the win as a triumph for “honesty, progress, and freedom.” The admiration and praise were understandable — after all, the Argentinian people elected a man of the people, someone who promised to do his utmost to work in their best interests.

Authorities could potentially detain individuals based on predicted future crimes, stripping away the very essence of free will and personal liberty.

Which makes Milei’s latest initiative so baffling and unsettling.

Under his leadership, Argentina recently established a so-called Applied Artificial Intelligence for Security Unit. This new agency, part of the Ministry of Security, is tasked with leveraging AI to analyze vast amounts of historical crime data and monitor social media interactions, all to predict and prevent criminal activities.

Such an initiative might seem forward-thinking and innovative. The idea that AI can forecast criminal behavior based on historical patterns sounds efficient, and perhaps in a certain way, it is. But it’s littered with potential land mines: overreach, profiling, and unwarranted surveillance. The emphasis on scanning social media for “potential threats” risks devolving into invasive scrutiny of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, all under a vaguely defined and potentially overbroad mandate.

Lamentably, this isn’t just about Milei or Argentina. AI-driven surveillance is becoming increasingly common in countries worldwide, including in the United States. In China, a country I worked in for 18 months, AI is already employed to monitor citizens’ behavior, with those deemed “untrustworthy” facing consequences ranging from travel bans to restricted access to social services. One could argue that the situation has already shifted, with cities like New York and London now resembling Beijing and Shanghai in terms of surveillance.

Of course, this dystopian reality is eerily similar to what we’ve seen depicted in episodes of "Black Mirror"or the movie "Minority Report." Authorities could potentially detain individuals based on predicted future crimes, stripping away the very essence of free will and personal liberty. Social media posts, online searches, and even the most mundane activities could fall under the relentless gaze of automated systems designed to flag anything deemed suspicious.

As if that’s not bad enough, these systems can easily be misused, leading to unwarranted interventions, the targeting of political dissenters, or the suppression of dissenting voices. As I write this, all across Europe, including in Ireland, my place of birth, "hate speech" laws are being implemented with increasing severity. Individuals found guilty of crossing the line, even through a social media post, are facing lengthy prison sentences.

Now is the time for citizens and lawmakers to engage with these developments critically. Ensuring that the pursuit of security does not come at the cost of the liberties it aims to protect is of vital importance. AI can be a tool for good, but only if everyday people have a say in how it is used. The power to shape our future should not be left solely in the hands of governments or tech giants. We must demand transparency, accountability, and a say in how these technologies are deployed. Otherwise, Big Brother will get a whole lot bigger and, without a doubt, a whole lot badder.