Elon Musk wants a robot in every home; here's how to ensure they don't kill us all



It’s been clear for a while that mass robotics are coming — and nothing short of a catastrophe will make them go away. But it took Elon Musk, the man Peter Thiel once called the greatest salesman in the world, to penetrate the collective consciousness with last week’s “We Robot” event, which unveiled the Robovan, the Cybertaxi, and the Optimus bot, instantly familiar to anyone who has spent even a few seconds watching "Star Wars" content with droids in it.

The advent of the mass-market humanoid robot — explicitly designed not just to do what you want but to be what you want, taking on any number of roles filled for all of human history by, you know, humans — has predictably touched off a fresh bout of feverish conflict between acceleration-happy tech optimists and tech pessimists desperate to at least pump the brakes.

And it’s true — Big Tech is dominated by the cult of wokeness, intersectionality, DEI, ESG, perv pride, and so forth, and what makes Big Tech big is its deep and intimate relationship with the federal government, especially the intelligence community, which has also cast its lot with the cult and its rituals.

What is new this time around is the political aspect of the confrontation. As more tech founders and funders have gravitated toward Trump this year — with Musk at the forefront of that trend, too — their newfound confidence in openly criticizing tech people and entities aligned with Biden and Harris has given the debate over tech an explicitly partisan flavor.

And it’s true — Big Tech is dominated by the cult of wokeness, intersectionality, DEI, ESG, perv pride, and so forth, and what makes Big Tech big is its deep and intimate relationship with the federal government, especially the intelligence community, which has also cast its lot with the cult and its rituals. There’s no denying that the woke left dominates the anti-growth, pro-deceleration, pro-regulation wing of technologists and bureaucrats who want to ensure the spiritual authority of their cult is what dictates and controls the vector of tech research, development, and deployment.

Ostensibly, what they want is to prevent the eradication of human life by out-of-control machines. In reality, they are increasingly apt to openly support the reduction of human beings to compliant freaks coercively on-boarded into the social credit regime of the ultimate in micro-management, a planetary woke supercomputer.

At the same time, the unfortunate reality is that the woke left managed to get its act together way before anyone else in organizing an attempt at aligning tech with spiritual authority. One might have thought even one generation ago that America’s many millions of healthy Christians, with their thick community ties and robust commercial activities, would have united around ensuring that technology did not develop and dominate American life in ways that directly, consistently undercut the authority of church life — by manufacturing experiences and dreams that promised paradise on Earth in exchange for complete spiritual submission to the technologization of all things, from the planet down to the molecules in your body.

Alas, America’s Christians did not do this, and so the cult of the woke left — increasingly a formal religion with well-developed liturgical language, ritual performance, and rites of sacrifice — rushed into the spiritual vacuum.

The result of this lamentable series of events is that the political right wing in America found itself increasingly out of control and desperate for a path back, perhaps at whatever cost. Because of their loss of political power, the people most spiritually inclined to resist swapping out their ancient faith for a heretical cult of merging with machines began to accept it instead, increasingly believing that their only hope of destroying the established woke theocracy was a revolutionary cyborg theocracy.

The plausible reasons for making that devil’s bargain are clear enough. But so, of course, are the objections. As one columnist put it: “I cannot understand why conservatives venerate a man who is destroying the way of life they want to preserve. This AI/robots stuff will take your jobs, your freedom, your humanity.”

To repeat, however, the key to understanding is quite simple: As technology developed in ways that made central to human experience the urgency of the ultimate questions about our identity and purpose — questions that demand theological answers and close, personal spiritual guidance — the political conservatism of the 21st century, unmoored from any institutionalized spiritual authority, became very easy for the revolutionary left to defeat, because the left so swiftly abandoned its formerly materialist and secular foundations in favor of militant post-Christian woke spiritualism.

And so we find ourselves caught in a political realignment where Christian spiritual authority over the otherwise free development of technology in America is almost entirely absent from the debate — a debate taking place at an unprecedented inflection point for the United States, one where the nature of our form of government and indeed the nature of our very being is at stake. Not good!

Seeing Elon Musk and his allies navigate this landscape has been interesting. Despite the criticism they have attracted, on the whole, the maneuvers have been in the right direction, even though the breakneck pace of the tech and how its fans market it effectively encourages the country to dump Christ the God-man in favor of the god-simulating Borg collective. However, the main problem is not with machines or their power but rather with people and their own. It would be just so embarrassingly easy for any technologist empowered in this way to simply betray the desperate conservatives huddled at his feet begging him for manna, offering a simulation of the conservative lifestyle — “based Disneyland” — in exchange for the rest of the world ... and, of course, their souls.

Some might see in various prominent tech figures the first stirrings of an Antichrist personality with the ambitions to match. I am much more inclined to focus our attention on the harder case of the technologist with the very best intentions being reshaped by the virtual and digital world he has created into a person who believes he has no alternative but to smash the church of Christ and the sacred human form so that the new and “improved” god of the Borg, and the neo-church to match, can take “us” to the next level of super-galactic consciousness.

What can prevent that dismaying scenario? One Christian technologist, riffing off of the marketing of Optimus for those seeking an emotional support relationship, recently posted the makings of an answer. “Teacher, babysitter and friend?! Can we use them as soldiers? This is one of the key patterns of the [cyborg] theocracy,” he observed. “They take weapons and use them to hijack human spiritual relationships. The solution is obvious.”

If you’ve made it this far, it should be obvious. Those who hope to lose the woke theocracy without losing their humanity, too, in body and soul, can trust neither political conservatism nor post-political technocracy. For structural salvation in the digital age, there is only one institution in real life capable of re-establishing spiritual authority without imposing a theocracy — inspiring us, not coercing us, to ensure our tech is developed and used in ways that preserve our way of life, form of government, and sacred human being. The time has come for Americans of all stripes to rediscover what church is all about: providing an inimitable foundation of rock, not of sand.

The dark and fascinating history of DARPA



If you’re reading this right now, you have one federal agency to thank: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

But DARPA (just ARPA prior to 1972) didn’t only invent the internet and GPS many decades ago; it's also deeply involved in researching everything under the sun, for better or for worse. This includes killer robots, maneuverable bullets that can travel six miles (or more), fully automated No Manning Required warships, self-repairing biological homes, plant-eating robots (EATR), self-driving cars (which already existed by 1984), light-bending invisibility technology, gene editing, and smart-powered exo-suits to create super soldiers. DARPA funds many projects that find their way onto the battlefield itself.

DARPA is understood to generally be at least several decades ahead on technology and discoveries that it keeps under wraps. The true limits of what it’s testing now remain speculative, but we can be sure it would make the most dystopian episode of 'Black Mirror' look tame.

As Sharon Weinberger writes in her 2018 book “The Imagineers of War”: “Today, the agency's past investments populate the battlefield: The Predator, the descendant of Amber, has enabled the United States to conduct push-button warfare from afar, killing enemies from the comfort of air-conditioned trailers in the United States.”

The list of DARPA’s greatest hits also includes spreading the reach of America’s vast surveillance state with DARPA’s first AI-related projects launched in the 1960s and testing out various deadly bioweapons and bioengineering projects from Agent Orange to the Brain Initiative Program, exploring the potential of humans controlling devices and technology with their minds.

Then there are HI-MEMS and Project Dragonfly: mini flying cyborgs that can spy and are outfitted with solar-powered guidance systems. Remote-controlled rats; mine-finding bees; and programmable, shape-shifting claytronics are just some of the items that we know of from unclassified, on-the-record projects that DARPA has disclosed, some of which are now in civilian and commercial use. How much is going on off the books?

A history of shadows

DARPA was first established in 1958 to counter the USSR after the launch of Sputnik, but it quickly switched away from a space focus after NASA was created a year later in 1959. It became a remarkably unconstrained agency with enormous funding and a constellation of research to invest in that would bolster military readiness and technological dominance. Its mission is to stay ahead of the curve at all times and innovate technology beyond the knowledge or capacity of adversaries.

The Heilmeier Catechism, named after former DARPA director George Heilmeier, takes on or rejects new projects, and research flows through industry and universities via DARPA funding. DARPA is remarkably small. As its official site notes, the agency “comprises approximately 220 government employees in six technical offices, including nearly 100 program managers, who together oversee about 250 research and development programs.”

First, the obvious: Many of DARPA’s innovations have improved people’s lives in various ways, even though they were originally designed to end lives or respond to situations where massive loss of life was imminent.

Some of the negatives have also become well known. Looking at past endeavors such as Operation Ranch Hand, DARPA developed Agent Orange to deforest jungle cover that the enemy in North Vietnam was hiding and operating under. Millions of gallons per day were sprayed out, ravaging enemy and civilian farms alike and leading to generations of cancer, health problems, and birth defects, including among veterans. First used in 1962, the presence of dioxin in Agent Orange was fully known by 1965, along with the discovery of its damage to unborn infants by 1967. Its use was discontinued by 1971.

When DARPA and its ally Monsanto were sued by veterans due to their illnesses after exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, DARPA simply denied it, cherry-picking scientists to cast doubt on the hundreds of thousands of suffering veterans. In the case of Monsanto, it quietly settled the case of domestic producers who developed cancer and diseases from producing and being in the environs of the substance stateside without taking official blame.

Killer tech

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The critical issue with DARPA lies in how much of its work is secret and its tight links with the intelligence community and high-tech industry. We just don’t know the full breadth of what it's working on because much of it is protected under national security confidentiality. We know that DARPA is very interested in tracking people's thoughts, feelings, and words.

By 1994, a little-known think tank named the Highlands Forum began working more closely with the Pentagon, providing an off-the-record link between the tech world, the defense industry, and the government. Private and off-the-record meetings operating under Chatham House rules are regularly held without fanfare. The organization is crucial for understanding how the military-industrial complex , which President Eisenhower warned about, is all about building bridges between public and private, civilian and officer. It’s also increasingly come to be defined by information operations in terms of shaping belief and tracking people’s beliefs as they winnow themselves into demographic and ideological categories formed by what they serve themselves from the internet’s vast buffet.

Whereas the early internet (ARPANET) arose out of military interest in maintaining wireless communications if phone lines and grids went down, later work on data mining, pattern recognition, and profiling became much more focused on anticipating, understanding, influencing, and even building the choice architecture to shape the actions of individuals and groups.

Researchers who can orient their work or lab around topics and areas that may interest DARPA can hit the jackpot and tap into a massive funding structure backed by the U.S. government to the tune of several billion dollars or more per year. By tapping into inchoate technologies and helping them out, DARPA can keep a finger in the pie of the cutting edge of research.

The Massive Digital Data Systems funding mechanism succeeded in moving massive funding through the National Science Foundation, academia, and other groups to get money to come up with a way to surveil people more effectively. This eventually found popular fruition with query flocking and association rule-mining in the Google search engine developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and invested in by DARPA. Information people voluntarily gave out (and withheld) could now be put through vast AI systems to assign them reliable and telling digital fingerprints and predict and influence their behavior at scale. It’s no exaggeration to say that the CIA, NSA, and DARPA helped form Google into what it is today via the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, which operated between 1993 and 1999.

The U.S. intelligence community has financially backed numerous startups in order to dominate the information age, while the Highlands Group, DARPA, and confidentiality rules have succeeded in doing an end run around any real accountability for what’s being tested and implemented. What we do know is that ongoing U.S. involvement in global conflicts, mass surveillance, and increasingly heated rhetoric and profiling of the domestic population have all become a glaring reality in the past several decades.

When former CIA director and top Obama administration national security adviser John Brennan announced that the government’s security apparatus would track down every participant who broke the law on January 6, 2021, with a “laser-like” focus, he wasn’t lying, as subsequent jailing of people for taking photos, jeering at police, or walking into the Capitol began playing out across the country. As Brennan threatened at the time, “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” are all very much on the government’s radar. Tracking down the government’s domestic enemies was helped along by, in some cases, family members informing on each other for participating in the January 6 protests in a manner reminiscent of socialist East Germany’s legion of citizen informants.

The Age of AI

As I wrote in a previous review of Shoshana Zuboff’s book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,"Zuboff contends that power structures want to “force a new collectivist order on humanity founded on the certainty of AI systems and to steadily take away people’s rights, freedoms, and even conscious thought, by limiting the choice architecture around us and conceptually shepherding people into increasingly tightly controlled avenues of mentation, decision, and action.”

There’s always an official-sounding and supposedly legitimate reason why surveillance and high-octane military technology and acceleration are necessary to use on the domestic front. But as Brennan’s threats above showed, the power to define who is a “religious extremist” or a “nativist” as well as to define why, exactly, that is “evil” or “illegal” has no controls on it except by those in control. The goalposts can be moved at any time, and powerful AI systems are there to click into place and comply.

Military dominance and technology development tend to go hand in hand. The danger, especially in the latter half of this century, is that technology is accelerating so rapidly and accountability so thin that the possibility of malicious actors within government or bureaucratic circles using tech to negatively control populations or accomplish nefarious goals is increasingly real, not to mention the prospect of enemy foreign powers copying or infiltrating such projects.

We already know American universities are heavily infiltrated by Chinese communist spies and others who run counter to U.S. interests. DARPA’s surveillance technology and AI investments are speeding ahead without brakes. Even if it hasn’t been publicly unveiled, we know that it’s only a matter of time until tools that can be used on foreign adversaries will also be unleashed on domestic enemies, even for purely political or cynical purposes. There’s no guarantee on who will deploy these technologies or why. To put it in the starkest terms: You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

DARPA is understood to generally be at least several decades ahead on technology and discoveries that it keeps under wraps. The true limits of what it’s testing now remain speculative, but we can be sure it would make the most dystopian episode of "Black Mirror" look tame. Groups like Highlands need more oversight. Regardless of its benefits, the truth remains starkly obvious: Out-of-control technocracy is a real and present danger to American liberty and vitality.

Inside The Global Race To Build Killer Robot Armies

Inside The Global Race To Build Killer Robot Armies

There are AI-assisted weapons already in use, but they still require a human operator to confirm targets and order the kill. That is changing rapidly.