MI6 chief: Tech giants are closer to running the world than politicians

Adding money to politics corrupts the will of the people, it will with 100% certainty, and the people who corrupt it will eventually end up in power. Super PACs have destroyed this country, allowing technigarchs to buy elections. You can’t prove or disprove control anymore, it’s pure capital infusion.

Lobbying is a scourge. I went on a trip to the heart of DC and got toured around by a lobbyist. They make you feel so relaxed and are very convincing how they’re helping as they guide you through how they work. Many others with me were very convinced and even defending the practice as necessary after my skeptical commentary. These are professional salespeople, wining and dining our politicians using corporate money. This is entirely disconnected from what is actually good for our society, is pure pay to gain. It has just seeped out and overflowed to the digital realm now.

A government having a dossier on every citizen would have been a headline 50 years ago. Today it’s open and free to corporations also. We’ve crossed the line and lost it miles away.

Now we have literally made up monetary systems that big banks can play with at will to extract as much wealth from solo investors, and effectively legalized insider trading and crypto scams.

If prices don’t drop (which I assume the opposite), we’re heading for another world war. China will invade Taiwan in a few years, Russia will keep the land and rearm for parts 5 and 6 into Poland and Europe, the US will be forced to dig into Venezuelan oil, and god knows what else.

This doesn’t feel like a bump on the road, this feels like an end to an era. I hope I’m wrong.

It’s all about the data. Used to be that the govt had the best data about the world and could theoretically use it to help the citizens (though almost never in practice). That flipped around the year 2000 and the Govt spent a decade to catch up to the ISPs post 9/11. However the govt investment into data/AI couldn’t match private investment even barely. I saw this up front and personal and NOBODY in congress or the White House cared about data or AI - arguably they still don’t and have no real data/AI talent left in the government.

It was very clear by then that Automation broadly was going to consume the planet, and that whomever controlled the data flow behind it would control the levers of power, overthrowing the veneer of “rule by the consent of the governed” (which is an impossible fantasy that can’t actually ever exist).

When Hintons lab won ILVRC in 2012 based on a data focused approach - that was the time that everyone should have sat up and realized what was about to happen. Many in AI did exactly that and that’s why we’re in the state of tech we are in.

Kurzweil predicted it, everyone in the singularity and transhuman communities saw it and the rest of the world has not changed their behavior and have accelerated this process.

Unless society as a whole gets her act together and organizes this planet for the benefit of humans and ecology, this is not going to the way anybody wants it.

Everything that removes the last vestiges of human directed action and control is accelerating rapidly.