'More important than water' Global AI Summit can't help but go off the deep end
Technocrats and social engineers partake in an orgy of self-congratulation and over-promising that reveals their pathological God-complexes
(To see the Day 1 report click here.)
Day 2 of the Global AI Summit brings more ominous moments and phrases
Technical glitches during the conference illustrate the sham of futurism
Ethical and philosophical questions continue to be the main theme, but their answers are shallow platitudes, if not entirely missing
“Challenges” galore
Aside from “AI” itself, the most popular word used at the Global AI Summit was probably “challenges.” It seems that every speaker was excited by the challenges of creating this new world order on behalf of the ruling class. Not surprising. This is how experts talk when you have an unlimited budget. They get paid to solve problems, so they get excited about having as many problems as possible.
What kind of challenges? Oh, you know, just little things like the existing infrastructure of every major city, every kind of legal and human rights risk, and human nature itself. Nothing we couldn’t solve with Saudi oil money.
Let’s watch some clips
Using YouTube’s handy “clipping” feature I’ve compiled a list of notable moments for you to enjoy. These clips cannot be directly embedded on the page, but they are highly valuable for sharing on social media. Here I will provide commentary and link you to the video clip(s). The clips should each open up in a new tab so you can continue reading once you’ve watched it.
#GreenWorldOrder Introduction
This is an important segment of Day 2’s introduction video. It really sets the tone of the conference, which was to promise clear ethical limits that help mankind, while simultaneously framing the entire conversation around how to achieve the anti-human U.N. Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They vow to create AI “for humanity, and never against it,” but immediately go on to push climate hysteria, which is obsessed with population control, sterilization, eugenics, and total control of all human behavior. By using this convenient moral framework, scientific dictators can greenwash their genocidal ambitions.
Note, too, how they seamlessly connect this to “mental health” and the ability to “re-imagine the future of food.” The massive ongoing controlled demolition of the world’s traditional food supply infrastructure is becoming glaringly obvious to even casual observers, but this will coincide nicely with the narrative of AI needing to save humanity from starvation. Of all the things to highlight, why these? They could have promised massive improvements in energy production, world peace, galactic colonization, or any other topics of scientific interest.
“Yet as we promote the use of AI for good, we must also agree on red lines we shouldn’t cross. Ethical and moral considerations that need to be taken into account when building technology for humanity, and never against it. Our shared challenge is to leverage data and push use of Artificial Intelligence at scale to meet the challenges of our time, which include to fight Climate Change, support mental health, and reimagine the future of food. AI leaders must be prepared to take risks, push boundaries, and try new approaches. The future is for us to build. We are the leaders.”
They are the leaders, we are the subjects. Their god is Artificial Intelligence, and we are the sacrifice they will make to it in exchange for permanent (“sustainable”) tyrannical power over all life on Earth.
Vision 2030
Closely related to the U.N.’s Agenda 2030 is Saudi Arabia’s own Vision 2030. This transformative agenda is clearly labeled “strategic objectives” meaning a military program. Part of it is to protect the Islamic identity, allowing them to remain sovereign and competitive in the world of global AI takeover.
The whole world has slowly but surely been forced to remove the flimsy curtain separating private sectors and government military projects. In our generation, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is nothing more than the official conglomeration of state-funded universities, partnering with state-subsidized corporations, with the aid of elite NGOs, to accomplish strategic goals of state militaries. This paradigm (ie. Military-Industrial Complex) has been around for a very long time, but it used to be a secret. Things like the Internet were noted to have begun as a DARPA project connecting universities together, but now the world is following suit. The race for “Web 3.0” and AI projects are heating up, so it’s no longer viable to keep this dynamic discreet and high-level. Now it is openly promoted as “responsible government” under various “visions” and “initiatives.” The Chinese Belt And Road Initiative (BRI) and the Atlantic Build Back Better schemes are the same as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030: they are all “public-private partnerships” where a nation’s talent is directly siphoned from schools and the private sector into military projects bent on disrupting and transforming each country’s own economy.
Just read what the Vision 2030 website says about their “National Transformation Program” and translate the buzzwords. Then watch both the clips below:
The National Transformation Program aims to develop the necessary infrastructure and create an environment that enables the public, private and non-profit sectors to achieve the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 [military incorporation of all sectors]. This will be accomplished by achieving governmental operational excellence [military efficiency], supporting digital transformation [forcing social change], enabling the private sector, developing economic partnerships, and promoting social development, in addition to ensuring the sustainability of vital resources.
LINK: Vision 2030 and the sustainable Digital Society “strategic goal”
Holy spyware!
As the Vision 2030 chart above shows, protecting and promoting Islamic identity is key to Saudi Arabia’s particular brand of Fourth Industrial Revolution. Their unique combination of religious, military, and industrial conglomeration, combined with the burgeoning tools of AI surveillance, perhaps naturally leads to what this Saudi Arabian general describes in the clip below: counting and tracking all visitors to their holy sites, detecting their behaviors in real time, using drones to spy on infiltrators, and other good stuff.
LINK: Military deployment of AI surveillance system in holy sites
“Instrumentarian power” gets called out
There was a marked difference between Saudi, Western, and African speakers when it came to their concerns. Saudi speakers generally prioritized the Vision 2030 strategic objectives that would benefit their kingdom and sufficiently appease foreign critics, while Western experts either focused on opportunism, or intellectual bluster and smugness that conceals their true motivations. However, the African representatives were typically more articulate about real worries involving the abuse of power. Here, Inuwa Abdullahi explains what surveillance capitalism and “instrumentarian power.” He is the Nigerian Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency.
LINK: The danger of surveillance capitalism and instrumentarian power
“Solving democracy” so that “Politicians should just relax and don’t do anything”
By far the most colorful and audacious speaker at Day 2 was Mohamed Alabbar, the Founder of UAE’s hundred-billion dollar asset real estate company Emaar Properties, which recently was responsible for major environmental destruction in Egypt. This is one of his choice quotes:
“AI is, I think, is the greatest achievement in human life. It’s more important than electricity, it’s more important than water…”
What could Alabbar possibly have meant by this? How could AI be more important than water? And why does he think that “water” was an achievement in the first place? Did he mean plumbing? Either way, this kind of hyperbolic fantasy speaks to a naked craving for power, and the idea that he is a chosen leader in this final frontier must be intoxicating. What else would account for sayings like this:
“I really think that AI is going to solve democracy problem. Because, it can collect data, can give recommendation; and I think politicians should just relax, and don’t do anything.”
Obviously, being somewhat of a greedy madman relying on his charisma, Mohamed Alabbar is saying the quiet part out loud, which is why he admits that he’s changing the subject, and why the host changes the subject quickly back to what it was supposed to be. The discussions at the Global AI Summit are confined, scripted, and narrowly directed, with prepared questions and prepared answers, but he felt obligated to break away and promote scientific dictatorship openly.
Diversity, but…
Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has been a major force in at least superficially modernizing (and thereby arguably “westernizing”) Saudi Arabia already, famously allowing women to drive in 2018, for instance. Women and men are still not allowed to interact naturally, however, and discrimination abounds in daily life. He has been accused of merely appearing to be liberal for foreign audiences. In the Global AI Summit, a clear emphasis was placed on diversity and equality, no doubt in order to lubricate the stage for the Western experts to feel comfortable, but listen to this presenter (Anna Patterson, of Gradient Ventures) force herself to stop short when describing her company’s policy on diversity:
“So, usually it’s measured by, uh, crunchbase, it’s just a way that it kinda evens the playing field; it usually means underrepresented group, um, as a member of the founding team. Um, which includes, uh, you know, women, and people of color, and umm… then… it also… Umm… Yeah. Those are probably the main ones.”
LINK: Stopping short of real diversity while in Saudi Arabia
Come on, Anna! You’re in the most progressive city in the world, Riyadh! You’re on the biggest technology stage in the world with all those Saudi billionaires watching and listening for your company’s progressive values! Why not mention homosexuals, transgenders, and alternative lifestyles? Don’t be shy! Or maybe you know that the money won’t be flowing into your pockets if you stay true to your real values?
Vulnerabilities and ironies
With all of the hype around absorbing and processing the entire world’s data around the clock, it is especially enjoyable to see that the Global AI Summit could not even handle a simple video call. The first person to remotely join the conference on a video call, the greedy technocrat madman mentioned earlier, Alabbar, froze up not once, but twice in the proceedings.
LINK: Alabbar freezes up the first time while wrapping his head around the “new world” that is emerging
Next he was promising that AI would be able to monitor and predict everyone’s needs. But how can we trust AI to accurately track and model an entire city’s population with intelligent insights when their billionaire frontmen can’t even talk to us without being comically frozen on the main stage of the Global AI Summit?
LINK: Alabbar freezes while promising the ability to predict needs
Concern was raised by the Vice President of Information Technology for Saudi Aramco, Yousef Al-Ulyan, about the vulnerabilities of mass-scale AI developed by young and naive data scientists. Being in charge of a 300+ Billion dollar oil company, Aramco has a very serious reason to be concerned. In the digital world, Israel (with covert help from the NSA) is king, as the Muslim world would remember from Stuxnet, the Israeli cyberweapon that crippled Iran’s nuclear program in 2010. Imagine how much damage could be done to a country’s critical infrastructure once it’s entirely digitized and automated.
LINK: Saudi Aramco warns of mass scale solutions being vulnerable
There’s more!
I’ll be covering the rest of the Global AI Summit in the near future! Including:
Learning what “cognitive cities” are
Discussion around Smart Cities robbing people of free will
Frightening rhetoric around decarbonizing
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