Connectionists: Military-grade Psyops-ready Reinforcement Learning is Probably Being Sold at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas

[Brian Mingus]

I am at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES - https://www.ces.tech/) in Las
Vegas and I believe military-grade psyops-ready Reinforcement Learning is
being sold here right now on the black market, and that it is being funded
by derivative swaps that are basically allowing terrorists to print money
and the whole thing is being run via a silent auction system.

Why? It smells. This conference is completely dysfunctional. Not only is
the technology not interesting or useful to humanity right now in almost
all cases, but the vibe and feel of the conference’s social sphere is
completely out of the normal human range. And it’s not just Vegas. These
people are supposedly here on business. I went to the Olympics in Athens in
2004 and I know what international cooperation looks like. Bjork did the
opening ceremony and her dress covered the entire field, and athletes from
every participating country got together under it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Canm7glYFgg

I approve that kind of positive interaction. Contingent on us living in a
safe world. Whereas these people are fucking sharks. There are psychopaths
seemingly everywhere. As-if from-concentrate.

Not only is CES very obviously militarized based on the tech on display,
it’s actually, based on my extensive number of social interactions with
people here, hard to understand how a huge number of the up-to 200,000
people in this mix of 150 countries are not spies who are doing black
market weapons deals. There are a lot of things that give spies away, but
the number one way to root them out is to detect that they are pretending
to be stupid. At “CES”. Consumer does not mean stupid, and these people are
not consumers anyway. I manned the AWS booth at the 2018 nVidia GTC AI
conference in Washington, D.C. and did ad-hoc booth consulting for hundreds
of spies. Not only do they pretend to be stupid, but they also, in the
famous words of T.J. Miller, attempt to “brain rape” you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc

In other words, they are trying to get information out of me (use my
creativity) so that they can weaponize it. As a responsible citizen of
Earth and a hopeful future parent, that is something that I believe
everyone reading this should absolutely be freaking out about. I am
basically a target when I go to conferences. I give, give, give, and I have
a lot to give after reading ~10,000 scientific papers, and these people
just take-take-take.

In addition, CES is pretending to be stupid as well. I walked around the
conference with two laptops both locked in separate compartments of my
backpack, and those locks were never opened by security and nor was the bag
ever scanned. And I was in the same room as Ivanka Trump during her keynote.

It’s the implication. The conference - up to 200,000 spies - is a hot bed
for electronic warfare. They are launching zero-days (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_(computing)) and they are fuzzing.
They are primarily using wireless signals to root as many devices from as
many different countries as possible. Why? Why else Pinkie. To try to take
over the world.

Is there any way I can add more emphasis as to how dangerous this is? What
the fuck makes Ivanka Trump and everyone else in that room resistant to
Metasploit (https://www.metasploit.com/)? Software which I have never
actually used, by the way. Just Say No.

.

.

.


Everyone, I am calling for an immediate global ban on AI. We don’t fucking
need it, and it’s too fucking easy. Autoencoders may be the fucking death
of us all.

What if a terrorist organization actually manages to create a chain of
zero-day exploits for everything. They could imprison us in this
technologically-driven world we’ve created. Fuzzing (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing) works so well that I have reason to
believe these exploit chains are being sold here at CES right now and that
cyber kill chains (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_chain#The_Cyber_Kill_Chain) are being
developed and executed. *My iPhone has literally been acting funny.* They
are going in through the "Hey, Siri" automatic voice recognition by
fuzzing-discovered frequency combinations that are not audible to people or
dogs.

We need to start taking immediate responsibility for our actions. Allow me
to explain what that means.


   1.

   I am calling out myself for my previous e-mail (
   https://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/2020-January/033714.html)
   in which I have now made it widely publicly known that so-called “AI” is
   trivial. Did this present a risk? Yes. But the point is that this
   information is so easy to discover that we must assume it was already
   known before the magical 2010 or whatever date. That means that we need to
   act appropriately, and what exactly does that boil down to? We need to
   avoid a situation where we are forced to EMP the planet by detonating
   nukes in space. Which might not even work! We might need to shut down
   the power grid. But what about portable nuclear reactors? What about
   people who are dug the fuck in? More specifically, we need to recognize
   that we are playing with fire and the situation is not safe.



   1.

   Was it Schmidhuber’s student who actually implemented and ran a version
   of the shortest algorithm that computes everything? The Super Omega? (
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant#Super_Omega)

   To: Schmidhuber, what the fuck is that shit you guys are messing with? That
   sounds like a WMD. And you guys decided to see what happens when you pulled
   the trigger.

   2.

   We need to strike a better balance between science and safety. It is not
   safe to be publishing scientific papers on the actual results from
   high-energy physics and artificial intelligence when the world is replete
   with terrorists who will weaponize anything they can get their hands on
   just so they can sell it, and potentially use.


As to the first point, we need to know the risks (and hide them from bad
guys when appropriate) and as to the second, we need to have the
self-control to not actually do it. That is part of the meaning of Ronald
Reagan’s “suicide pact” quote. Please do not have a lapse in self-control
and do anything stupid. Whoever told you the Cold War was over told you a
bald-faced lie. WWIII is effectively in full swing, and its coldness is
made all the colder by the “chilling effects”-style limitations on free
speech under which we are basically not allowed to talk about the fact that
we are at war despite the fact that we are obviously the winners of ALL
past wars (that's *trillions or more* generations of winners) and never
really stopped fighting. *Yet.*

Do Not Press Play on AI. Just Say No. Don’t even write the code. We aren’t
ready as a society. It’s not even clear to me what it would really mean for
us to be ready. Aside from some supply chain optimizations and building
better telescopes, what the fuck is AI really good for anyway? Use your
brains people. You are basically a fucking kalman filter (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) with a body, feelings,
consciousness and qualia already so fly by wire. That means: Use your own
brain and Quit Fucking Up My Planet. If you don’t like it here, leave.

Who can fix this problem for us? We all play a part. But in particular I am
looking to the Central Intelligence Agency. With any luck a good number of
the spies here are actually Americans. It’s possible that the Secret
Service is so on top of their game that my bag was thoroughly scanned by
them. But when we live in a society in which our potential heroes must live
under the moniker of the Presidentially deniable “Third Option,” (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Option) and the technology that the
government possesses is not public knowledge, how am I to know that the
people in that room were actually safe? Quite frankly, given that low level
of security, it wasn’t safe for me to be in that room given how big of a
target she is. In fact, Iran bombed us during her fucking session.

President Trump supposedly doesn’t like the CIA, but we need to understand
that they are our Constitutional protectorate. Their organization absolutely
exists across presidencies. They conduct “Third Option” “special
activities” that are, according to published national security directives,
so secret that, according to a Reagan-era National Security Decision
Directive, they never have to be written down or ever discussed again. Those
spies go alllll the way under cover. And so do their children. However,
President Trump is ultimately the person in charge of declassifying
information, and if he chooses not to reveal the Third Option’s activities they
would effectively have to execute a coup in order to reveal what they have
been doing to protect us.

Why exactly is that?

By now the CIA’s Third Option very likely has so much power that they only
obey the President out of strict deference to the Constitution. In other
words, they are super-patriotic Americans.

Again, it’s the implication. If we are actually safe right now, that means
that every president has kept the Third Option’s activities secret,
including Obama, who created the Disposition Matrix, allowing for the
deniable killing of Americans in America (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix).

In sum, what we need is a POTUS who will convince us we are safe, and that
does not include bombing random-ass Iranian generals. Iran’s nuclear
program is not the problem. And we’ve already taken strong measures to
limit it, launching viruses such as STUXNET to over-spin their centrifuges (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet). North Korea’s nuclear program is
likewise not that big of a problem. More worrisome would be if they got
their act together combined with their bad intentions and forcefully
conscripted every citizen into an elite hacking society. To Kim Jung Un: Please
do not do that. Have a fucking heart.

The problems are: The Queen, Russia, China, our own secrecy, AI and
cyberwarfare in general, not to mention economic warfare and artificial
scarcity leading to epic amounts of completely unnecessary poverty and
suffering. In the words of the Black Eyed Peas: “Where is the Love?” (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpYeekQkAdc).

Very Sincerely,

A still-young man who is not yet sure whether his world is safe enough for
him to become a father.

Brian Mingus
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