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My friend and mentor Steve Bannon is went to prison this week. He’s sentenced to four months for a misdemeanor. Why? Because he told the establishment to shove it. When the egregiously biased J6 Committee ordered Steve to testify before the House, he held up two gnarled middle fingers. Once his enemies brought the hammer down, he never flinched. He never whined. In the nearly two years since his sham conviction came down, I’ve never seen Bannon waver.
When the final die was cast on Friday, I assured Steve that I’d pray for his safety in custody. I try to avoid warm and fuzzies, but I may have been a touch sentimental. In typical admiral fashion, Steve replied, “Stop. Get back to work.” So here I am.
For over three years now, my task and my purpose has been to explore the various dark visions of the future that lie before us—and the real technologies emerging from them. It’s sort of like working as a traveling nuclear plant inspector, where I irradiate my brain with toxic memes and deliver weekly qualitative reports.
These inhuman worlds are saturated with datastreams and artificial intelligence. Pedantic AI daemons are unleashed to instruct every child on the planet, molding their minds for The Future™. Tenacious AI customer service bots shield irresponsible managers from their all-too-human patrons. AI-powered suicide drones gather into swarms of swarms to kill enemies en masse, be they soldiers or civilians.
If you can stomach the notion, allow yourself to ponder one of their most ambitious transhuman dreams:
- You are injected with shape-shifting, microscopic nanobots. They infiltrate every tissue in your body and gather detailed data to create a digital twin on a server. After a thorough evaluation of your biological and neurological deficiencies—determined by “expert” standards—these invasive nanos set to work imprinting a new, improved, utterly mutated digital twin back onto your actual flesh.
- The nanos alter your genome, your hormones, and your neural structure, cell by wriggling cell, until you’re “cured.” If you don’t love it, they’ll just reprogram your brain. You’ll love it soon enough.
For now, none of these worlds exist outside of research labs, paranoid delusions, and barely viable prototypes rushed to market. So don’t let mere dreams build a digital prison in your head before they ever happen. On the other hand, you’d be wise to prepare for the worst.
Last week Hashem Al-Ghaili, the Lebanese dreamer turned “German science communicator,” released his latest concept video: Cognify – The Prison of the Future. This is “a facility designed to treat criminals like patients.” Social media went ape over the idea.
Imagine a sanitized rehab where any natural born killer can become a clockwork orange. Al-Ghaili’s CGI video opens with rows of shirtless white men locked in glass pods. Each prisoner has a circular brain-computer interface around his head that resembles a fallen halo. His eyes are covered by beady little VR goggles.
Artificial intelligence analyzes the inmate’s neural patterns, creating a “high resolution brain map.” It sniffs out deviant desires, which are then zapped away. “Instead of spending years in an actual prison cell, prisoners can finish their sentence here in just a few minutes.” How could this “fast-track rehabilitation” be possible? It’s easy. You just take B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning—the alteration of behavior through reward and punishment—and slap an AI sticker on it.
“Cognify could some day create and implant artificial memories directly into the prisoner’s brain,” our enthusiastic narrator says. “These complex, vivid, and life-like memories are created in real time using AI-generated content.”
For violent offenders, Cognify might “trigger empathy” for their victims. Perhaps a psycho-technician would force the criminal to experience himself—or his victim—being subjected to a brutal beat down. Or a sex offender might receive an implanted memory of getting raped by himself.
Look, it’s a concept video, not tech demo. Go bananas!
Another proposed operation is to “simulate trauma” to teach criminals a lesson. This virtual torture would be sort of like the empathy thing—horrific memories would be implanted while the subject screams in his prison pod—except the procedure would simply instill raw pain-aversion without all the feelies.
Presumably, the same could be done to political prisoners. A dissident would be carted back to Room 101 and have love for Big Brother written onto his or her brain. Whatever it takes to infuse “new positive personality traits.”
Honestly, the sleek design for Cognify’s device is ingenious. The brain-interface ring is equipped with a pistol-grip. The psycho-technician would hold it to the back of the prisoner’s head like a handgun, then pull the trigger execution-style. According to our narrator, authorities could blast any drive for “hate crimes” or “discrimination” from a crimethinker’s brain and splatter his former self into a database for further study. We’re told this procedure might also be applied to “education,” “healthcare,” and “social welfare.”
Normal people are disgusted by all this. But one writer over at The Science Times has already learned to love Big Brother. “Though implementing Cognify still raises some social issues and concerns, it is a significant step in reevaluating how we assist criminals in becoming better,” writes Austin Jay (or his chatbot surrogate). “Combining AI and neuroscience may result in a more efficient and just criminal justice system.”
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Hashem Al-Ghaili is well-known for his jarring concept videos. Last year, he released EctoLife – The World’s First Artificial Womb Facility, which presented haunting images of pod babies being eugenicized in steel capsules. Last May, he shocked the world with BrainBridge – The Head Transplant Machine, where we see robotic arms sever aged craniums and move them to new bodies.
His demented fork in the timeline is a cheap blend of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, PKD’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Elite babies are born from artificial wombs. If they act up, they have their minds purified by AI-generated memory implants. Once age wears them down, they get their designer brains transferred to younger, healthier bodies, thereby extending their stay in hell-on-earth indefinitely.
Al-Ghaili’s videos are only mock-ups. But there are experimental programs like this all over the world. Armies of corporate- and government-funded scientists are working on eugenic embryo selection and artificial wombs. There are already semi-functional brain-scanners and crude memory implantation procedures. Going back to the mid-20th century, mad scientists have been hammering away at full head transplants, albeit with limited success.
The Future™, in reality, is always a matter of approximation. But once a technology is widely adopted—via marketing or mandate—even half-assed execution counts.
Unsettling as it may be, you can’t let it get you down.
Over the past two years, I’ve heard Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro joke about going to prison for their defiance. “Maybe you can spot me on the weight bench out in the yard!” At the time, incarceration was just a grim possibility on the horizon. As of today, Navarro has been locked up in Miami’s Federal Detention Center for over three months. This afternoon, Bannon will report to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, CT, where he’ll do time with sex offenders and violent criminals.
If you’ve watched the War Room, you know Steve only smiles at his own situation. He saves all his outrage for others persecuted by this corrupt regime.
There’s a lesson in that nonchalant attitude. It’s wise to take menacing possibilities seriously. But sometimes you have to laugh it off—if only to stay sane—no matter how dismal it gets. You have to face the future without flinching.
No outcome is certain. Yet if the worst does arrive, don’t wallow in despair. There’s no choice but to keep faith and soldier on, preferably with a wry grin. All things will pass soon enough.
SOURCE: SINGULARITY WEEKLY
