EVER wondered how we can purchase so easily from selections laid before us on our computer screens? It is because of the potential there is for the storage of and access to information about us.
Like me, you probably have suspicions over the privacy of the Cloud. What an innocuous title that is for such a dangerous thin end of a wedge. The Cloud. Go nowhere near it.
Separate, portable hard drives come quite cheap now, £100 or so, and you get a pretty big one for that – a couple of terabytes perhaps. A terabyte of storage capacity in a little box of portable hard drive tricks is enough to house many, many thousands of high-resolution digital images and tens of thousands of pages of written material (printed data is far less hungry for computer space than photographs). Now consider a storage system of 400 terabytes. It is estimated that one such 400-terabyte unit would be large enough to store every written work in existence. This device would probably be only about the size of a shoe box.
So imagine then how much data could be stored in the facility I am about to describe. In Utah the US government have, according to the Mitre Corporation, a 100,000-square-foot building dedicated to computer storage. In it they have a couple of yottabytes or so of potential computer storage space. No, I hadn’t heard of a yotta anything until quite recently either. A yotta is a million trillion.
Let’s examine what just one trillion actually is, as it’s quoted so much nowadays, especially in financial circles. A trillion is a million million. We have skipped the billion stage here as that is only a thousand million. To give further clarity imagine you counted to a trillion at the speed of say two counts per second, It would take you 15,244 years. That gives you an idea of how big a trillion is. Now this yottabyte stuff is a million times bigger than that. A million trillion terabytes! The Americans have this capacity, maybe more.
Say you printed out one yottabyte of documents on smooth A4 sheets straight from the box and stacked them one on top of another. The stacking process itself will require some complicated machinery as the stack would be 39.5billion miles high; so high it would extend beyond the edges of our solar system.
All this is to help us visualise just how much storage capacity the ‘authorities’ have at their disposal now. They can’t let that go to waste, can they? With this much storage potential the ‘authorities’ will quickly be able to house information about you such as where you live, who you visit, how often. Your hobbies and how important they are to you. Your financial position, what you spend and what you spend it on and why. Where you go on holiday and how often. Your political, religious and sexual preferences. Your records, criminal as well as health. Your eating habits. Your weight, your clothes, your underwear – how often you change it. The list is infinite. Pretty much anything you know about yourself and a fair bit you don’t yet, including stuff that you might have preferred nobody else knew, at least for the time being.
Immediately the spectres of Bill Gates, Dr Tedros of the WHO, Klaus Schwab of the WEF and Tony Blair come to mind. However, even their underhanded efforts to seize global power are soon to be pushed aside. They may have access to all this data but how will it be any use to them? You know too well your filing system is only as good as your ability to access it. So however much the ‘authorities’ store, for it to be useful they have to be able to access it efficiently.
As I heard Jordan Peterson explain recently when talking to Piers Morgan about the Post Office scandal (if scandal is a strong enough word), there is so much reliance on new and untested technology he describes it as ‘automated tyranny and wilful blindness into which political bias so easily creeps’.
Of course Digital ID (Tony Blair’s pet subject) and the Digital Currency (which most banks now favour) are the tip of the iceberg. So very convenient for the authorities to be able to monitor and moderate our activities and modify our movements and control pretty much everything we do indirectly with promises of money or more likely threats of less of it. Limits on what we can spend it on and where we can go. Facial recognition advances can even give this system an insight into our moods minute to minute, bearing in mind we are being scrutinised pretty much all of our waking hours.
Niall McCrae pointed out the dangers from your mobile phone in TCW here. It’s already your tracker and your digital ID. His suggestion was to junk it and try to live without it. Trouble is, soon it will not just be a convenient distraction but an essential to access modern life. Think of the things you can only do with it now. Pay for parking, enter certain establishments, travel on public transport and often actually prove who you are.
They are well on the way to total control already in China but this will become a global system. So far, so George Orwell. World Government. Horrid. We are still in the hands of humans. Nasty enough but human nevertheless.
Enter Artificial Intelligence.
We have to remember that Artificial Intelligence is just that: artificial. It will not have been imbued with any human responses or even basic humanity. It will not be intelligent in the human sense. It may be very accurate and concise but it will still base its ideas and activities on how it has been programmed, certainly to start with. That could be worrying enough depending on whether it’s your taste of dictator or not who has done the programming. But as we know these systems work things out for themselves and once they have got sorted they will do their own thinking. Logic follows that the human part of the equation will be the first part that these logical brains see as an unnecessary burden. That could be very unfortunate for the human race and by then it will be too late. Elon Musk touched upon this possible scenario only recently.
AI is the Antichrist in our midst. The only question is, who is the good guy that is coming to save us? Could it be you?