David vs. AI supercomputer Goliath
by Jon Rappoport
October 10, 2017
You can call this an editorial or a “think-piece.” It is about the present and near future. It is about the mightiest of information ops. It is about The Collective.
This is not an article focusing on the Vegas shooting, or on any other mass shooting. This is about how modern propaganda is done. I’m talking about the propaganda that is floated during and after major events—events that magnetize the public and elicit millions of responses online in comments sections, videos, articles, call-ins to talk shows and podcasts.
Giant modern computers have the ability to suck up every scrap of online information. They can analyze the information and then decide what people AREN’T BELIEVING AND AREN’T BUYING.
A major covert op is underway? An official scenario (an extended lie) is being presented to the people? Let’s see what the people are saying about it. Let’s analyze a zillion-zillion bits of online information and see where the propaganda isn’t working.
Then, analysts can come in and do a fix. They can construct new scenarios (lies) and float them and see how well they sell.
Here are a couple of wake-up calls in that regard, from the IBM site promoting the heavy of heavies, the super-duper computer called Watson. Watson can:
“Uncover insights from structured and unstructured data: Analyze text to extract meta-data from content such as concepts, entities, keywords, categories, relations and semantic roles.”
“Understand sentiment and emotion: Returns both overall sentiment and emotion for a document, and targeted sentiment and emotion towards keywords in the text for deeper analysis.”
This is the mission of modern artificial intelligence. Suck up, digest, analyze enormous amounts of information and imply ways of changing public perception.
In a major covert op, there is a great deal of official disinformation and contradiction. Things are not as they seem. On the whole, how is the public reacting to all the official disinfo? Call in AI. Call in the supercomputers. Ask them.
Then, when the answers appear, adjust the ongoing propaganda to fill in the holes and minimize the disbelief. Then, do another massive search and see how the new lies are selling. And so and so forth. In real time.
In the old days, an agency would mount an op, carry it out, and then do after-reports to assess the success or failure of the mission.
Part of that assessment: did our propaganda lies sell well? What were the problems, if any? What can we learn for next time?
That was horse-and-buggy stuff.
Now AI Goliath can make that assessment.
And now, independent media are working against Goliath the AI Computer and its analysis of public perception.
Goliath can defeat human opponents in chess and Jeopardy, but can it defeat independent media?
The game is afoot. The future is open.
The backers and users of Goliath believe they can increase the subtlety and nuance of AI to a point at which all the “clunky” interpretations are gone. Instead, AI will behave and think like a god who understands humans down to their fingertips.
I reject that. I believe humans will always have deeper inner-resources than machines.
No matter how well machines evaluate human responses, there is always more that cannot be anticipated.
In the ancient story, David was smarter than Goliath, who relied on his brute strength to win the day.
The father of modern PR, Edward Bernays, stated: “It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.”
You can scoop up, ingest, and analyze data from 600 million people in the blink of an eye, but when you draw conclusions from those data, you ignore the independent individual and what he can think, investigate, discover, and infer.
He is the ace in the deck. He is where the algorithms stop. He is where the hypnotic disposition doesn’t live. He is where group-think fades out.
This is why the independent individual is all-important.
There is a new fictional TV series, The Wisdom of the Crowd. A super team with supercomputers and software and algorithms solves crimes. Part of the effort (which can obviously pay off) involves fielding reports from many people, a few of whom might have seen the perpetrator or witnesses. But the second aspect of the effort is murky: ask a question to the world online, such as, “Where is the missing child?” Then scoop up the millions of answers, apply an algorithm to these answers, “average” them out, and you’ll come up with something much closer to the truth than if you consulted just one investigator or a few investigators.
This is ludicrous. It assumes a wisdom The Group doesn’t have. It is another Goliath operation.
Goliath is an illusion. He is empty. He is either The Group or he speaks to The Group. In both cases, the individual is absent from the equation.
This remains the problem for all AI reality. It falls short. It can’t gobble up and swallow the mind and imagination of an independent individual.
In my work over the past 30 years, I have seen this “flaw” play out over and over again. The Group fails; the individual wins.
At a cost of billions (or trillions) of dollars, people are programmed to believe the opposite.
Why? Because they actually know or sense the power of the individual. That’s what they have to be “programmed out of.”
That’s called a clue.
Reality points to the pre-eminence of the individual. Massive illusion puffs up and promotes The Group.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Outside the Reality Machine 
Great post, Jon.
Artificial Intelligence has no soul, no brain, no instincts, no imagination, no emotion and no creativity. It works like a robot, programmed from top to bottom. Therefore, it is sort of a slave, whereas, individuals are free.
Maybe you should put a link to this article in your original site, so many more people can see it.
Fleshing out my theory on there being multiple shooters — both human and human-operated drones carrying long rifles…
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/vegas-shooting-concert-workers-phone-footage-wiped-clean-by-fbi/#comment-265894
Your clue is indeed at the core of the mass mind programming. For thousands of years human survival depended upon being accepted by the group, the tribe. This has selected or predisposed people to value membership in the group — to be normal — to be accepted by their peers (however they define their peers). This is a deep drive that most people are only superficially aware of, though it is expressed in the first years of school. Due to its fundamental nature, it can easily be exploited by the elites and used to control the masses.
I agree that the marketing models were originally built for the average, to maximize understanding and targeting of the group. This was where the most profit and data were. In 1990 marketing models started to move to neural networks (AI) and from modeling the mass (as in mass marketing) to modeling peer groups with the goal of one-to-one marketing. The internet has been the Mother Lode vein of a gold mine for collecting information on the individual. The models can sort through the networks of individuals and aggregate similar individuals into groups of thirty to one hundred individuals or more, even if the individuals don’t know each other. That size group of peers gives enough data to build a model and the data is a relatively homogeneous group, therefore the model does a good job of predicting the average behavior for the group which is close to the individual behavior within the group. Models have evolved from simple logistic regression zero/one response models and log-linear value models to hidden Markov models with states determined by the data and transitions between states being used to predict next events. These types of models are used in many places including Google search and Netflix and Amazon recommendation engines.
Now with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites capturing and analyzing every personal detail of millions of willing members, the models have reached into depths of human psyche that were inconceivable in 1990. Pictures can be analyzed for location and context beyond meta data. Post a picture at a restaurant? Capture a poster on the wall behind you? Five years ago they were extracting that poster from the wall to place you at the exact table within the restaurant. You don’t take your smartphone anywhere because you don’t want to be tracked? Doesn’t mean you are not in the background of somebody else’s pictures. Only carry your smartphone for emergencies and leave it off? They still have your smartphone location by triangulation with connected cell towers (even though your phone is off). Eight years ago the hand-off of your smartphone between three towers was sufficient to determine with 85% accuracy where you were going (i.e., which building, store, or restaurant).
If you try really hard to avoid being tracked, then that calls attention to your efforts. It is better to intentionally add randomness to your life. The randomness shows up as “outliers” and the outliers spread, increase the variance, of the data that they are using for predicting and will make them less certain of your true activity.
Tom
“I believe humans will always have deeper inner-resources…”
So do I!
“…there is always more that cannot be anticipated.”
THEIR greatest fear.
“In the ancient story, David was smarter than Goliath, who relied on his brute strength to win the day.”
Ahh, the Ancient MO, that has worked rather well for THEM, since the start.
Watch Kubrick’s 2001. 20 minutes in, the use of a found tibia proves most resourceful.
Please EDIT
20 minutes
To 40.
I sincerely apologise.
I’ll be more careful.
Thank you.