James Poulos

U.S. intercepted Ukraine government messages discussing plot to route money to Biden re-election justthenews.com/government/sec…

FIRST LOOK: Val Kilmer has been resurrected via AI to star in the new movie "As Deep as the Grave." Kilmer was cast in the movie in 2020, five years before his death. But he was too sick amid his throat cancer battle to ever make it to set. Now an AI version of the actor is appearing in the film, with the full blessing of his daughter, Mercedes: "He always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling. This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part.” “He was the actor I wanted to play this role,” says writer-director Coerte Voorhees. “It was very much designed around him. It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the Southwest... His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this. He really thought it was important story that he wanted his name on. It was that support that gave me the confidence to say, okay let’s do this. Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted.” wp.me/pc8uak-1lH1PI

Palantir CTO @ssankar says society is "over-indexed on listening to the inventors of AI," and that the impact of the AI revolution will be determined by the people who wield the technology, not its inventors: "They're very smart, but just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence." "Galileo did not invent the telescope - he used the telescope to discover planetary motion." "The microscope. The power loom. The personal computer. Thing after thing, it's the wielder of the technology that determined its impact on society."

His book has been banned by the Us governement in 2023. A US Space Force officer wrote a thesis at MIT arguing Bitcoin is a weapons system. The Pentagon ordered him to take it down. The book is called SOFTWAR, written by Major Jason Lowery. I managed to get my hands on an original, pre-takedown version. Here are the ideas that apparently made the DoD nervous: → Bitcoin is not a financial technology, it's a weapons system. It is an electro-cyber power projection system, in the same category as armies, navies, and air forces, but for the domain of cyberspace. → The "Power Projection Theory" framework Every military branch exists to secure a domain by imposing severe physical costs on anyone who threatens it. Armies secure land, navies secure sea, air forces secure the sky. Bitcoin, Lowery argues, does this for cyberspace. It imposes real physical cost (energy/watts) on attackers, which no prior cybersecurity system could do. → Every military branch secures a domain by making attacks physically costly. Bitcoin does exactly this for cyberspace, imposing real energy costs on attackers for the first time in history. → Lowery draws on 5,000 years of history to argue that any system based purely on trust and rules eventually gets captured by bad actors. Physical cost is the only reliable constraint. → He calls this new paradigm "softwar": non-lethal, machine-vs-machine energy competition in cyberspace. Tesla predicted something like it in 1900. → His most striking claim: a soft, electro-cyber WW III war may have already started. World leaders do not recognise it because they are expecting the next war to look like the last one. Five concrete policy recommendations for the US government: 1. Stop letting economists set Bitcoin policy. 2. Treat Bitcoin as a cybersecurity asset first. 3. Consider strategic Bitcoin reserves. 4. Protect proof-of-work under the Second Amendment. 5. Recognise that proof-of-stake is a centralised fraud, not a viable alternative. Because the nations that figure this out first will have an asymmetric advantage over those that do not. The book was pulled in July 2023 by DoD. Physical copies now sell for over $300. @JasonPLowery

A hypothetical: 1. In the 2028 election, a Democrat has won. Say that it is Kamala Harris. 2. Using frontier AI systems contracted by the Department of Homeland Security, President Harris orders the creation of a new program for AI to monitor social media and notify the social media platform about posts spreading “misinformation” that “harms homeland and national security by spreading dangerous falsehoods.” 3. Many Republicans see this “misinformation” as core policy positions of their political party. 4. The AI-generated monitoring and notification system described in (2) is designed to conform to the pattern of jawboning exhibited by the Biden Administration in Murthy v. Missouri, where the Supreme Court ruled that people whose social media posts were taken down due to government pressure have no standing to sue. 5. The social media platforms create AI agents that receive the government’s AI generated requests and make decisions in seconds about whether to take down posts, deboost them, deplatform the user, etc. 6. According to very recent Supreme Court precedents, everything I have described falls into “lawful use” of an AI system by all parties involved. A person whose speech was deleted by a social media platform at the request of government does not have standing to sue the government, so long as the government did not threaten policy retaliation against the social media company. And a social media company’s content moderation policies are protected expression. Thus a person whose speech rights were harmed in this context currently has no legal recourse. 7. This is “America’s national security agencies using AI within the bounds of all lawful use.” It is also a wholly automated censorship regime. This is barely a hypothetical. Much of it already happened *under the Biden admin.* The only difference is the use of AI. In the world where this happens, I’d be curious to know whether thoughtful people like @Indian_Bronson would object. If xAI were one of the companies used by the government for the social media monitoring, would you encourage the company to cancel their business with the government? Or would you say they have an obligation to provide their services to the national security apparatus of USG for all lawful use? If you would encourage xAI to cancel their contract with the government, on what principle (not qualitative judgment—universal and timeless principle!) would you distinguish between the DoW’s current insistence on “all lawful use regardless of a private party’s qualms” and xAI’s hypothetical future insistence on “all lawful use regardless of a private party’s qualms”?

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I request that you all please stop what you're doing and read this miracle of a 1987 @omnimagazine interview with Claude Shannon on @internetarchive: - "I am always building totally useless gadgets just because they're fun to make. They have no commercial value but may be amusing." - "I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines." - "I have got a file upstairs of unfinished papers! Ha-ha-ha! But that's true of most of the good scientists I know. Just knowing for ourselves is probably our main motivation." - Omni: "You once created quite a stir by juggling while riding a unicycle through the corridors of Bell Labs!" Shannon: "Yes, I did! Those people are very far-out, but this was something that had never happened in the halls before." - Omni: "Can you imagine a robot president of the United States?" Shannon: "Could be, but I think by then you wouldn't speak of the United States anymore. The world will have a totally different organization."