Tag: Double Down News

All That’s Political Come To Pass

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

With this day comes the final seven day countdown to my last piece on here. In the last day or two I’ll write something self-indulgent about the whole experience but in the mean time I want to use today to mark the end of what feels like a series of pieces on the US election and Trump. Naturally with these words he will do something ridiculous tomorrow and I’ll be left no choice but to comment on it but it would be nice not to allow him to take up the last week of something that is not supposed to be predominantly taken up with politics and especially not Trump.

I would like to draw your attention to a video I discovered by independent media organisation Double Down News. I’ve mentioned them before because I find their videos to be highly agreeable and I want others to agree with them too. It’s called spreading the word or something like that. I’m not someone who spends hours watching videos online, I come across them more then anything, and will always call out people who call watching videos on YouTube ‘research’ or try to use them as evidence of anything. They are an easily accessible medium though and it is no surprise YouTube has become a battleground of sorts.

This short video discusses the issues facing the Democrats and how they’re incapable of dealing with them when their core donors expect a continuation of neoliberal economic and political choices. It discusses the similarities between the Democrats / Labour and Sanders / Corbyn and the self-destructive response from establishment figures within the parties. This feels like a video which successfully encapsulates my beliefs but it’s important for me too to understand whether my beliefs simply encapsulate the ideas put forth in this video and many things I read. Narratives do exist and while we’re capable of conscious thought as well as forming opinions objectively by ourselves, we’re easily convinced of things and it’s not always clear what comes first.

The video is only ten minutes but it is interesting and gives insight into the rumblings inside my head if my previous words over this year haven’t. There won’t be another year to clarify. In fact, there won’t even be anything this time next week. Everything has a time, all things come to pass. That includes political ideologies and that in a way feels like a reassuring thought at the very least.

Artificially Intelligised

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

We’ve all watched or at least know the premise of the Terminator movie franchise. It feeds on a fear we have over the creation of free thinking killer robots. I’m currently watching the series Battlestar Galactica which deals with a similar theme. There are a seemingly infinite number of films or series dealing with this topic to varying degrees of success and infamy. I’ve just watched this video produced by the independent media organisation Double Down News. To suggest it’s intention is to scare you would be unfair but be prepared to be scared.

Worried yet?

What it does do though beyond that is raise an important point on the programming of artificially intelligent robots. It is important to start from the premise that we will not be able to create fully self-aware and conscious robots. We do not understand the brain enough to fully understand consciousness, so being able to create it within a computer programme in actuality is not possible. How the programme is written then is what we need to understand. As the video suggests the computer would be programmed to kill all humans or to convince all humans not to reproduce and ultimately see them die out as a species. Even I could probably write the code for the kill all humans although teaching them to recognise what a human is would be the tough part. Could a computer write that programme, not unless it had been taught the basics in the first place.

It’s the human input we need to be concerned with. The computer may be able to learn but in and of itself it will only learn what and how as it has been programmed. If we want to detach ourselves, it is easy to suggest a little like people. The video raises an interesting point too that I had never considered before. If people can easily create malware to infect your computer, what about the artificially intelligent version of that, or a robot with a virus. We shouldn’t be naïve enough to believe our governments only have our best interests when they produce anything but we should also fear the malware version of an AI robot. What if it simply malfunctions?

And of course there are the nanobots that will land on your head and kill you. Suppressing an unruly populace will be pretty straightforward if you have that kind of technology. As someone who has always romantically believed in the possibility of a good revolution one day that is rather concerning. What then too if someone hacks these miniature killing machines and the virus infecting them leads them to kill everyone. Or more positively the current people in power trying to kill the partisans. Maybe there is hope after all. No matter what one side does it simply forces the other to step up and be creative. Food for thought.