Joe Allen

They are cultivating our society to see artificial intelligence as a kind of necessity, not unlike what we saw with COVID and the vaccines and the masks, not unlike what people see during wartime when one determines who is and isn't inside the society with hard lines drawn.

For now, again, it's a kind of sales pitch.

These people are selling corporations.

They're selling government agencies, schools, even churches.

And of course, they're selling individuals on the idea that AI is the next step in human evolution.

And if you want to remain relevant, you will have to adopt it.

You will have to, in essence, merge your mind with this artificial mind, with this alien mind.

But it doesn't really require a whole lot of paranoid imagination to foresee a world in which that sales pitch becomes a demand.

You see already in China, their AI plus initiative and others in which people are forced, they're mandated to use technology.

algorithmic systems.

They're mandated to take digital identity.

In many provinces, as I understand it, they're mandated to have a smartphone because you can't really function in Chinese society without it.

But if you do, if you do submit, if you do download WeChat, then this whole cornucopia of very convenient goods and services are open to you.

You are free to the extent that you are plugged into the machine.

In a free market society like America, it's more a matter of buy-in.

But in the same way that you see in, say, small to mid-sized southern cities, in which not having a car means you do not participate, or in modern society as a whole, you see this push that without a smartphone, you do not participate.

You can't buy or sell without the mark.

It's not too crazy to imagine a world in which those who have refused to submit to the authority of the machine, of the virtual brain, are pushed so far outside that they really are made irrelevant.

Not because God declared that this was the case.

Not because nature determined that this was the case.