There is so much potential for AI surveillance tools to be abused, and tyranny is on the rise all over the globe.
Every inch of our planet is being watched, and incredibly sophisticated “artificial intelligence solutions” make it possible for those that are watching our planet to find whatever they want in just minutes. You can try to run, and you can try to hide, but if they really want to find you it won’t be very difficult. All around us, a global surveillance prison is being constructed. Even if you completely stay off the Internet and you totally avoid all forms of modern technology, cameras and satellites will still be endlessly watching you. And once your face has been identified, artificial intelligence can be used to locate you wherever you pop up on the entire planet.
Corey Jaskolski is the CEO of an artificial intelligence company known as Synthetaic, and the system that his company has developed is extremely impressive.
According to NPR, it “really can find anything you want anywhere in the world”…
BRUMFIEL: AI has been getting attention for its potential to bring huge changes to lots of different fields in the near future, but the AI revolution in surveillance is happening now. For decades, cameras have been watching over cities, businesses and even homes. But that footage has mainly been stored locally, and reviewing it took a pair of human eyes. Not anymore. AI systems can now hunt for a van in a city, scan license plates and even faces in real time. The system being developed by Synthetaic has many possible uses. An environmental group, for example, is trying to use it to track large livestock operations globally to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Synthetaic’s system really can find anything you want anywhere in the world.
JASKOLSKI: We’ve run searches, as an example, across the entire eastern seaboard of Russia for ships, and we can find every ship in a few minutes. It’s pretty remarkable.
BRUMFIEL: Being able to scan the vast coastline of a nation like Russia is why this kind of technology has caught the eye of big government intelligence agencies. Watching everything that needs to be watched has always been a labor-intensive business. Even in George Orwell’s famous novel “1984,” the all-seeing thought police struggled to keep up.
In the wrong hands, such technology could potentially be used to enforce tyranny on a scale never seen before in all of human history.
I wanted to learn more about Synthetaic, and so I went to their official website, and I discovered that they recently announced “a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft”…
Synthetaic, a leading provider of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, and has announced a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft aimed at revolutionizing AI data and cloud solutions. As part of this agreement, Microsoft is providing Synthetaic access to nearly 1 million hours (about 114 years) of cloud compute resources. This strategic collaboration will unlock a new era of possibilities in computer vision and data analysis, with a wide range of benefits across defense and intelligence, commercial, and non-government agency applications.
This partnership will help significantly accelerate innovation with Synthetaic’s key product, the Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) tool. RAIC, built on Microsoft Azure, enables unparalleled search capabilities through automated data labelling, allowing for the exploration of massive global datasets, without the need for pretraining or structuring. RAIC was instrumental in the tracing of suspected Chinese balloon flights through 18 trillion pixels of Earth observation imagery without a pretrained model using a rough sketch and unlabeled data.
Most people don’t even know that this sort of surveillance technology exists.
And now AI has made it possible for the watchers to seamlessly connect everything that we do online to everything that we do offline…
However, with the advance of the internet and the increased reliance on it to perform many of our daily activities, governments and other commercial companies can monitor everything we do online and connect it – using different ways – to our real identity, creating a complete profile for every internet user. For example, our online purchases, search queries we submit to search engines, social connections, geographical locations we visit, and anything we do online can be recorded and traced back to our real identity.
AI surveillance will allow interested parties to exploit the power of AI to collect and analyze the tremendous volume of data available online and connect it to each person.
However, it is worth noting that surveillance is not limited to people’s online activities; we mean what people do on the internet. For instance, surveillance cameras powered by AI technology can recognize individuals’ faces quickly and track them across the city.
Like I said, there is nowhere to run and there is nowhere to hide.
Of course most of us willingly hand them vast troves of personal information about ourselves anyway.
And the big tech companies are always searching for new ways to extract even more…
Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. You can opt out if you’re proactive, but the company is pushing Link History on users, and the data is used for targeted ads. As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.
The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers “with your browsing activity saved in one place,” rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you’ll “never lose a link again,” Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that “When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies.” The app keeps the toggle switched on in the pop-up, steering users towards accepting Link History unless they take the time to look carefully.
Needless to say, this isn’t just happening on the Internet.
These days, most new vehicles are systematically collecting information about you…
If you own an EV or a “digital car,” you better watch what you say because you might be under total surveillance, and that goes for your passengers as well. What? Your data will be sold, too? Yep. Multiple times to multiple companies. However, there is an easy opt-out fix: “Never buy them, drive them, sit in them, or exist on the street when they drive by.”
When you go to purchase a new vehicle, be very careful to read the fine print.
For example, just check out what anyone that buys a new Subaru is agreeing to…
Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants”, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes.” Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.
Wow.
We have reached a stage where virtually everything that we do is monitored and put in a database somewhere.
And with each passing day, the surveillance prison that is being constructed all around us become even more intrusive.
So where is all of this ultimately going?
We might want to think about that, because we are moving into one of the most chaotic periods in all of human history.
There is so much potential for AI surveillance tools to be abused, and tyranny is on the rise all over the globe.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.