Any Political Solution to the crisis we are in must develop and grow from our communities and grassroots; NOT from any existing Party that still wants to rule everyone Top-Down
One of the key problems with UK Politics today is that it operates as almost the mirror image of wider culture, where most people fall into the trap of believing that their own perspective is the right one. But that anyone with an alternative view of any kind – even in just the smallest of ways, is or will be fundamentally wrong about everything else, too.
Yes, you could easily argue that this is how tribes and groups work.
But politics or rather the UK political system is supposed to be about delivering public policy that is created and then implemented in the best interests of ALL British People.
The one thing that we can be sure of is that when it comes to the political classes who have been running Westminster and our local Councils for decades, there is very little about any of it – apart from the Election campaigns, that has anything to do with or what is best for us.
As I have been discussing in some of my recent blogs, time has now run out for the way that government and our economic system runs. Neoliberalism and everything such as MMT, FIAT money, and the increasingly illogically impractical schemes like Net Zero and everything that pushes people and businesses into being reliant on credit are no longer sustainable.
That is why everything is now in the process of crashing around the Labour Government’s head.
Yes, the politicians in power are incompetent.
No, the mess we are in didn’t begin the day after Labour were elected to power and Starmer arrived in No.10.
And No, not Labour, nor the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, Reform or any other group of politicians currently looking ahead to the next General Election are going to offer and deliver to us anything different. Certainly not in any way that the UK actually needs.
For a time, I was open to the idea that Reform could find itself pursuing a different way. One that would offer the cross-tribal consensus and answers that the UK now needs.
Instead, it has become clear that the mechanics of this 4th evolution of the anti-EU movement certainly hasn’t moved on in any kind of people-centric direction.
Instead, Reform is just reforming itself, but in ways that have a very familiar likeness to political parties that have been in power before, who have increasingly aligned themselves and been led by the machinations of the establishment instead.
The mess over Rupert Lowe and the inescapable optics suggesting that at every level of the Reform Party, the whole thing is all about Nigel Farage, really does speak volumes for itself.
That’s before taking the time to read the outpourings of words from former party activists and ‘officers’ who have recently walked away. Just like better known voices associated with Reform such as those of Howard Cox and Ben Habib.
If any of the names instantly trigger feelings that suggest you have taken a side as you read – no matter the reason, it is exactly that kind of emotion that is our collective problem.
Disagreement over the smallest of things shuts so many of us down to the reality that we all have views about different things that we might never agree on. But when it comes down to all the things that are actually important, there is an awful lot of commonalities between all of us to be found.
Difficult to hear though it might be, it is the division that is deliberately sown between us over issues that we do have in common – by them being presented in ways that make them appear and trigger us as if they are something else – that really plays into the hands of the incompetent political classes that we regrettably have.
As things stand, and without a lot of us choosing to approach our relationship with politics very differently, the same people dividing us and guiding us to hate people we should not have any hate for, are set to keep guiding the ship that we are all beginning to sink on. And they will happily continue to do so, until the whole thing actually goes down.
Westminster is just the tip of the ruling iceberg that we can actually see.
Behind central government sits all the things like power, influence and the wealth accumulation that money controls and which is carefully kept outside of open view.
Because the truth is that the only people who benefit from us continuing to elect politicians who are under the spell of the establishment are those politicians and all those who are benefiting from the continuation of the establishment itself.
Whilst there is very good reason to believe that the wheels could fall off this broken bus at any moment in time, for those who have been aware and watching the direction of travel of the UK (and for that matter the whole of the Western world) for a considerable period of time, both the Global Financial Crisis and then the responses to the Covid Pandemic could, and arguably should, have already been the catalysts that introduced a genuinely new way of doing governance to the UK.
That these two massive events didn’t doesn’t indicate that change cannot or will not come.
The fact that we have been led to believe that what the politicians have done in response is in any way normal just tells us even more about how deeply embedded those who genuinely believe or work with this Top-Down, them vs us culture really are, right across the establishment.
We can see just how far they are prepared to take things in their attempts to stop the whole thing from crashing down, even now. Indeed, they are growing so desperate to maintain The System, they are even attacking the people who their ‘tribe’ have always typically helped.
Whilst the talk of absolutes will certainly sound like a contradiction to the words used as I began writing this Blog above, the one dividing line that we really do have no choice but to observe and then decide upon, is which side we sit between the establishment and all it stands for, and on the other side, the people and what putting people, our communities and the environment surrounding the places where we live and work, first.
Whilst even the Tories are successfully making themselves sound very plausible, just 8 months on from losing power, in the context of everything that the Labour Government is doing wrong, none of these political parties – and that almost certainly now includes Reform, show any sign of genuinely offering an alternative to establishment-directed public policy today.
However, it isn’t today and what is now past that we need to worry about. The most important thing is the future, and specifically what happens when we reach the next General Election and what must be ‘our time’.
The UK and we as its people cannot afford another General Election result that delivers power to any group – whether elected directly, or assembled as a result of some kind of post-election ‘deal’, that then goes on to do whatever the hell it likes.
No political party out there today, currently canvassing for votes in this years Local Elections is offering to do anything in any different kind of way.
We know this, because the way that they are running their election campaigns right now; how they are communicating and most importantly, how they are engaging with real people outside the bubbles of their own members and activists, is exactly the same as it has always been before.
To put it bluntly, we can no longer afford to take the risk that comes with accepting a choice of political candidates in any election, that not us, but the political parties themselves actually choose.
Change will not come in the way that we now so desperately need it, if we keep on doing politics at every level in the UK in exactly the same way!
It is our communities and the people who are around us every day who should be selecting the people who will represent us at all levels of government.
Not people we don’t know beyond the pictures, websites, social media and TV screens.
We need public representatives to represent us who have genuine skin in our game. People who are answerable only to us and who are committed to delivering locality-centric democracy, that is the only way that democracy can genuinely thrive, survive and most importantly, work.
Whilst government and the public sector really do now need to undergo massive change, the reality is that our communities could be working together to select and elect non-party candidates in all elections, right now.
We certainly don’t need any kind of change to the electoral system that just favours the election of more incompetent candidates. Ambitious and self-serving politicians whose actions will be made even worse by the guaranteed requirement for compromise on public policy that schemes like Proportional Representation as a replacement for First Past the Post would bring.
Power MUST come back to the people. Not through carefully crafted labels like ‘devolution’ and ‘devolved power’ that is nothing more than Regional Centralisation sold to us with a very misleading name.
The power – OUR POWER is already ours and that power can be made to work for us right now. IF we choose to use it. Look beyond the manufactured differences. And focus on working together, on the important things that we all have in common, and to deliver a new world and way of being that is happy, healthy, safe, secure and governs life with fairness, balance and justice for us all.
Anyone can begin this process of change and the appointment of new candidates to become the public representatives and politicians who will create and deliver our new future, right now. And we need them to, IF we are going to experience beneficial change.
That change will only be certain if we all change the way that we think. What we can be sure of, however, is that a good future for us all doesn’t and will not start where anything ‘new’ for the politicians and voices that we already recognise as public figures begins.
The ‘Great Reset’ is just 1 of at least 3 resets underway. We should all consider what the desperate attempts to reset the world actually mean
Everyone knows we are in a mess. We just can’t agree why
We are awakening to the reality that a conspiracy theory is no longer a theory and is certainly no longer a conspiracy, once everyone can see that whatever it is, is actually true.
There is much to ponder over the question of the ‘Great Reset’. In terms of who or what is resetting anything; why they are trying to reset it and what it will mean if any of them actually turn out to be successful.
As many of us are likely to realise painfully, very soon, the intended forms of ‘reset’ or ‘resets’ that are underway – and there are arguably at least 3, are relying on a lot more chance than they are anything that resembles any modicum of control.
Collectively, we may soon begin to realise that these planned ‘resets’ were just the manifestations of different forlorn hopes of what was once the very same new world order, now falling to bits as it loses control.
‘They’ know the game is up. That’s why ‘they’ are trying to ‘reset’
‘It was good whilst it lasted’ should be very much at the forefront of the minds of everyone with power, stood in front of their mirror, who is desperately trying to carve out a new future led by themselves today. Rather than whatever the sense of entitlement to continuing power and the accompanying delusions of grandeur that they are actually holding now.
You will not need me to explain how today’s media and the narratives that they so religiously convey would never share how vulnerable the establishment is now feeling. Nor any of the truths and therefore unspoken secrets that would actually explain to everyone how everything within the system does indeed work.
On this basis, you may also therefore be able to understand and appreciate that the last thing that anyone with power and influence wants the general public to know, is just how fragile everything currently is. How close things have been to collapse for a number of years, and how the almost constant flow of policy decisions and steps being taken that we are experiencing are actually a clear sign that the establishment is now in a very serious mess.
In real terms for us, the existing world order will continue to exist until the precise moment that it cannot convince the majority of us that it is there, still functioning and in control of everything, anymore.
Those who we are about to look at in more detail have known or been aware that ‘the game is up’ for a long while. Yet they are now in the process of attempting to create and implement a new world or new world order systems, that they then intend to lead and control.
World governance looks like a massive race against time. However, the reality is that they are all racing against events, forces, factors or whatever you feel comfortable calling factors, that are way outside of their control.
Reset 1: The reset that won’t reset the world as we know and generally accept it in the way they want
First in the list of the three resets, is what many will have heard and what those labelled as ‘conspiracy theorists’ celebrate as ‘The Great Reset’.
The Great Reset is being pursued, pushed, demanded and implemented by those involved with and aligned with the WEF (World Economic Forum).
In terms of the government and establishment figures who are ‘in on it’, the WEF ‘plan’ and what we now know as The Great Reset has, for a long time, been the only real ‘reset’ game in town.
There is so much that I could write about the realities of what ‘the few’ who sit beyond Western democracies and effectively ‘pull the strings’ of many different governments have done, that it would probably take many different books to get even remotely close to the detail.
The WEF are the group that we usually hear most about early each year, when the great and the good fall over themselves to head to Davos for a big meeting. Where it seems like an endless number of private jets, flown by everyone who is preaching at us to go green and look exactly the same get lined up.
These are the people who are responsible for the way that public policy has actually been formed and implemented for over 50 years, as part of a strategy or plan that has always been about a them and us approach to world governance.
These are the governing elites who use and manipulate existing ‘democratic’ systems to make what they are doing look legitimate.
They use a top-down hierarchical approach, that we believe to be all that it says, because elected representatives are technically still in charge.
Those who really understood neoliberalism and what the adoption of a FIAT money system, alongside the deregulation and manipulation of laws and rules to favour big business and profiteering that is under their control, also knew from the start that the life of the system it was driving was finite and that the wealth divide that it would necessarily create would eventually become too wide for even the uneducated not to see for all that it was.
Tools such as the EU (which has never been in anyway democratic but has been able to hide behind nationally elected governments so that it can perpetuate the lie that it has) have deliberately chipped away at the mechanisms, infrastructure and governance of sovereign nations. So that borders and basically anything that can give identity to people, groups and communities – i.e. the tools which are necessary for independence – have not only been removed, but then destroyed, so that there is little or no way back for any kind of revival of sovereign states, once they have been absorbed by whatever was supposed to come next.
What they didn’t bank on, was that the financial and monetary system would unravel in the way and with the speed that it has – helped in no small part by the responses of inept politicians to Covid and the War in Ukraine – and that events have now reached a point where the whole bus is about to go over the cliff, without the necessary tools of unquestioned societal control being anywhere near in place.
The front and belief that these people have not only had, but exerted through the governments that they have basically controlled for many years has been breathtaking.
In the majority of respects, all that they have been doing has been almost perfectly hidden in plain sight. Not least of all because control of the narratives and the media that share them with us has meant that the harm they have inflicted upon our own people as a consequence of their actions has been hidden. Whilst the impact of their behaviour on entire nations and peoples beyond their direct and desired sphere of influence has never been openly acknowledged or exposed to the people unwittingly under their control.
Here in the UK, people cannot earn enough to actually live on what the establishment dictates to be the Minimum Wage and the growing infliction of poverty amongst our own people, so that this grand strategy can be pursued, is troubling enough.
However, in many different countries abroad, the way that they and their kind have used money, markets, commodities and even wars to achieve these nefarious ends have not gone unnoticed.
With some of the more recent steps, that have simply taken things too far, there is a growing group of countries that have been considered to be outside the exclusive club that has been the West, that now see and have been actively working towards the implementation of their alternative choice of reset.
Reset 2: BRICS and a very unhappy world beyond ‘The West’
If you already think that what you are reading here is the stuff of conspiracies, it is more than likely that you also accept and take at face value, everything that the media tells us about events and what is happening in countries and across the world beyond what we know as the West.
The western narratives certainly don’t entertain or make suggestion at any level that our governments and the big businesses that are based across the west and which are traded here, have been exploiting every resource that they could capture control of. Simply by manipulating foreign governments, replacing them or invading sovereign states and taking over so that they can do pretty much the same thing.
Where the Western ‘few’ have done this already and taken all that they could through other ‘acceptable’ means, they have then artificially lowered, raised and even held prices of commodities, precious metals and currencies within the markets that they control, so that anything that these vested interests that are based in the west have needed to pay for has always been available to them for less.
This in itself is in no small contributing part to why the west is hated as much as it is.
The reality that we all face is that no matter how little we have been aware of what the establishment and those who control it have been doing ourselves, the people from these other countries who have suffered and gone without so that the few from the west can profit from them, don’t see any of us as being different from those who are actually responsible.
One of the most horrid parts of the whole sordid affair that the majority of populations right across the world do share in common, is that the only way that the western few have been able to do all that they have done, is by having created and implemented a financial, monetary and economic system that has effectively provided them with money that isn’t real and therefore money that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.
They have then used this money to buy up land, resources, infrastructure and even businesses that it would have been impossible for them to have done so otherwise.
Growing numbers of these countries from outside of the west have been progressively working together.
In recent years they have created another international group or body that you may have heard of which is called BRICS.
Two years on, I understand that the currency now has a name and is called The Unit; that it has already been tested in electronic or digital form, and that whilst Asian Countries in particular have been using the price suppression that our governments have stupidly played along with to hoover up and transport massive quantities of precious metals to the Far East, the BRICS Nations are also working towards the launch of a grain (and commodities) trading exchange.
Those who have been watching the evolution of BRICS will attest to the reality that very little of this was even on the cards during the last Trump Administration.
The ‘final straws’ have appeared and in turn broken the camel’s back, in the form of US Foreign Policy during the Biden Term. Which not unlike the actions of the Labour government in the UK today aren’t just an isolated one-off whose actions can be corrected once they are gone.
The policies that these governments have enacted are in fact the end of a very long downward chain of decisions that have been made to benefit and most recently save the skins of a few vested interests. Rather than being about anything to do with what is in the best interests of the people that they actually represent.
Any or all of the systems that BRICS are known to be building or working on have the potential to create financial and market chaos across the whole of the West and not just the USA, potentially within days if not hours of them being launched.
However, as plausible and as well thought out as these plans might be with the aim of effectively switching market and financial power to the East from the West, they do rely on what may prove to be the naïve idea that everyone in the West will simply accept the change and willingly step aside.
The real risk of a financial, market and economic collapse in the West, that is precipitated by BRICS systems or similar, is what western governments decide they (and therefore what we) should do in response, as the first thing that BRICS would almost certainly do is expose the systems that we have as not being in anyway real.
That means that we will have a critical emergency when it comes to the need for real leadership to step in and do whatever we will then need to do.
Reset 3: Trump is too Trumpian, too Late and too much of the same
Barely two months into the second Trump Administration and the flurry of headlines that policies such as DOGE have created, the noise and many distractions being caused are taking much of our attention away from the events that are unfolding around the world.
There is very little discussion or thought regarding what the result or outcome of Trumps ‘strategy’ will be. Not only in the long term. But critically within perhaps just the weeks and months that lie immediately ahead.
Many cannot see and fewer can accept that recent US Democrat Administrations under Clinton, Obama and Biden were all very much geared towards pushing a system that Trump appears to be destroying, overtly for all the ‘bad reasons’ that can be seen such as open immigration and woke policy.
Unfortunately, all those things that people didn’t like about the Biden Administration and those that contributed before, as well as all the recent governments in the UK, were just side effects or symptoms of everything bad in the centre. A direction of travel that has long since required growing chaos in all directions, so that the policies can be delivered which were their priority or genuine choice all along.
Politicians who are owned by self-interest and greed are all doing whatever it is that they believe necessary to keep the ‘Moneyocracy’ afloat.
It just looks different across different countries. Because the systems in each country are still different enough for a different approach to be required, IF they are to succeed in making the ultimate end game work.
In real terms, this means that the core direction is simply being rewrapped and represented differently wherever it is possible to do so, so that enough people will hopefully accept this ‘new’ way of doing things, until the real truth of even that is then exposed.
Regrettably for us in the UK, we are much further down the road than even the US.
Whereas Trump is doing plenty that gives the impression that it his reset is not only different, but that it will work and it will be beneficial, the situation here is that we are knocking on the door of the Inn that we have been desperately looking for, just as the sign goes up outside to say no vacancies and the landlord is calling ‘Time!’
Money has no real value, yet we have made it worth everything, whilst everything with real value has been made worthless by money
If you’ve read this far and the story that is unfolding is making any level of sense, you will also have some idea of the mess that we are in.
Not because all of these things are happening – because they certainly are. But because the next thing that comes to mind when you can see and accept the problem is that as things stand, there also doesn’t appear or feel like there’s any way out.
In my recent eBook Your Beliefs Today Create Everyone’s Experiences Tomorrow we journeyed through the opportunity to consider the different perspectives that everyone has; those perspectives that groups of people share; how shared perspectives are then perceived differently, and then what this all adds up to, or rather could add up to in the bigger scheme of things.
What is now beginning to become ever more apparent to anyone paying close attention to events that are happening around the world – and not just on our ‘accepted’ media channels, is that there are common themes amongst all the different experiences that we have.
These common themes demonstrate that everyone outside of the elite and ruling classes have many things in common that are being overlooked, missed and hidden by everything that the establishment has done and is still doing to create divides.
Money and the importance that it has as the tool that the establishment uses to manipulate, control and basically con the entire population is also the common factor with the elite groups or amongst the VVIPs whose fights are now breaking into the open as they take whatever steps they consider necessary on what they believe is their own respective pathways to control.
To summarise:
1. The WEF/UN/Known western establishment ‘Great Reset’ is falling apart because the elites involved have lost control of the FIAT driven monetary, economic and financial systems. Not least of all because they have either abused or failed to adhere to their own rules.
The UK could easily prove to be the first domino that falls because of the actions of the current Labour government that appear to have snapped into even closer alignment with the ‘plan’.
Whereas many other Western countries are openly resisting in what has manifested generally along more ‘right wing’ lines.
2. The BRICS ‘reset’ has been building, developing and evolving outside and beyond of our mainstream news view – even though you are likely to have heard BRICS mentioned at various times.
From the information available by doing web searches, watching and listing to podcasts that are available, it is becoming clear that whatever BRICS is going to do with a new currency, grain and commodities trading, and the precious metals that offer a very different and potentially anchored approach to whatever it will be that BRICS does, it could be launched and begin to create chaos across the Western world as we know it very soon.
3. The Trump ‘reset’ has been underway since the 20th of January 2025 when the returning President of the United States was sworn in and the new Administration got straight to work.
Trump’s reset is an attempt to shed or eject all of the bad and damaging policies and issues that were created overtly by the Biden Administration and to remove all the issues that people have not taken kindly to, such as woke ideology and everything that is currently being presented as being in a mess.
What is not so clear is that the plans being followed are also about retaining US hegemony and the status of the US Dollar as the ‘worlds reserve currency’, pretty much with the approach and thinking that bullying and bulldozing will overcome the resistance of a lot of very pissed off countries that will very quickly snap back into line.
Unfortunately, just with the example of the BRICS nations alone, we can already see that they see a pathway to their independence from the existing world order, and there is little to suggest that they will be happy to welcome it back – just because Trump is demanding otherwise.
***
It is reasonably safe to conclude that a system collapse precipitated by any or all of these 3 resets or indeed any other, will reach way beyond the scope of just the financial, economic and monetary systems themselves.
This is why our cultural focus upon money and the way that it has become the value mark for everything in life is not only dangerous. But has the potential to invite change and the chaos that goes with it on a level that has never been witnessed before.
If you were to have a conversation with a handful of different people and ask them for their view on the problems and what their solutions to those problems would be, it is unlikely that any of them would respond in a way that suggests that the existing monetary system and the way that we value money would be at its core. Even if they were to make suggestions that might at first glance appear to address the problems as they see them.
Even economists and highly regarded academics and researchers would fall into this category.
They share what we might call a situational bias that reaches across society and currently refuses to accept that the basis of what people are comfortable with (or benefit from) within the current system, would not or rather could not exist anymore.
It is important for those seeking solutions to understand that problems such as the exploding welfare bill, increasing poverty, the reliance upon debt and how it is considered ‘normal’, along with replacing jobs with new tech and AI are and would remain symptomatic of resets 1 and 3, with things likely to become worse much more quickly, if any collapse should be driven by a BRICS takeover.
Whilst any or all of the resets continue and appear to work, society as we know it will function less and less as we have known it – or at least not for the majority of the Western population whilst changes made under the resets favour some at much higher cost to many more.
Ultimately however, none of the resets can work permanently because of the disparity that they will cause. With even the BRICS reset working on the basis that it would switch one type of world dominance which is wholly unfair and unjust, for a completely different one which would only appear to be a switch of places for the specific VVIPs and elites who are involved ‘at the top’.
Moving away from chaos
Regrettably, it is very difficult and probably impossible to convince enough people that the way we are living, with the priorities that we have, is not only unsustainable and inflicting potentially great harm on everyone’s future. But that it is also only really benefiting the VVIPs and the elites, with the perceived material benefit to everyone else always proving to be transitory at best.
This means that things either have to crash, or other unforeseen events will need to take place that effectively result in the same thing and same experience for everyone, before enough of us will accept that the time has arrived for change and that change will not resemble anything like we have known before.
Until that point of acceptance, the elites and the VVIPs will retain control and continue to pursue every avenue possible to maintain and keep them in control.
Chaos will be the immediate result and the inevitable next step, with the alternative then being a power grab from opportunists who will prove to be even worse than the pathways of the 3 resets that we have now. OR the people and our communities can step up, take back power and determine the future for ourselves.
This is the only kind of ‘reset’ that we should ever allow or have.
As you read through the pages of this blog or read the eBooks that are available and recognise the story unfolding and the different parts that we can all see, you may be able to step back and observe the reality that those who ‘take from the state’ are the easiest for everyone else to blame.
No matter their background or reason for being dependent upon the State, Benefits Claimants have become scapegoats and little more than everyone else’s ‘guilty bastards.
Worst of all, they have now become a very easy target for those who are actually responsible for everything that is going wrong with the UK, to project their own guilt and fear upon.
For anyone receiving benefits when they could or would rather be ‘paying their own way’, being anywhere near the Benefits System, the many organisations that work within and around it, and being within the exploding sub-class of our society currently being gaslit by the financial benchmark of the National Minimum or Living Wage; life is a fearful, emotionally and practically challenging living hell.
Given the nature of the announcements due to be made as part of the Spring Statement this Wednesday and what we already know is on the way from the October ’24 Budget, I will expand here on 5 of the most important points of what being within or touched by the Benefits System means to many of those whose lives are touched by it:
1. It costs more to live than the Minimum or Living Wage allows
The elephant in the room that is the cost-of-living crisis, is this:
What we currently accept as being the National Minimum Wage or Living Wage, isn’t anywhere near enough for a single person without any parental, caring or partner responsibilities, to live independently without top-up benefits, help from charities (foodbanks), going into debt or raiding savings.
2. Working on the Minimum Wage means you still need help
People working in Minimum Wage jobs in the UK, cannot earn enough, working a 40-hour week, to pay their own way.
Those on Minimum Wage cannot live independently, without still having to jump through the hoops and requirements that come from being a benefit claimant; from ‘qualifying’ to get emergency food packages from Foodbanks; by going into debt using credit cards, loans or pay-day-credit type schemes; or by falling back on family or friends for handouts, just to make ends meet.
3. Being on benefits is no breeze: Welfare cuts are an act of increasing cruelty when many just want safe-to-climb ladder to escape
Being on benefits means being treated like you are someone else’s guilty bastard and like you are the one who is in the wrong.
The staff in jobcentres (understandably) often don’t really want to be there. They are regularly exposed to some of the UKs most unhappy people. When they themselves are at the cutting edge of a Benefits System that has ALREADY removed all sense of humanity from its heart and behaves like it already runs with the dehumanisation that we can expect from universal AI that is being introduced for all the wrong reasons.
People who are not working or who have personal issues that have made them dependent upon benefits often feel vulnerable.
They suffer from the lowered levels of confidence that any form of unexpected or inescapable vulnerability brings. Even before they contact Jobcentres, the Benefits Office or any other organisations that provides the different services and offerings that provide income and support that comes from the public purse.
Some active claimants do use anger and exhibit loud forms of frustration. But this is often a self-protection mechanism and way to try and secure what they need from the System.
Sadly, these few are the stereotype upon which much of the prejudiced behaviour towards those on Benefits that reaches far beyond DWP staff is formed.
The profit-led private contractors who provide ‘back to work’ or ‘welfare to work’ services and ‘support’ are no better.
The tick-box culture that is applied universally towards anyone whose existence touches the welfare purse is one where claimants are considered capable of working if they tried, and therefore there because they choose to be.
Once through the turnstile of the benefits door, benefits claimants are considered worthless.
Nobody operating or administering the benefits system from within is prepared to look at anyone asking for help as being anything other than the same.
The Benefits system is inherently cynical and labels everyone who doesn’t work as being in the benefits queue as a lifestyle choice.
Unless benefits claimants possess a CV or situation which would be strong enough to indicate that they wouldn’t even be there in the first place, the experience of being just within the benefits system itself quickly takes its toll. Once inside, it is a downwards spiral for many where there is no genuine escape, even if you find a way to leave.
Politicians may indeed be openly questioning the number of unemployed who there because of mental health issues.
But beyond the torture of what it takes for growing numbers to keep up with a financial and money-centric culture that demands everyone keep up, the constant hits that come from being in ‘the system’ and treated like you are sub human by those who do and can work, makes for a progressively difficult challenge, that in the situation we all face today, has come down to little more than lucky breaks for the many who do want to escape.
4. Very few want to be on benefits – Living independently on a basic wage is key
I mentioned the angry and the frustrated above.
These are the people that hide behind a mask and fight the contact that they have with the Benefits System, because it’s what they believe they have to do, to survive.
Yes, many receiving benefits suggest openly and behave with a sense of entitlement. But this is the situation that decades of poor politicians – and therefore that we all have created, because of the responsibility that we all have, for appointing the politicians who have created, developed and maintained the mess that the UK is now in.
The stories of people who cannot step out of the benefits trap, because they cannot afford to do so, are also true.
There is something perverse about a situation where claimants will not take the risk of taking jobs and opportunities because of how they will be treated by the benefits system and what support they will lose immediately if and when they take those steps to get out.
Unless they cannot work because of other commitments or they find themselves genuinely unable to do so, there are few Benefits Claimants who have entered or remain within the Benefits System by choice.
5. A Minimum Wage that is guaranteed to be a Living Wage would change everything
Another truth that we have turned a blind eye to, is that many people who cannot do so currently, would be very happy to be working in Minimum Wage jobs IF they actually paid what its costs to live independently.
Many people would choose to work in Minimum Wage jobs, in receipt of a wage that they could live independently on. Because their only working responsibility or responsibility to others would then be to do what they are asked for the time that they are at work.
Many of us would be very happy just to work a working week and at the same time earn enough so that all of the bills and the essentials that it takes to live an independent and self-sustaining life today are paid for. Just as long as we don’t then have to go looking for and making ourselves vulnerable to anyone or anything else, reaching out for help, just to make ends meet.
In the days ahead, the Spring Statement that will be made to the Westminster Parliament by the UK Chancellor is likely to usher in mayhem of a kind we have never seen. Cuts to the Civil Service and Welfare Payments sit alongside taxation policies announced in the October ’23 Budget that should be flying red flags for many more of us than those who are ready to see, warning us about the mess the UK – and the World – are now in.
All for the love of money
The financial, economic or monetary system we have was designed by people who understood the following:
The power of money isn’t in the value of money itself. The power of money lies in what people without money can be convinced to believe the value of having money will be.
In the period running up to the ending of the Gold Standard, the launch of FIAT, GDP and tools like the (EU) Common Market, failing politicians who were desperate for control, power and the money they needed to spend on getting (re)elected, were easy to convince that FIAT and the tools that MMT and Neoliberalism had value, for us all.
The creation of a money system that wasn’t backed by gold or linked to anything with tangible value opened a world of possibilities.
Because at the bottom line of the whole balance sheet, money was always going to be worth whatever the people controlling that money said it was.
Naturally, the politicians didn’t really think about who would actually be in control of the money, as the real political pay-off was the way that the creation of money by banks and finance houses kept the true workings of everything far away from public view.
Creating the myth of credibility within shared systems
Through the adoption and regard of GDP as an accepted international economic benchmarking system, any money or unit of currency created by a private bank or finance house and introduced to the economy as loans or finance can be counted over and over multiple times.
Every unit (Pound, Dollar, Euro etc) adds another multiple of its original created value as it passes through each transaction or link in a supply chain, with the monitoring and publication of GDP recording output and growth that was really never there.
Total GDP figures are themselves then used to devalue or rather hide the debt that politicians incur through public spending, which is published as a percentage of what is required to be permanently growing GDP.
Traditional public spending is itself ‘dead money’. Because public service supply chains are typically short and revolve around providing public servants income and earnings.
The attraction for politicians to let the MMT genie out of the bottle was that they would be able to use money that they could borrow, rather than what they would have to obtain through raising taxes, to gain and maintain their power by buying votes. All with policies that they would not be able to afford or win support for in any other way.
The deregulation that was necessary – presented to all of us as ‘free markets’ – was never about freedom of small business in the sense that many even today believe.
Free markets are about giving freedom to big corporations and financial titans to set their own rules and control everything to do with money.
The freedom they have gained through deregulation has then dictated what the money they created can then buy. So that they could do whatever they want, take whatever they want and control whatever they want.
They knew that in time, the bogus system they created would eventually allow them to take over anything and everything that offered independence to anyone or anything that could provide a morally legitimate alternative to what they dictate would be our culture and way of life.
The big downside for every part of government and the ambitious and inept political classes who have blundered along whilst this has all unfolded using their signatures, is that they themselves have been manipulated, controlled and duped by the same interests that we have been conditioned by all along.
Politicians now go cap in hand to borrow from money creators who are always willing to use more of the false money that has enriched them to buy up the bonds the Government Treasury ‘sells’ them so that they can then charge interest on the money they gave the Government that doesn’t exist, but that we see made ‘real’ by our puppet politicians in the form of Public Borrowing.
The Credit Trap (For people)
Growing this system and measuring ‘growth’ is dependent upon the amount of money outside of the public accounts:
That has been added to circulation (the total volume of money that is known to exist in bank accounts or as cash) that can be realised or moved around, and
The multiples that can be added by the movement of that money, each time that it changes hands in a way that can be recorded through GDP.
This means that credit or money creation has become more important than traditional forms of production – which have historically been the source of value creation; and that these forms of production needed to be absorbed by the new system, so that everything within every supply chain could be leveraged – no matter the real cost to us all – so that they could force the creation of more new money or credit in some way.
As you begin to understand how valuable consumerism and everything that feeds it, such as mass production, globalisation, rent, leasing, subscription and licensing has become, you can also see how what is arguably the biggest and perhaps the perfect crime enacted against humanity, has really played out.
Through the necessity dictated by its need for ‘growth’ and now survival, The System has relied upon developing new and ever more inventive ways to force the masses into borrowing and the use of credit.
Using politicians and the law, we have deliberately been led and in some cases pushed away from owning resources, earning enough or having any kind of financial independence (including the use of cash) of our own.
The Credit Trap (for governments)
The growing value of the public debt was never intended to be paid off using this system.
It couldn’t be, because all of the natural forms of production and infrastructure that the population, normal businesses and even government once owned have steadily been sold off, moved and even rented back to us.
All so that those who used fake money to trap us all, could use the material wealth that they had bought and accumulated with fake money, to force us to borrow even more of that non-existent fake money, so they could gain increasing control over everything and make even more.
Our currency has become worth less and less in proportion to the value of the money that the banks and finance houses have been creating, which itself has been increasing from the start.
Unfortunately, all this has meant that as the assets and genuine productive value of the UK economy have been increasingly stripped away.
Government at every level – like all of us, has been left with less and less in terms of options to find money or income in any alternative way – because there is basically less and less happening in terms of independent production that remains available to be taxed!
The basic equation that politicians and government can no longer accommodate is this:
Privately or corporately created money and its circulation through increasing growth MUST always eclipse public spending for The System to keep working.
That is why everything we know and understand about the role of money, our access to it and our use of it has moved towards credit and debt creation that allows the flow of created or printed money at a level previously never known, that has then been used to finance the takeover of everything that has followed.
This is why we are now in the mess that we are in.
The System was always destined to fail. The only question was when
Public spending could be argued as having been out of control from the very beginning of this ‘system’.
Even economists believe that The System is genuine, because for no better reason than the subjectivity within the realms of an intergenerational period of time, it can certainly be argued that it does.
However, the realities of a system with malfeasant legitimacy were hidden so well by what remained of the ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ system for the first two to three decades, that politicians really had a honeymoon period.
Once bedded in, and the turmoil that followed adoption of the new system and what it really meant in the 70’s was complete, Politicians believed they could increasingly do whatever they wanted and didn’t see any danger hidden in everything they were being advised and influenced to do.
In reality, it was only the level of our Politicians own stupidity that could prevent them from getting successive wins, within The System of the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s as it then was.
The real turning point when everything should and could have gone a different way was the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 (Which has quietly been renamed The Great Recession) – when the stupidity and recklessness of the bankers own making through the actions of their employees and systems should have brought the whole system down.
The System was saved because the entire establishment by then depended upon it to survive.
Everyone with responsibility for the way everything we should be able to rely upon working for us, was already in it up to their necks.
The volume of cash created to bail out the banks in response to the impact of the GFC removed any real question over whether the existing financial system has any moral backbone or grounding in reality or not.
The fact that public borrowing being used to refinance private banks was accepted as being ‘normal’ in the way that it was, does indeed tell anyone looking on objectively, all they need to know about where the real priorities within The System lay.
The Politicians, establishment and bankers we so emboldened by the idea that they had got away with that one, it really didn’t take much for those in power, but without the skills, experience or leadership skills they all should have, to abuse the situation even further to get themselves out of a blind panic the very moment that the Covid Pandemic arrived in early 2020 and people began to die.
The explosion in unnecessary public spending, in response to the Covid Pandemic and then everything to do with the War in Ukraine that has followed, have contributed exponentially to the situation we see today and are key contributors to the fiscal decisions that the UK Chancellor and the Labour Government behind Keir Starmer is taking now.
UK government no longer has the ability to pay for all the public services that we need. Because private money creation and the ‘growth’ in credit is no longer high enough to hide everything that government needs to do.
The historic or traditional forms of production that the UK once excelled in and led the world with no longer exist to create either the value and therefore the money flow (through taxes etc) in any other meaningful or visibly legitimate way.
Our Armageddon is already here, today
The reason that so much of this is breaking into the open now, isn’t a warning of what will come if we don’t change our politicians’ minds and get them to run government differently.
It’s all coming into the open now, because it’s already too late.
When we begin to appreciate just how deeply rooted this bogus financial system is and how it is affecting so many different areas of life, we can begin to see just how serious the collapse of The System will be.
It is already making many fearful for what not having a system that works this way at the centre of the lives will mean.
Not because there isn’t an alternative, but because of the fear of losing whatever we believe we have gained.
Those who are responsible for keeping this morally bankrupt excuse for an economic system going know this and feel this too.
They are desperate to rescue themselves, their positions, influence and wealth with a new system that will keep their interests in place.
Alongside, they also plan to create a new set of myths for those of us who can be useful, and disregard everyone else.
In order for them to survive, the elites must change everything we know that’s built around the lies that are either unfolding or can already be seen to no longer work and replace them with new lies and The Systems that appear to work until those inevitably break too – no matter the cost to all of us.
Part 1: Why AI is the threat to our lives that it should never have been.
The threat from AI today isn’t AI. It’s us.
Theres a very big difference between what any of us want and what any of us need.
Yet the lines have become so blurred that we live our lives and consume or purchase what we believe we need today, without any care for the reality that it could be what will end up killing us tomorrow.
Do we want to die? Probably not. But that doesn’t stop us chasing a dragon that we deliberately forget to fear until we catch up with it and it turns around and burns us.
The strangest part of the whole process is that we don’t even question why we are chasing a dragon or myth that we don’t even need in the first place.
Processed Food and eating out, new smartphones every 24 months, expensive clothes and cars, foreign holidays, the latest games and technology, overpriced houses and many of the other goods, products and services that most of us have access to or use daily are all one and the same:
These are the things that we want. They are not the things that we need.
The difference between meeting our needs and meeting our wants can be considered as follows:
The economics of supplying everyone’s needs is sustainable. The economics of meeting everyone’s wants are not.
The simplicity of this equation should make the consequences of the way we are living not only easy to understand, but even easier for us all to take action to head off.
But we don’t see or understand it. We are all too busy trying to get the next thing we want.
We ignore the reality of our decision to live this way, using the excuse that it’s someone else’s responsibility to change things, or at the very least, it’s always someone else’s fault.
Living the Lie that welcomed in AI: We are addicted to an easy living lifestyle where the relationship between what’s easy and what hurts us is deliberately overlooked.
You may need to stop and think about the next paragraph. It is certainly recommended that you take the time to do so. If you can.
We don’t get addicted to the things that we need.
Your brain may now be whirring and coming up with all the things you have, you use or that you experience in your own life that you just know people can get addicted to in some way.
But are any of them things that anyone genuinely needs?
The honest, fully understood or recognised answer will be NO.
The things that we need are the very basic things that allow us to survive in a happy, healthy, safe and secure way – and NO MORE!
We do not need AI to survive or to thrive.
AI is something that somebody somewhere else is working very hard to make us want.
AI may appear to be Progress. But real Progress doesn’t always travel forwards.
We are probably all guilty of taking for granted the idea that progress is a life process that can and only ever go one way.
Yet progress isn’t directional.
The real meaning of progress is a pathway or journey towards an outcome where our experiences of life will have been improved.
Better isn’t always achieved by adapting to or adopting tools, methods or experiences that we haven’t used before.
A significant trap for the unwary exists where change has not worked out as well as hoped.
Instead of going back to what was proven to work before, we step forward again, armed with the foolish belief that moving forward or progress is the only way a bad situation can be improved.
Change for change’s sake doesn’t help anyone, other than those who believe they have something to gain.
AI is built on a lie. But it could take over the world before we have time to wake up.
Whichever direction you look or listen, information and chat about AI is coming at us all, thick and fast.
But why the hurry? Why are we already being made to feel that AI is a ‘done deal’ and it’s something that we MUST now have?
As with most things in an age where messages and narratives are packaged to look like they are everything and that no other truth could exist, the truths that sit behind AI and much of the new technology that is being installed at various points along the journey that we call our daily lives, are genuinely frightening if and when they are obvious.
The problem for us, is they are being cleverly concealed from us and are hidden in plain sight.
The speed of the arrival of ‘Chat Bots’ and the generation of technology that accompanies it is no accident.
These forms of AI are being pushed at us deliberately fast, with the intention that the majority of us will simply miss the trick.
The trick we are intended to miss is the understanding of what AI is already doing and what the arrival and rollout of this latest generation of Artificial Intelligence is really all about.
If enough of us miss it – which there is a regrettably serious risk that we are likely to do, the reality we face is that it will simply be too late for People to do anything about what amounts to an engineered tech-takeover, once we are already dependent upon it and all of the tools we have available to us to maintain our independence and freedom of choice today, have either been made redundant or deliberately destroyed.
AI is not something that is happening somewhere else. It is happening to us.
No matter how uncomfortable the truths are that accompany AI’s lightening quick arrival, we have a responsibility to wake up to the truth and then act upon that knowledge, using every opportunity that we can own.
Part 2: Our Reality: An age run on unrestricted and unethical AI.
The different Parts of this AI REALITY that we all need to Know and Understand
The biggest mistake that any of us is likely to make, is to believe it already a foregone conclusion that AI will play the part in life that it’s going to play, whether we like it or not.
It is essential that anyone who can see the dangers of adopting all the forms of AI that are being fire hosed at us, understand that the disadvantages of accepting its use disproportionately outweigh the advantages of doing so.
The so-called advantages of AI will only come to those who own, control or have the ability to make money from everyone else becoming enslaved by it.
Over the course of the following pages, we will go on a brief journey through the realities of AI and what they mean for life as we know it, as they are today.
These are the specific issues that you should really be thinking about. They are the things that you should be researching, considering and talking about with everyone who is important to you.
They are:
AI REALITY Pt.1: Our fear of what we don’t know about AI is stopping us from asking the right questions about it.
AI REALITY Pt.2: The arrival of AI is no conspiracy. It’s a takeover and manifestation of irresponsibility, stupidity and an inhuman ethical drought.
AI REALITY Pt.3: Every time we use AI today, we are one step further towards the permanent loss of Human Agency.
AI REALITY Pt.4: Unless this AI Takeover is stopped or ethically restricted, Humanity is now on the fast track to mass stupidity and ignorance.
AI REALITY Pt.5: AI isn’t ‘all knowing’. It just reads a lot and remembers everything.
AI REALITY Pt.6: AI doesn’t think. But People are easily fooled into thinking that it does.
AI REALITY Pt.7: AI is a programme. A programme is only as reliable as the programmer.
AI REALITY Pt.8: AI cannot learn human ethics, because AI is not human.
AI REALITY Pt.9: AI IS the expert in Artificial Intelligence. There are no human experts in AI.
AI REALITY Pt.10: The same old interests gain, whilst we all lose from AI being rolled out in this way.
AI REALITY Pt.11: The Establishment want all of us to depend on AI, so they will not accept it is creating a problem.
AI REALITY Pt.12: Even if we could get new AI legislation today, it may already be too late to avoid a lot of pain.
AI REALITY Pt.13: Use cheats and the only person you cheat is yourself.
AI REALITY Pt.14: AI is already playing a massive part in our digital lives.
AI REALITY Pt.15: AI can only be reliable when it is used ethically as a support tool and not as a go-to for everything.
AI REALITY Pt.16: AI will only keep advancing for as long as we don’t resist it.
AI REALITY Pt.17: The future role of AI is our decision to make. Our future should not be in the hands of anyone driven by what they can gain.
AI REALITY Pt.18: This is a war we can only win by taking action. We lose by taking part or standing still.
AI REALITY Pt.19: AI is a very BIG problem. But it is not the only one.
AI REALITY Pt.20: Actions Speak Louder than Digital Words.
AI REALITY Pt.1: Our fear of what we don’t know about AI is stopping us from asking the questions we need to
The most frightening aspect of the days and months that lie ahead, is that the building blocks of an unstoppable change – that has the power to affect us all, are being assembled around us in a way that would be best described as taking place whilst the majority of us are fast asleep.
Fast asleep, because so few of us are even questioning the legitimacy and need for what is happening, with the majority falling back on their knee jerk reaction to fear.
Each of us holds the power to stop the AI revolution that is now under way. The journey begins with learning to stop, ask the questions and then keep on asking the questions, “Why? and What?’
Why is AI necessary?
Why can’t we just improve the systems we’ve already got?
Why is the change happening so quickly?
What is the real benefit of AI?
What is the real cost of AI?
What is AI replacing?
What will be lost?
Yet that is really just the beginning.
Within a period of what might only be weeks or months, we will need to forget relying on the provenance of all the data an internet search provides, that we watch on video, or that we listen to.
We will not be able to trust any information source that isn’t itself assuredly genuine or original. Because the chances are that whatever we are otherwise being presented with, it will have been at least influenced by, or be a complete AI creation.
AI will only create and present information or work, based upon the parameters or the algorithms that it has been set.
As the programmers already know, the credibility of the AI ‘end product’ is far from being guaranteed – even though the way it is presented will convince many of us that it is.
AI REALITY Pt.2: The arrival of AI is no conspiracy. It’s a takeover and manifestation of irresponsibility, stupidity and an inhuman ethical drought.
Regrettably, we cannot look the realities of AI in the eye without recognising conspiracy theories are already playing an active part in this unfolding disaster.
Not because there isn’t any truth to what conspiracy theorists say. But because conspiracy theorists are failing to place any value on the context.
The end result being that the response generated by the statements they are making is actually getting in the way of the understanding that everyone needs.
Big business, the tech giants and all the People who mix with and surround their senior managers and leaders – such as Politicians, Establishment leaders and yes, people involved with groups like the WEF – are all in on AI. Not because they have some plan to kill off the entire proletariat and the middle classes. But because AI is a very easy way to create a pathway to more and more control, which will ultimately help them all achieve their aims which is to gain even more of the more that they already have.
The power that exists in the world belongs to all of the people who populate it. That power can only exist if the people it belongs to continue to exist. So, the real issue is only a question of who maintains and how they maintain control over the majority of People, so that the masses don’t hold any power, but they can continue to exist.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a takeover. This is the way that people, corrupted by power, operate and work.
AI REALITY Pt.3: Every time we use AI today, we are one step further towards the permanent loss of Human Agency
Yes, it sounds very clever to create a machine that can do exactly the same things as a human being, when it comes to the processes of thinking.
The problem is that machines are not human and cannot be human. Even if they reach the stage where it would appear that they have attained the ability to be fully independent in the way that they ‘think’.
We live within a time where the value of the human experience and the value of any human life is now measured in terms of monetary value or cost.
The technological advances since the 1990’s have almost fully succeeded in delivering the final part of the dehumanisation of relationships in every way.
It should therefore come as no surprise that we are so willing to trade off the ability of every coming generation to genuinely think for themselves. Because we are being conditioned to forget or overlook the value of humanity itself, in just about every possible way.
Without change of a kind that can only begin with the way that each and every one of us thinks, we are already within the process of surrendering our ability to think to non-human machines.
Yet these are machines that are not equipped or able to consider the true consequences for human beings in anything that they do. Because machines do not have the sensory experiences that will enable them to empathise and understand the experience of life in a human way.
We are literally welcoming in a new age of technology as we wave goodbye to what history will soon recognise as the most enlightened human age that we have ever had.
If we fail to act, we must welcome with it, a new age of human ignorance and stupidity – surrendering the ability to learn – as we do so.
AI is stripping humanity of the ability to learn. Bit by bit, it is already removing our ability to make decisions for ourselves. It is and has been doing so without us even being aware, and the decisions that AI has been ‘helping’ profit-focused People and businesses to makes, may have already come at significant cost to us personally, as well as to the community as a whole.
AI REALITY Pt.4: Unless this AI Takeover is stopped or ethically restricted, Humanity is on a fast track to mass stupidity and ignorance.
One of the greatest myths about education is the idea that our whole student career is about learning and retaining information.
The reality is that education at every level – whether we are at preschool or studying for a PhD – is about learning and gaining proficiency in educated method. Be that the ability to write with a pen, to do arithmetic or most importantly, how we engage in the process of learning through the research and discovery of information, and how we then process that information so that our understanding of any subject and our ability to apply that learning in a practical way has been formed.
By allowing AI into education or any life process where it is beneficial for us to learn and discern BEFORE we then understand it properly ourselves, we are effectively opening a trap door back to an unenlightened age where only those considered to be special in some way, will be automatically granted access to the magic formulas of learning that we woefully take for granted today.
The very instructions for civilised life are now in the process of being taken away by AI.
History is the greatest of tutors. It wasn’t that long ago that the only people who were educated and could read and write were the wealthy, those in the employ of the church and the landed gentry.
A return to the dark ages of ignorance is the direction that our unquestioning acceptance of AI and all related technologies will take us, without change.
AI REALITY Pt.5: AI isn’t ‘all knowing’. AI just reads a lot and recalls everything.
Al works by analysing patterns of behaviour over and over again.
So, when AI reads you doing just a few a few of the things that it has read in the behaviour of others somewhere else – perhaps many times before, AI will conclude that you will be the same in your other behaviours to those that relate to whoever those compared examples have come from before.
On the majority of occasions AI will certainly appear to be right. But what AI is right about will be generalisations.
AI will not and cannot ever be 100% right about what makes anyone tick. Nor can AI be fully right about the real ingredients or idiosyncrasies of what really makes any of us who we really are.
Regrettably, what seems like the magic or trickery of being able to fit each and every one of us into a box or category based on little more than patterns, will be enough to convince those who intend to profit from AI, that artificial intelligence is the power that will make them the new gods.
They are a long way from being anywhere near correct.
The human condition is built upon a foundation of difference or separation at its most basic and intricate level.
To consider any number of people as if they can be understood and treated as if they are exactly the same is not only the behaviour of people who believe they are the equivalent of a god. The oppression and restriction that naturally follows is an act against humanity itself – whether or not the victims have any conscious understanding of what is happening or what is involved.
AI cannot fully understand you. But the people who pay for it believe that it can.
This belief is what makes them feel powerful. But it is a power built on oppression, not understanding, as all power should.
Deep down, everyone and especially the few who have everything know what the real value of a human and the human experience is.
However, the reality is that even as slaves, humans are not a thing that any other human can truly own. Whereas a machine that is perceived to have the same abilities as a human is something that they can own, and therefore cheaply control.
AI REALITY Pt.6: AI doesn’t think. But People are easily fooled into thinking that it does.
If you had read everything on the internet – and I mean quite literally everything, AND you were able to recall all of it, recognise similarities between different sources and pieces of information, make conclusions and then present whatever you have come up with as a finished piece of work – and do all of this in no more than a couple of seconds, it would be reasonable to expect that whoever asked you to do this would automatically assume that you were very special indeed.
It wouldn’t matter whether you were right or wrong. Just like one of the very best magicians performing their art to an audience on stage, it wouldn’t be the outcome of the act that would leave you speechless. It would be the unasked question of how that outcome was achieved.
With all of the information that AI has access to, that it will inevitably always be updating, many of us will automatically assume, and therefore believe, that with the speed and apparent resourcefulness that AI can demonstrate, that AI must be able to ‘think’.
The mystery of a process that achieves an outcome using methods that we do not or cannot understand is very compelling and very influential upon us.
But much like a Ponzi scheme or any other form of con that sounds too good to be true, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s good or that it’s right.
For as long as we believe in the mystery, it is the mystery that will hold all power over us.
Even if AI reaches the stage where it appears to be fully sentient and able to think fully for itself, the truth that everyone will sooner or later have to accept is that AI is only a programme or software code. AI will only function within the parameters that it was originally set – whether they are right, wrong or their function rests upon the question of whether they are genuinely complete.
For a machine or AI programme to fully understand the human condition, it would either have to be living the complete human experience itself, with the abilities and understanding that we all have, or would to have been comprehensively and exhaustively programmed by a programmer or programmers together, who possess this inexhaustible knowledge themselves.
AI will not become sentient in the way that humans and other ‘living’ creatures can be.
Even the ultimate act of self-preservation suggested as possible by the AI movie legend that is Skynet from the Terminator films, was functioning based upon the limitations of its programming when it launched an all-out nuclear attack upon the world.
The real problem that we face with any and all forms of AI and Artificial Intelligence for the future, is the governance and the ethical boundaries or restrictions that any of its forms is able to operate under – even if that operation is itself carried out under the misused term ‘self-learning’.
No AI programmer or group of AI programmers have anywhere near the universal understanding of the human experience that would enable them to create a program that alludes to it, let alone covers the universality in difference of the way that humans actually think.
The reason for this is that no human exists on this planet today, who has the understanding or even the ability to understand everyone else’s experiences and the processes which make them think or have made them think, throughout the history of time.
As such, the inherent problem with any AI programming is that if the programmer, programmers or anyone who makes a decision upon what that AI can or cannot do, then do so in a subjective, biased or prejudicial way at any level at all – which will include their own lack of knowledge and understanding of what each and every other human being on the planet or that has lived and will live, faced with the same situation would do – they will not have provided the AI with every possible parameter that it could have.
AI is only as good as the information that is available to it. But that regrettably doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t or couldn’t kill a human being as a consequence of working with or within the limitations of what it could ‘learn’ or know.
AI accurately mirrors the limitations of the thinking of its creators. To be all knowing, it would not only have had to have been created by God, It would also have to be God for it to be so.
You can rest assured that if any human being alive possessed this ‘all knowing’, universal and arguably complete level of knowledge and understanding today, the last thing they would be planning to unleash upon the world would be any form of unethical AI.
AI REALITY Pt.8: AI cannot learn human ethics, because AI is not human.
It is regrettable that the world functions as it does today, with a system that values the financial value of everything or against everything – including the value of human beings, rather than what the value of being human equips us with or what the experience of being a human will allow any of us to understand.
Arguments will be made that sensors and cameras that detect heat, light, moisture, facial expressions and just about every physical change or activity that is exhibited in any particular situation, will equip AI with an understanding of what being human is.
However, consciousness, emotion, empathy and the ability to reflect and to relate to other human beings is not a skill that can simply be programmed into software form – especially when the programmers have not experienced each and every human experience themselves and don’t have the ability to translate that information into programable form(s).
Regrettably, it will not take the experience of just a few of the things that AI will be able to do, to convince anyone who doesn’t think critically about what they are seeing or experiencing to believe that this is not the case.
A reality we face is that because the world is being run by people who don’t relate or even attempt to relate fully to what life is really like for every other human being, beyond the bubble of people who are sharing very similar life experiences to them, we already have massively disproportionate levels of inequality and a world system that is teetering on the edge.
Those responsible for all that is wrong in the world are the very same people whose ethics and ideas are fueling and driving the takeover of AI. The machines that they are responsible for are and will simply continue to be a mirror of the behaviour of their true masters.
AI REALITY Pt.9: AI IS the only expert in Artificial Intelligence. There are no human experts in AI.
The part of the AI problem which is very much the responsibility of the Programmers and the architects of this whole Agenda is that its direction of travel and where it goes next is not under the control of any human or human expert.
Those responsible are unaware of what they don’t know and the machines themselves suffer the same limitations as a direct result.
Because there is no governance that controls the controllers of AI, Artificial Intelligence has already become the expert when it comes to everything that it is enabled to do or which it can learn to do next.
AI quite literally sees in black and white the differences between the nuances of experience and the lack of it, that those in control don’t understand.
As a recent news story from the US Military that was quickly withdrawn made clear, AI that is tasked to function ‘independently’ will stick to any tasks it is given religiously. With the consequence that every action it takes to ensure that its purpose is carried out can and will be perceived as protecting that purpose – no matter the cost, even if that cost should be the life of the AI ‘operator’ which outside of a simulation, could very easily be a real human life.
The self-styled experts of AI don’t know what AI can or what it will be able to do. They cannot and will not recognise the genuine parallels that each and every form of AI has or will have as it is developed, with a human, the human condition or the human self.
Anyone with the level of awareness necessary to see and to identify such parallels would be very unlikely to play any role which furthers the use of AI in these very harmful circumstances.
Such understanding could not be possessed by anyone who cares about humanity at either the individual or collective level and remained prepared to unleash its unknown potential upon the world.
The so-called experts in AI are merely experts that create the operational parameters of AI or instruct AI to do the things that their employers want it to do.
AI REALITY Pt.10: The same old interests gain, whilst we all lose from AI being rolled out this way.
In a recent blog, I talked about the lack of care and consideration for consequence that many of the AI developers themselves have been exhibiting, regarding what some will consider an arguably independent thinking tool, that is already documented for creating unexpected outcomes.
On this basis alone, every time AI of this kind is used, mankind is one step further into a potentially very dark unknown.
However, just like the health conditions caused by eating foods containing ingredients that our bodies simply do not need, or the majority of us being actively encouraged to take on debt and the mental anguish that follows it, just so someone somewhere can make more profit or assume some other form of control, AI is a multifaceted product or tool that is being pushed into our everyday lives. Not because it is genuinely beneficial for all of us if we use it. But because our use of it and the growing reliance that our use will then require that we have, will offer even greater profits and turnover for anyone and any organisation that is invested in its use.
The unfolding tragedy for us all is that we will see ease of use as the benefit, whilst not even realising that we are surrendering the ability to learn, and with it will go our freedom of choice, our independence and personal control.
AI REALITY Pt.11: The Establishment want us to depend on AI, so they will not accept it is creating a problem.
The hardest pill to swallow when it comes to understanding the realities that underpin the societal role of AI, is that Politicians, the Government and the Establishment do not see or understand that they have anything to gain by seeking to exert any kind of meaningful control over the use and roll-out of AI.
Politics, Government and the Establishment is driven by self-interest, that in its most obvious or relatable form is money or financial gain of some kind.
The reason that AI is being pushed as hard and as quickly upon us as it is possible for them to do so, is that the use of Artificial Intelligence has the ability to revolutionise working practices in ways that mean machines can do many of the jobs that People like you, and I are employed to do today. Not just in factories, but also in highly academic or professional ways.
It is reasonable for any sensible person to assume that if less people are being employed to do jobs, that will mean that the products and services that the companies using the AI systems provide will cost us less as the end consumer.
Regrettably, the world we live in today doesn’t work like that. Any savings that these companies make by reducing the number of staff they use, will be added to their bottom line or profit margin, just as soon as the much lower running and purchase costs for these machines have been taken out and, in all likelihood, offset against their Tax.
These companies, the people who run and influence them and the people who own shares in them are the People that ‘own’ the Political Parties, the Politicians and all of the People who work in positions of authority. The very People who should be acting against the unethical practices and the lack of legislation that is enabling the programmers, money men and owners of companies using AI – to do all that they are already doing and all that they are planning to do.
It is therefore not in the interests of anyone who could do anything to address the AI problem before it becomes one. They are too afraid of what would happen or what they would lose if they did so.
AI REALITY Pt.12: Even if we could get new AI legislation today, it may already be too late to avoid a lot of pain.
If we were for a moment to consider the position and the circumstances that we are in with AI, IF we had Politicians and Government who were aware enough, able and motivated to create the kinds of emergency legislation and longer-term regulations and laws that the whole World now needs, the reality is that it may already too late to head off a lot of the damage that the free-for-all of the Digital age has already been allowed to create.
Without taking widespread action to change things ourselves – action that will make tech work for us and for humanity as it should do and not just for the benefit of the few, we could still, very quickly find ourselves in a situation where we have to reject and destroy many of the advances that have been made, simply because they have been created with a system of priorities that doesn’t work beneficially for or in the best interests of all.
We have no choice but to reflect on the difficulty we face in creating a system of ethics for AI use in the future. Only then will we be equipped to try to make sense of what would need to happen in order for many of the problems that the Internet and smart tech age have already created, IF we should decide to put our freedom first.
The problem with the pillars of man-made laws is that there are gaps between them.
Like it or not, the future basis of a healthy relationship between mankind and AI rests upon what we as humans define or rather what we allow that relationship to be defined as being for.
Sadly, as mankind is already experiencing each and every day to its cost, the mass of laws and regulations that have been created under the myth that this is how civilised life for everyone works, have only served to created more and more legal pillars that those with little understanding find it easy to identify, whilst those who understand what those pillars really are and what they represent, are quickly and legally able to walk right between them, creating income for themselves that rides of the back of exploiting humanity as they do so.
The real problem we face with legislating against AI and Artificial Intelligence, is that the People and the interests that own and are behind all this technology have all the money necessary to sidestep or walk through any pillars of legislation that anyone well-meaning and with influence should manage to erect.
With advances taking place at the speed and at the pace of evolution that they are, any legal devices that are created will quickly prove themselves to be no better than pouring water with some very obvious twigs through a sieve.
The only way that we can be sure that the threat from AI is being and will be addressed, is for us all to take action and to play our own very important part.
AI REALITY Pt.13: Use cheats and the only person you cheat is yourself.
Everything can be as easy as you want it to be is the biggest lie or myth that has been perpetrated, propagated and promoted by the profit, control and influence-led interests which have been the real driver and power behind Public Policy for the majority of the time from the end of World War II onwards.
So addictive and overpowering has the idea that everything in life can easily become, that even the people who are now pushing it genuinely believe their own hype.
Consequences are not something that those in positions of power, influence and with responsibility have any consideration of, unless the impact of what they are pushing will have an impact upon their own future or whatever they possess or own.
Your own power lies in doing or taking responsibility for all the things that you can do, yourself.
Yet, increasingly fewer people really see the value in doing anything themselves – because there is a created belief that you can do very little and still come out on top or win.
But what do you actually win, if you haven’t done the job, learned the lesson or written the story or article yourself?
The chances are that you are already being offered different opportunities to ‘cheat’ processes or tasks that are in your best interests to undertake and complete yourself.
Yet the ‘cheats’ you are being offered aren’t cheating the people who created or own the AI programmes. In fact, the cheats they sell you are very quickly gaining these very unethical people all the things that they could possibly want.
‘Cheats’ take away the opportunity for you to learn, to understand and to retain full control of your own thinking and who you really are.
AI REALITY Pt.14: AI is already playing a massive part in our digital lives.
The AI or Artificial Intelligence that we are focusing on now comes in the overt form of chat bots, work reduction tools and alternatives to the established forms of Search Engines that are springing up everywhere.
They are being discussed in the media in a way that suggests that they have always been here.
However, in this precise form, AI has only been available to us for open use for a matter of weeks or months*.
It is important to understand that anything on a device, on an app or online that does your job for you, completes a task for you, provides a price for you, creates something for you, adjusts something for you, checks something for you or translates something for you, is almost certain to be using a form of AI – to which all Rules, Realities and Actions apply.
AI, in the form of algorithms, has already been in use for a long period of time.
AI is established or being extensively trialed on:
Apps
Dating Websites
CCTV
Insurance Company Websites
Money Saving Websites
Search Engines
Smartphones
Smart Speakers
Smartwatches
Social Media
Supermarket and Retailer Reward Card Systems
Recruitment Websites and the Software that Recruitment Agencies use.
Remotely accessible doorbells and CCTV
Translation Software
Websites where you buy anything or have to enter ANY data about yourself
And the latest information available as I write, suggests that Chat Bots and their functionality will soon be inserted into the instant messaging and direct messaging services that so many of us already use throughout the day too.
The list will grow every day until those benefiting from the roll-out of AI are either stopped or redirected to go in a different way.
Software, programmes or coding of any kind that enable a phone, watch, tablet, laptop, computer, TV, smart speaker or anything else that apparently makes a task easier for us or reduces the effort that either we or any other person makes, is relying on what we understand the general meaning of AI or Artificial Intelligence to be today.
However, the generational differences between the types and specific functions of AI do not matter.
Without any further thinking, have accepted that the ascent and take-over of AI in these ‘new’ but already ‘established’ forms has already taken place, and that even the dangers that the true pioneers of this software development are warning us of are already inevitable – because that’s the way that it goes.
‘It’s just the way that it goes’, can only be assured by our collective acceptance of AI’s use, and with it our unwillingness to reject or object to its further use and takeover of so many parts of life. Not because the use of any form of AI is necessary or beneficial in some way to mankind. But because somebody somewhere will benefit massively if we unwittingly help them to make sure that it does.
*This page was originally written in early June 2023.
AI REALITY Pt.15: AI can only be reliable when it is used ethically as a support tool and not as a go-to for everything.
The most disconcerting thing about AI – as is the case with all forms of technology today, is that used and driven by the right purposes and agendas, AI and Artificial Intelligence have the potential to be ridiculously beneficial to the whole of mankind.
However, the key to uncovering the genuine benefits of AI and all tech, is the realisation, acceptance and ethical governance that will ensure that tech and every form of AI that comes is only used as a tool that supports human life. Not as a replacement for it.
Replacing the ‘use’ of human life, under the direction of very selfish interests, is the pathway that all of humanity is on right now.
AI MUST only be the means. AI MUST NEVER be allowed to become the end.
Nobody who has responsibility for the governance and use of AI today should be allowed to have any influence under any rules, laws and regulations that will be created to govern its use at any level for the future.
If the intention and understanding of what those behind AI are and have been doing already was genuinely with the best interests of all in mind, those already involved would have ensured that we had effective and appropriate governance in place already.
For humanity to survive, with everyone at every level having the freedom of choice – even if only in the form that we have experienced or that we already have now, we MUST create a system of governance that ensures that no form of tech – and that only includes AI – can be used to replace the role of any human being and that it will only be able to support their role or make it safer for them to complete.
The only reason for doing otherwise is for the purpose of control or so that a profit can be made.
The value of human life must be prioritised above all.
AI REALITY Pt.16: AI will only keep advancing for as long as we don’t resist it.
The reason that AI is taking over as quickly as it appears to be, is that nobody with influence, or not enough people who will attain that level of influence by acting together – have, through their actions, said NO to what is being placed in front of us, whilst also being loaded onto the equipment and machines that we already possess.
In the absence of Politicians, Government and an Establishment that genuinely represents the best interests of the People – as they always should, the only real power that we, the masses, actually have, is to vote YES or N for the new world of AI – with our feet.
AI REALITY Pt.17: The future role of AI is our decision to make. Our future should not be in the hands of anyone driven by what they can gain.
We CAN stop the march of AI.
Despite what all the messaging and the clever narratives keep telling us, there is nothing beneficial for all of us collectively, and certainly not for the majority of us as individuals, for the way that we live and the way that life works to be pushed in this very troubling direction.
Making the conscious decision to acknowledge and respect the role that AI already plays, and to then purposefully step beyond it and take back our own decision making and the power of choice – instead of doing what’s easy and what’s basically being lazy, being used to talk us into so many choices that are simply bad for us – is an active and ongoing choice. It is a way of living that we all have the power to adopt right now.
Be the conscientious rejector when it comes to AI. Recognise the real war against freedom and against humanity that is already underway. Act by refusing to take part.
If you fail to recognise how your freedom of choice and freedom to think for yourself today really operates today, the sad reality is that with the speed that change is happening, it will almost certainly be too late to act, once you realise that your freedom has already gone.
AI REALITY Pt.18: This is a war we can only win by taking action. We lose by taking part or standing still.
We cannot change the past by thinking about it. We cannot change or dictate the future by waiting until we are there before we act.
Our point of power is in the present and the way that we influence everything that comes next – whether it is just a minute or a decade away – will be based on the decision and therefore the actions that we take immediately next.
There is a lot of talk of ‘timelines’ these days. In no small part due to the very clever and deeply considered writing that has created the ‘Marvel Universe’. An entire genre of cinema films that parents, children and many up to and around middle age will know well.
Timelines are a concept based on the suggestion that it is possible to look at a point in time in the future, based on what it looks like or resembles when looking at it from the point in time that we stand in right now.
We don’t need to believe that anyone has the ability to see the future to be able to accept that if you knew right at this moment in time, where you would be and what you would be doing in exactly 5 years’ time, that the outcome you have just been made aware of will be subject to change, potentially millions of times over, depending quite literally upon choices you make such as which bus you catch to work, or which side of the street you decide to take. That’s how multiple timelines work.
By taking the other side of the street – just because something deep inside you suggested you should, you might avoid a car that went out of control and would have hit you on the other side of the road, in a way that on that timeline changed everything about your life.
When you left your house, you had the power of choice to decide which side of the street you walked on. But once the car had hit you, everything that happened afterwards was no longer within your power to decide, because the decision that led to that event had already been made.
It sounds like an extreme example. The point is that even the smallest decisions can have the most unimaginable consequences.
Now that you know AI is here and what it has the potential to do, you have the choice of doing what YOU can now and every time you have the opportunity to open the door of your life to more of it or to reject it. Or you can do nothing, each and every time, potentially losing what might be the last opportunity that YOU have to change things for the better – as it simply passes you by.
AI REALITY Pt.19: AI is a very BIG problem. But it is not the only one.
It is certainly true that if the correct circumstances were to exist, legislation, regulation and governance of the kind necessary to oversee the use and development of AI, in a healthy and beneficial way, could be created and implemented too.
However, in isolation and without change to anything else, you might as well create such governance in a silo.
Whilst there are very few people who either recognise or even understand that there is interconnectedness between everything that happens with Public Policy and across the public realm – no matter how disparate public policy and the areas of its implementation may seem, there are virtually none within Politics, Government and the Establishment who are willing to attempt to do so. Of those that do, their careers rarely avoid being cut remarkably short.
The interconnectedness or commonality between everything, isn’t the Public Policy itself. It is the thinking that lies behind its creation, review, maintenance and review.
Everything today is focused on self-interest.
The majority of People walk around and approach their lives with a filter between them and everything they are experiencing that immediately captions everything with the question ‘how does this affect me’.
One step further to the People in Politics, Government and the Establishment and the question simply changes to ‘how does this benefit me’.
On a collective basis the problem is so severe because of the way that power and influence works.
The world today is morally bankrupt.
Bit by bit. Person by Person. Me and You. We have all played our part.
We can change all of this by changing the things that we have the power to change. That’s all we really need to do.
We just have to accept that the power and the responsibility for change doesn’t lie somewhere outside of us and with someone else.
AI REALITY Pt.20: Actions Speak Louder than Digital Words
We can all too easily pay lip service and use words to talk up our fears and concerns about AI, whilst doing none of the things that we know we have the ability to, in order to play the very important part that each and every one of us has not only to influence, but to be a part of necessary change.
The words about Artificial Intelligence – and as you already know, there are plenty of them – are VERY noisy.
It is true that the way AI is being discussed and reported in the news, with tech moguls and even Prime Ministers and Presidents apparently having talks about it – suggests that any problems with AI-based technology will quickly be cleared up.
The problems with AI will not be cleared up quickly by anyone who has the power and the influence to do so. But that’s what Politicians, Governments and The Establishment want us all to think.
It’s all words and those words are very hollow indeed.
Only WE can change the direction of AI, Artificial Intelligence and every form of tech that has or will soon be impacting lives through action. Using only words, simply doesn’t work.
Part 3: The Action that every one of us should now take.
The biggest threat to freedom is our willingness to engage with the Artificial Intelligence Programme any further
If you can make the decision to remove AI from every part of your life where you know that it already exists, you should know that your actions – no matter how isolated they might feel – will be beneficial not only to yourself, but to everyone.
Once everyone realises that there is a better way for us to live that is much happier and doesn’t need all the ease of use, shortcuts and false ‘benefits’ that have manipulated us and created our buy-in to a way of living that is unhealthy for us, the lies that we don’t even see or think about today, will no longer be hidden in plain sight.
However, AI is now in the early stages of moving beyond the comparatively less harmful ways it has already been used to manipulate and monitor us and is about to begin reconditioning those of us already using it, whilst conditioning new generations to come, in ways that will change what it is to be human.
It is a process that will bring into question everything that’s genuinely true and whatever we have or will soon be taught.
Our Rejection of any new forms of AI must begin right away.
Once we have started using AI and learned to rely on it – because its biggest selling point is its ease of use, like some instantly addictive drug like Meth or Crack Cocaine that will quickly destroy us, it will be ridiculously difficult to turn back.
Once enough of us are addicted to the newest forms of AI, the messaging will quickly change, and the focus will shift to ridiculing those who ‘are in danger of being left behind’.
This will be the moment where the momentum has actually shifted, where the majority will be committed to whatever the masters of our new brains or intelligence demand of us.
Freedom will no longer be in the hands of the majority, and we will already be a shrinking minority when it’s too late to take the easy steps that we could right now.
We will be left with the choice of accepting this new fate, or to fight against what we are free to reject right now.
Actions for Living a Free Life and Contributing to a World without AI
The hardest part of Conscientiously Rejecting AI is that humanity has already gone way beyond the point where dealing with the problem that Artificial Intelligence is creating could be resolved with a simple YES or NO.
AI is already embedded within our digital lives and is set to take over more and more of what we ask from technology.
Because many are so unaware of the role that AI already plays, unless technology were quite literally no longer able to run or exist, the reality we face is that there are very few people who will willingly or voluntarily give up the use of every functional element of AI, wherever it already exists – Whether or not it is already prejudicing or restricting their freedom in some way.
Even if you already accept the threat that AI and further reliance upon AI and Artificial Intelligence poses, you are unlikely to accept it as being practical to reject your own use of it, wherever within your life it already exists.
We will ultimately need to reject many of the current uses of AI, along with many more within our lives, IF we want to live lives where we have and maintain the genuine freedom and right to choose.
Ten Actions we can all take to Reject and halt the AI takeover.
We have the freedom to choose a life without AI and Artificial Intelligence right now.
The choice is regrettably not as simple as a YES or NO.
The choice comes in many parts. In the form of many actions.
But it’s these many actions that are necessary to secure yours and everyone’s real freedom.
Freedom cannot be achieved by using only words.
The Ten Actions are:
ACTION 1: Treat AI and Everything Online like another person. A person you have only just met.
ACTION 2. Don’t ask AI to do ANYTHING for you.
ACTION 3. STOP clicking adverts on your social media feeds.
ACTION 4. Follow the alternatives too.
ACTION 5. Research the content yourself.
ACTION 6. Read EVERYTHING in FULL!
ACTION 7. Think Critically.
ACTION 8. Only Trust the people you can see, hear and stand beside.
ACTION 9. Trust your instincts.
ACTION 10. Reject New Tech. Embrace Simplicity. Improve on what’s ‘old’.
ACTION 1: Treat AI and everything Online like another person. A person you have only just met.
You wouldn’t normally go up to a complete stranger on a bus, ask them for life-changing advice or information that could affect your future in some way, and then act upon it as if they were guaranteed to know the answers and be a 100% accurate source.
So why do exactly that, each and every time you use a smart phone, tablet, computer or other tech device?
Very few people consider that we feel naturally disposed to ‘trust’ tech over people already, even when the tech in question is neither a person that has even the potential to know and understand what is important to a person. Not only that, but most importantly, its behaviours, priorities and boundaries are all being set or programmed by a stranger that we are very unlikely to know or ever meet.
IF you want to know and understand the truth in anything and find yourself able to access every bit of information that can genuinely help – rather than disadvantage you, treating the Internet and any form of AI that you use as if it were a complete stranger, will be a very healthy way for you to live your digital life.
ACTION 2: Don’t ask AI to do ANYTHING for you.
AI is most likely to create buy-in from the masses by behaving like a drug-dealer handing out a free-giveaway. Every opportunity it provides for you to ask it to do your work for you is the opportunity for you to get hooked.
It won’t matter one bit if your work or task is study, research, newsletters, social media posts, presentations, animations, videos, content creation, writing books, or even translating what you or someone else has said: IF you ‘instruct’ AI to do any of these things for you, you will not be doing them yourself.
By not doing them yourself, you will not be learning. You will not be developing your skills. You will not be extending your experience. You will not be sure of the credibility of whatever the AI creates or whatever it writes. You cannot be sure that the integrity and meaning of the original material will still exist.
Yes, you can check the work. But if you have to check it, you will also need to check it properly.
So, if you are in a hurry anyway, it could well end up taking you a lot more time to deliver the work you gave it, if you had simply completed the task yourself, first.
It is truly alarming just how many adverts for books and websites that make promises such as ‘People are already using AI to earn $120K a year’ – when the opportunity to even use it has not even existed for as long as a few months.
People are genuinely falling for the lie that everyone can get rich by doing absolutely nothing other than setting up a program or chatbot themselves, when the only way to make good money using AI as a business in itself, is to sell a guidebook or formula on how to use it, and make a lot of money from a lot of unsuspecting and lazy people looking for an easy life who will enthusiastically part with the charge.
The only way that AI can make money for anyone, is by making the roles and the jobs that other people do redundant, or by playing the markets and the gambling games which raise the prices of everything, that people who have no morals, ethics or care for others already do.
Don’t fall into the trap of teaching yourself or anyone else that you no longer have any use. Because sooner or later, you will indeed become useless, and that’s how your future will feel and will be seen.
Have the integrity to do your job and do your job to the best of your ability, whatever your job might be. Your destiny will remain in your hands, and will not be at the mercy of someone, somewhere else who is only aware of you as a number and simply doesn’t care.
ACTION 3: STOP clicking adverts on your social media feeds.
Can you remember what it was that first drew you into using social media?
What do you use social media for today?
Are the answers to these two questions the same?
I would like to place a BIG bet that they aren’t.
The reason that we supposedly use social media is contained within its name. Social media is a form of media where we can be social. i.e., we can interact with our friends and the people that we know.
IF being ‘social’ with all the different people we know or have known in the ‘real world’ – even if they live on the other side of the world today – was all social media was still about, social media wouldn’t:
Be as addictive as it is.
Be anywhere near as popular as it is.
Yes, we all love to watch puppy videos and films of cats and other animals doing ridiculous things. But we don’t need to watch videos of these things or anything like them to meet our real or genuine needs.
In fact, the ease with which this attention junk now arrives in or on our social media feeds is a dangerous distraction that only takes our attention and time away from the activities that are healthy for us, that would be meeting a genuine need.
The social giveaway sprat to catch the media and big-tech payday mackerel.
Each and every time you click on something that you see on a timeline or social media feed, you are providing data about what you ‘like’ and what ‘interests’ you, to someone somewhere who can use that information either to sell directly, or to use as a way to sell your attention as an advertising space.
You are quite literally being fed the treats that you like, so that somebody somewhere can make a profit from the trojan horse offers that are almost always attached or hidden within everything that we see.
It doesn’t stop there either. The reality is that every action you take online, even if it is just the search of the spelling for a single word, will be telling someone somewhere something about you that they can make money from.
Not because it’s something you are doing wrong. But because we have all been funneled into the same trap where we are already behaving exactly the same way.
Until such time as we have Politicians, Government and legislation that deals with the ethical vacuum that surrounds the harvesting and use of our data, along with the manipulative ways that so many of us are being duped into giving it up, the risk will remain that anything we do online or by using any equipment or technology that is connected to the internet, will result in the surrender of information and data that is personal to us in some way.
You don’t need any of the things that appear on your feed. But you believe you want them.
This is where the very bad taste should begin to appear in your mouth, when you begin to realise and then understand that there isn’t any magic involved in the way that the things that interest you, or the things that you might like to buy, so miraculously appear.
Yes, we’ve all had that ‘wow’ moment when we see something appear that relates to something we’ve discussed or been thinking about. But that’s because what you’ve been doing online or somewhere where an algorithm can identify you, is triggering someone somewhere and telling them that they or someone somewhere else that they can sell advertising or make a sale – if they get a link or many links to confirm the magic that makes it all feel so easy when things find you, that you literally don’t need to think.
It’s time to remember that when we have a genuine need for something, we already know where to get it, or we already know a way to look for it that will provide us with options that genuinely make a lot more sense.
Even if you really do believe that you genuinely need something that has appeared in a feed, you should at the very least undertake your own, fully conscious search of the options that are available and preferably buy from someone you can physically meet or visit – even if you actually buy online.
By becoming dependent upon systems that are creating wants, rather than servicing our basic needs, we are actually funding the development of the technology and the AI systems that are set to make the pathway from human freedom even worse.
Every rejection of the opportunity to click is a step away from the digital dependency that somebody somewhere wishes to create. Not because it will help you. But because it helps them.
Your future and your freedom will come from reasserting your independence from these systems; by quite literally moving away from them and physically moving and looking around.
You will become a part of that system, each and every time that you get plugged in.
ACTION 4: Follow the alternatives too.
This will sound contradictory when ACTION 3 explained why you should reject each and every opportunity to ‘click’.
However, we are already within a digital world and until such time as we aren’t, or preferably we have a system of ethics and regulation that protects humanity on both an individual and collective basis, we have no choice but to recognise, accept and then work with some of the more ‘everyday use’ AI systems. So that they can be made to work for us, rather than being used against us.
Everyday use AI are the sources of information that many of us read, that we use to inform our understanding and views on current affairs and pretty much everything where any kind of meaningful life choice for us or the people we care about is being made.
The chances are that you will already be following, bookmarking or subscribing to various companies, news sources, celebrities, people with public profiles and the list really does go on.
Each and every one of these is likely to be exerting an influence on you in some way and although you will genuinely believe that you follow them because you ‘like’ them or you ‘agree’ with them, what you are doing is limiting your own input and therefore the understanding that you have about events, issues, trends and ways of thinking and giving yourself an isolated viewpoint – irrespective of whether you believe it to be right or wrong.
Nobody is impartial. But everyone can be objective.
Sadly, we are experiencing times when it is more often than not the case that writers, speakers and just about everyone who is in the public eye – or has a platform that people like you and I follow and listen to or read, that they tell us is based upon them being impartial in some way (e.g. they speak for the public or have the majority view), when they are actually being highly subjective.
By isolating our information gathering, reading or listening just to the people and the subjects that we like, we are consuming and growing with a subjective view of the world too.
This has never been more dangerous than it is right now, when you can no longer even be sure that the words you read or listen to come from the source you believe and may have been created only using a criteria they gave to a machine.
To understand a subject, the news, or what is really going on, follow as many sources that have different views on the same subject areas as possible – even when the differences seem trivial or too small to note.
ACTION 5: Research the content yourself
AI is about to make information so easy for you to find, that there is already talk that Search Engines such as Google and Bing are about to become redundant and will very quickly be left behind.
The only question you really need to ask yourself about using AI when you are looking for an answer is ‘Will this form of AI provide me with what I actually need?’
The reality is that it will not. Because:
Someone somewhere may have programmed the AI to ignore the answers that they don’t want you to see.
Someone somewhere is likely to have a pecuniary or financial interest in you receiving information that benefits you in some way.
The programming of the AI is based only upon the parameters that its algorithm has set.
Some AI programmes have already demonstrated that they have the ability to create sources that appear credible to the untrained eye. Yes – that means they have the ability to lie.
Like a search engine, the AI reads your question or request in a very literal way. It does not and cannot see, hear or even pick up any other information about your request, that would enable a human to respond to you in a very different and considered way.
Once again, in the absence of ethically based regulation or ending the use of the equipment and tech that we already possess, we have no choice but to use the tech that we already have in ways that will help us, rather than hinder us.
Use Tech as the means. Not the end.
The healthiest and most beneficial way to work with existing smart technology and help prevent further development, is to use it as the means to find the right information, rather than relying on it to be the end, final source or to provide the conclusion in itself.
Use search engines that already exist and search out as much original content and as many original sources as possible. DON’T rely on just one.
One original information source is likely to be better than any AI supported view. But even then, that source will still be subjective, no matter how less subjective than the AI would be.
The best way to learn any subject in real depth is to teach it or talk about it many times over. Because the understanding of many different perspectives is how we finally uncover the genuine truth.
ACTION 6: Read EVERYTHING in FULL!
There are already apps available that sell the lie that you can fully understand concepts, principles and even entire philosophies by quickly reading the 10 summary points they give you – for a charge.
They can’t.
There isn’t a cheat on real learning.
You have to read the whole work if you are to have any idea what the author intended to share. And even then, the wisest move to understand any real learning is to read as many books about the same subject by as many different authors as you can, if you want to understand the objective truths.
The only books that it might be safe to summarize and look at this way would be stories, fairytales or fiction. Because they are stories anyway and it doesn’t matter what conclusions you reach, as the outcome of your conclusions cannot usually hurt anyone, including you.
As you will surely realise already, cheating actually misses the point of reading such books anyway.
AI is about to offer you a no return ticket to a summary of life outside of you. Not a genuine or truthful one. But a mere overview, written using someone else’s filter or terms.
ACTION 7: Think Critically
You may believe that you already look, listen and then think critically about every bit of information that comes your way.
Regrettably, the chances are that like many others, you don’t.
Yes, I just said, the chances are that most of the time, you don’t think critically at all.
What you and what most people do, when approaching new information, is to filter it in terms of past experiences, or in terms of what you already know.
The problem with this process or this way of thinking, is that we become complacent or take for granted the validity, reliability and objectivity of what we already know, failing to recognise that our assessment of any encounter is likely to be influenced by what we have already seen.
That false sense of security and misplaced confidence means that we don’t ask any of the questions that we should be about the information that we receive.
As we don’t ask those questions, the problem is then compounded further because we then fail to look into the subject as deeply or in as much detail as we really should.
Sadly, most of us alive today have been failed by our education system. Unless you are focused on subjects such as philosophy within higher levels of education, there is no part of any syllabus within mandatory areas of schooling that teach critical thinking or the ability to think critically in a fully objective way – when this is a skill for life that every human living in an information-based environment should be automatically trained to have.
The question over whether this omission was and continues to be deliberate is one for debate elsewhere.
However, you can quickly teach yourself to become proficient as a critical thinker, IF you want to understand everything at a level and in a way that is beneficial to you.
Read or listen to everything thoroughly. Then ask and find the answers to questions like these:
Why is this being done?
Who is doing this?
Why are they doing it?
Whose purpose does this really serve?
What is the real benefit for them?
What is the real benefit for me?
What is the real cost to me?
What are the alternatives?
Why are the alternatives not being used?
Do I actually need this, or do I just believe I want it?
Yes, it sounds like a lot of work.
However, by going through these questions or questions that typically begin with Why, How, What, Who and words just like them, you will soon change the way that you process information and the way that you think about new information.
Critical thinking will quickly become second nature with practice. As with the benefits of practicing any skill, you will just get better and better and more efficient at using it the more you do so, until you don’t have to even think about it.
Being an objective reader and listener will just become another part of who you are.
ACTION 8: Treat everything as Opinion and only Trust the people you can see, hear and stand beside.
NEWSFLASH:
Real life doesn’t come to you digitally. Real life is everything that doesn’t involve a screen.
Regrettably, the days that existed when it was even possible to be able to trust a newspaper, a TV news bulletin or a radio announcement have long since gone.
News is no longer news. It is opinion and we can see it too.
Yet we still persist in giving our trust to created content, rather than genuine human interaction and life experience – every day.
If you can accept – as you should, that AI, opinion or something somewhere that has an agenda which is highly subjective – now controls the channeling and placement of every bit of information that ‘just comes to you’, the next step is to reach the understanding that no source of information that you haven’t independently made the decision to search for and then qualified as credible, is a source you can trust.
As a process that anyone who genuinely values freedom will soon have to follow, it will only be the people who we can access in ‘real’ life, who we are able to relate to as fellow human beings, who we will be able to genuinely trust.
It is only the people who are in your life that have any chance of understanding anything that is going on within it. We should never go in search of help and support from anyone or anything that can only ever be made available to us through a digital medium or online.
ACTION 9: Trust your instincts
The digital world fills our heads and our existences with so much noise, it has become difficult, if not near impossible to hear, listen to and feel the messages that come from the essence of who we really are.
Too many of us have switched off to our own intrinsic guidance systems.
These are the gut feelings, the hunches and the unexplainable inner ‘knowing’ that we probably all have, that come without emotion and don’t shout at us in any way. They are the subtle signposts that point us away from experiences that have a habit of coming back to haunt us very quickly when ignored, reminding us that they had been there and warned us of the pathway or situation that we needed to resist or avoid.
By simply asking yourself the question ‘is this genuinely something that I need or something that I need to do’, the chances are that you will shut out the noise and the temptation that the world is throwing at you for long enough to hear, feel or know the answer, whether or not it’s something you want to do or don’t actually like.
ACTION 10: Reject New Tech. Embrace Simplicity. Improve on what’s ‘old.’
The most challenging change that you can make in your Conscientious Rejection of AI, is the rejection of new tech within your life and the active refusal to use or adopt upgraded software within your existing equipment, wherever possible.
This is as challenging as it is because:
You must make the conscious decision not to upgrade phones, computers, TVs or anything else that is using Smart technology.
Much of the tech you already have in your possession or in your home will be receiving upgrades without you even knowing.
The programming sat behind any search engine or dynamically active website that you use online will almost certainly be upgraded regularly and could already be using the latest forms of AI or a ‘plug in’ that comes from the same genre of Artificial Intelligence.
It sounds impossible. But it’s not.
This goes back to the fundamental question of asking yourself what you need versus what you want.
You don’t need to buy food, clothes, health products or anything else that you need because it is essential for life, by relying only upon systems that are already under the influence of AI.
You still have the choice to reject any and all transactions where you haven’t knowingly controlled the entire decision-making process – from realising the ‘need’ to the point where you are in receipt of or able to use the item, product, goods or services.
It may come as a surprise to learn that taking Action doesn’t mean a complete rejection of any form of AI that you have no choice but to avoid. It just means that you need to be fully aware of the entire process and remain completely in control throughout.
If you have had an email about an offer about something you regularly buy or you have a post in your social media feed that reminded you of something you ‘remember’ that you need, you are not in control of the whole process – even if you believe that you have made a conscious decision to buy.
The Bigger Picture and breaking out of the freedom-sapping trap that we are already in
The future isn’t in the hands of the billionaires, the Politicians, the tech moguls or the AI programmers. No matter what they say, no matter what they are telling you they are going to do.
The future is in YOUR hands. MY hands. The hands of EVERYONE who values freedom and humanity in some way.
Just as long as we are prepared to act, and then do so.
What we have covered and discussed in this short book only provides a basic understanding of the situation that we, our communities, our country and the whole world face. Then, what each and every one of us has the power to do to stop what appears to be the unstoppable march of AI and the tech-takeover right now.
If we were all to become conscious of everything we do and everything that we use that involves AI and then at the very least do so knowing how to retain control, or ideally remove it from our own lives altogether, this would prove to be an act that is, in itself likely to change the approach of those behind the AI takeover that is being inflicted upon us.
However, this in itself is only a step-in terms of all the changes that need to be made, so that technology, financial devices and anything else that may be sold as being great, but actually hurts us, can be removed from the lives that everyone lives, and humanity can then have the freedom of choice to appreciate everyone and value every other human in the same ways.
The future is yours to decide and Actions Speak Louder than Digital Words.
Adam Tugwell 