Welcome to Building Better Futures: Food, Community, and Beyond – a portfolio that brings together a diverse collection of blogs and books dedicated to shaping resilient communities and thriving local economies through the lens of food and farming.
This area of work is a vital part of my broader professional journey, reflecting a commitment to practical solutions, thoughtful analysis, and transformative ideas.
Within this collection, you’ll find a wide range of resources – many of which are available as downloadable PDFs at each link, making it easy to access and share insights.
A number of the books are also available for purchase as Kindle editions on Amazon, offering flexible ways to engage with the material.
Central to this portfolio is my belief that food sits at the very heart of future communities and local economies. This vision is explored within the works listed here, with each section delving into how food systems, sustainable agriculture, and collaborative local action can empower individuals and strengthen society.
From foundational essays on the importance of farming, through analyses of current challenges and policy barriers, to practical blueprints for resilient food systems, these resources invite you to reimagine what’s possible for our shared future.
Please explore the links below to discover actionable ideas, innovative models, and a vision for building better futures – starting with food, and reaching far beyond.
1. Foundations: The Importance of Food and Farming
Introduction: This section lays the groundwork for understanding why food and farming are central to the wellbeing of communities and nations. These pieces highlight the fundamental role of agriculture and the urgent need to recognise and support those who produce our food.
Having established the essential role of food and farming in society, the next section delves into the pressing challenges and threats facing the UK’s food system today.
These entries reveal why urgent attention and action are needed to safeguard our agricultural foundations.
2. Current Challenges: Crisis, Policy, and Threats
Introduction: This section examines the mounting pressures and systemic issues threatening UK food security. The entries here analyse the causes and consequences of the current crisis, urging immediate action to prevent further decline.
Understanding the scope of the crisis leads naturally to an exploration of the political and economic barriers that hinder progress.
The following pieces critique the policies and market forces that shape – and often obstruct – efforts to build a resilient food system.
3. Political and Economic Barriers
Introduction: This section explores the political and economic obstacles that hinder progress in food and farming. The entries critique current policies and highlight the need for a shift toward self-sufficiency and local resilience.
With the obstacles clearly outlined, attention turns to how farmers and their allies are responding.
This section examines the spectrum of advocacy and activism, highlighting both the risks and the opportunities for constructive change.
4. Farmer Responses: Advocacy, Militancy, and New Directions
Introduction: This section discusses how farmers and their supporters are responding to challenges. It encourages constructive, peaceful approaches and warns against divisive or counterproductive activism.
Moving beyond reaction, the next section focuses on solutions. Here, collaboration and local action take centre stage, offering practical pathways to strengthen food security and empower communities.
5. Building Solutions: Collaboration and Localisation
Introduction: This section presents constructive approaches for improving food security and farming. It emphasizes collaboration, local action, and practical steps to build a resilient food system.
As collaborative efforts gain momentum, the conversation expands to consider new models for local economic governance. These entries introduce innovative mechanisms – such as barter and exchange – that can underpin a more resilient and equitable food system.
6. Economic Systems: Local Governance and Exchange
Introduction: This section introduces new models for local economic governance, focusing on food as a central pillar. It explores alternative mechanisms like barter and exchange, and proposes frameworks for economies that prioritize collective wellbeing.
Finally, the collection concludes by examining the deeper questions of control and power within food systems.
This last section analyses who holds influence, how policy shapes outcomes, and what it will take to build trustworthy, future-proof food systems for all.
7. Control, Power, and the Future
Introduction: This section concludes the collection by examining who holds power in food systems and what that means for the future. These entries analyse policy, strategy, and the blueprint for building trustworthy, resilient food systems.
Thank you for taking the time to explore Building Better Futures: Food, Community, and Beyond.
If the ideas, resources, or practical solutions here have sparked your interest, I would be delighted to hear from you. Whether you have questions, wish to discuss any of the topics in more depth, or are interested in collaborating, please feel free to get in touch.
I am always happy to share insights, exchange perspectives, and support your work. If you’re organizing an event or discussion where these themes are relevant, I welcome invitations to speak and contribute.
Let’s build better futures together – starting with food, and reaching far beyond.
There is growing disquiet, fear, and quiet concern about the turbulence we are experiencing in the world, alongside a deep, intrinsic sense that nothing is as it should be – and that it will never be the same again.
Yet at the heart of this unsettling feeling lies confusion. The prevailing narratives insist that with AI now here, and the technology it commands about to permeate every conceivable part of our lives, humanity should be grateful.
We are told we stand on the cusp of a new age, where surrendering to AI will deliver a dream life unlike anything mankind has ever known.
Some are already suspicious, beginning to question what the rollout of this digital revolution will truly mean.
Others believe the only way to progress – or to feel in control of either the real or digital worlds – is to recapture what they perceive as the “good times,” attempting to fix everything as if it were possible to freeze life and live forever in a single moment of the past.
Uncomfortable as it may be, the time has arrived for everyone to begin asking the hard questions: what happens next, and where will we find ourselves in a future that is no longer a distant shadow on the horizon, but already towering above us right now.
The Watershed Moment We Cannot Ignore
The Coming Crisis of Agency & Survival
The answer to the question so many wish to avoid is that, if we continue on our current path, ordinary people will be left with no means to provide for themselves. They will have no income to pay others to do so, and neither government nor business will exist with the resources or the intent to supply even the basic essentials necessary for the masses to survive.
Everything we know – whether or not we recognise its connection to our current reality – has been moving in this direction for as long as most of us have been alive.
There has been a steady erosion of agency, independence, and self‑resourcefulness for ordinary human beings, first through the transfer of all forms of wealth, and now, taking place through the progressive takeover of every aspect of working life and function by both existing and rapidly emerging forms of AI.
Whilst many today spend quiet moments fearing the apparent opening of immigration floodgates and the erasure of Western culture, society, and life as we know it, others, for reasons seemingly unknown, appear to have embraced a suicidal empathy that insists the only correct behaviour of Western society is to destroy itself in order to prioritise all others.
AI’s Encroachment on Everyday Life
Yet everyone fails to see that the impending and critical threat to everything we hold dear has already been welcomed into our governments, our businesses, our technology, and the very functionality of daily life, and is so deeply embedded that it now resides in our computers and our phones.
The Myth of Effortless Utopia
AI, along with the robotics and technology now emerging to support it, is becoming the option of choice for carrying out the majority – if not all – tasks across what we currently understand as life.
This development will soon mean that, for the majority of us, there will soon be no reason for work to continue to exist.
Exploitation and Systemic Transformation
Whilst many of us hear talk of the AI takeover, the reduction in new hiring and training opportunities across numerous professions and industries, and the replacement of jobs of all kinds, we fail to connect these developments with the rising welfare bill as people find themselves with no choice but to accept a life of unemployment.
The New Divide: Inclusion and Exclusion
Nor do we pause for a moment to consider the pressing question: What does it mean when there is no job left for you?
The Last Chance for Human Agency
Yes, many truly believe the stories openly shared by members of the elite community driving this change – that in no time at all, life will become cheap and effortless for everyone because AI and machines can do everything.
The Value of Effort and Contribution
People really do believe we are about to step into a new and previously unrecognisable utopia, where the system has eliminated the need for human industry, effort, and value in the form of contribution, and instead provides everything we can imagine, free of charge and experienced as if life were one giant, permanent holiday for us all.
Historic Patterns and Systemic Endgame
Such benevolence, hinted at in the form of words from these few, and the feeling it inspires about our future, is one that few can fail to imagine.
Indeed, the words and the ease with which life now comes at us makes it very easy to accept the disproportionate levels of wealth for the few that has been encouraged by the progress of this new technical revolution.
People are taking for granted that once the evolution of everything needed to perform every task that human beings carried out across all functions of life is complete, these are the very same few who will then happily smile and sit back while everything they own and have developed works and provides for all of us in return for absolutely nothing. All whilst we continually maintain an ever‑improving standard of life and receive a universal basic income that covers every requirement beyond the luxurious permanence of 24‑hour leisure, which is somehow ever present and that we somehow believe we would actually enjoy.
In truth, we do not need to understand how or why we arrived here to see the situation for what it really is. The fundamental truths are already available for us all to observe, consider, and comprehend, hiding in plain sight: the masses have been used and exploited to create the very means that will ultimately be implemented to destroy humanity as we know it.
As this has all progressed, we have all been fed and indoctrinated with stories, technology, forms of easy wealth, and advances convincing us that things can only ever improve along this path and that a golden age awaits.
At the same time, we have given our consent to puppet politicians who have willingly changed and enforced every rule necessary to facilitate this under the veil of progress -driven not by principle, but by submission to those with power and self‑serving agendas, lured by promises of glory and gain that appeal to their true, hidden selves.
Many struggle to believe that those we have elected, and those who have grown rich or benefitted so greatly from the rewards of leadership in a modern world and society, could truly be so cruel. Yet does it matter whether we – or even they – accept that as truth, when the outcome fast approaching, without a change in our direction, will inevitably be exactly the same?
Within the world and its structures – The System as it operates, functions, and controls every part of life today – the true divide of them and us lies between those whom the system will continue to carry and cater for once the concept of human independence no longer exists, and the masses who have no further use, whom the system will either choose to exclude or find some means to remove.
This is neither a horror story nor a work of fiction. The only uncertainty – without a change in direction – lies in when and how events will unfold that bring about the critical period of transition.
Today, humanity still possesses agency, choice, and the power to pursue an alternative pathway – even though so many of us are sleep‑running toward the end of freedom’s existence, actively embracing and welcoming the very tools that will soon replace the need for us within our own lives.
The fundamental truth of any life worth living is that there can be no reward without effort, and that effort itself is the pathway to reward when life is grounded in truth.
We hold no value to anyone or anything if we do not contribute or participate when we are able. There are no free rides for anyone or anything, unless they come in the form of charity – or unless we ourselves assume the role, if deemed desirable, of pets.
History repeats this truth time and again. We need only look further to see how power is abused by the powerful—how they seek to control everything they find useful, and how quickly they dispose of it when they do not.
Everything about the moneocratic, money‑centric, top‑down, centralised, hierarchical, and patriarchal system was ultimately designed to end this way.
The arrival of technology – and finally AI – has brought humanity to a genuine watershed moment, an endgame in which we must either abandon the unsustainable way of life to which we have become addicted and embrace one that restores balance, fairness, and justice for all, or continue living the lie created by those who profit from our subservience.
If we choose the latter, we will participate in it until the moment we realise we no longer hold any value, and the destiny imposed upon us by others has arrived.
The Alternative Pathway
The temptation for many, upon realising what has happened and what is happening, is to believe that all we need to do is step back a few years and remove the most corrosive technological advances that have entered our lives.
As simple as the removal of AI might seem – even if we were able to overhaul politics and replace politicians with those who agree – the real damage to society and culture has not come from technology or its advances themselves. It comes from the reasoning, motives, intent, and forms of control behind them.
These forces have long been at work, reshaping how everything functions across society – manipulating and redirecting life so that what we have already become is accepted as normal.
The way we live, work, conduct business, relate to others, and even relate to ourselves must return, rediscover, and recreate a way of being that transforms our system of values.
Our entire value set must shift so that we understand and expect meaning from life in ways that, by today’s standards, may seem counterintuitive or even alien.
The Human Value Imperative:
We must embrace the reality that everyone is equal, and that the only difference between us lies in our roles, functions, and contributions within society—roles that are always dynamic and open to change.
We all need to accept that differences do not make us different when it comes to what is ethically, morally, and fundamentally right.
We all need to accept, understand, and embrace that no person should be advantaged over another by circumstances beyond their own efforts or control.
We must accept that deviation or allowances beyond these principles will always lead to growing unfairness—even when special circumstances seem justified or privileges are believed not to be abused.
We must accept that hierarchies are not a natural system of order, even though the need for order in society means that some will naturally take the lead.
We all need to share responsibility and take part in collective choices that shape the aspects of life we share.
We all need to contribute to the community in whatever ways we can.
We all need to work and actively contribute to shared life whenever we are genuinely able.
We must live by the principle that the responsibility we have toward others is the same responsibility we owe to ourselves.
We all need to accept that once our needs are met, nothing is gained if any one of us seeks to have, take, or control more.
We must accept that true abundance means having as much as we need, not everything we want.
We must accept that people are the greatest source of value, and that real economics should be centred on that value.
We must embrace the reality that full employment is both natural and normal when employment is defined by all forms of contribution, not just financial return.
We must welcome and protect the truth that locality, and the transparency it brings to every kind of relationship, is key to maintaining and benefiting from a system we can trust to be fair, balanced, and just.
We must ensure that AI and all technologies are used only to support human life and enhance working practices—not to replace jobs or create circumstances in which any human being is considered useless.
When we commit to all of these principles, we can begin to envision a society and way of life that truly functions as it should with equity, equality and accountability for all – one that is transformed in almost every possible way.
The Turning Point: Choosing Freedom and a Better Future
For many of us, the uncomfortable reality we must face is that passive inaction – or continuing to accept life under the control of others, believing things will simply carry on as they are – poses an existential threat that is all too real. It is a danger that extends beyond the confines of Orwell’s 1984 and, for those who truly value their lives, could mean something far worse.
The choice – while we still have one- is to not only accept but to embrace an alternative path.
This path, though carrying forward some familiar aspects of the world around us, demands that every part of our lives be lived in a fundamentally different way: a way where people, community, and the environment come first; where power rests with the individual, their freedom, and their personal sovereignty; and where the whole experience of life unfolds in a completely new direction.
The Local Economy & Governance System Framework: A Path to Empowerment
Exploring the Local Economy & Governance System
Visualising a different world – how it operates, what it requires of us, what we must give, how we work together, and how frameworks of rules function (rather than laws that micromanage every part of life, as is increasingly the case today) – may sound simple. Yet their adoption, interpretation, and our response to them within a system centred on empowering every person, rather than controlling them in every conceivable way, will be fundamentally different.
This shift will inevitably provoke resistance, not least because we have become addicted to the unsustainable, money‑centric way of living that dominates our lives today.
The Local Economy & Governance System provides a detailed picture of these frameworks, showing how this new people‑centric model will look and how it can be implemented.
Perhaps the most important element of this new world is that it will be built upon direct, participatory democracy – a system entirely unlike the hollow or pretend democracy that defines the moneyocratic world we currently inhabit.
Participatory Democracy: Power in the Hands of People
Participatory democracy means that everyone takes part in the decision‑making processes that shape public policy.
It ensures that we all hold the power to change or remove the public representatives we choose and appoint.
This requires a level of accountability and participation that is not only regular and personal, but far greater than the limited choice we currently have – voting every four or five years for candidates selected by someone else.
There is much to consider about the processes that enable true participatory democracy and how it can work effectively and diligently.
One of the most striking differences between this future system and what we have today is that there will be no political parties.
Instead, public representatives will be chosen directly by the community – respected individuals with proven commitment to serving the best interests of everyone involved.
From Possibility to Reality: A System That Works for Everyone
The Local Economy & Governance System will work because it prioritises people, community, and the environment in ways that may seem inconceivable today.
It places value on personal sovereignty and the freedom that comes from living lives defined by who we truly are, rather than by external factors and reference points that remain under someone else’s control.
Yes, the practical mechanics of LEGS will work – and they will work well – if we choose to embrace them.
After all, the dysfunctional world we inhabit today has appeared to “work” only because we came to believe in it, even as it has harmed so many of us.
We must not underestimate the ability, ingenuity, and creativity of humankind to deliver and implement solutions that succeed under any circumstances, when motivated and convinced it is right to do so.
Together, we can reclaim power and value and build a new world and system that functions with equity, equality, and open accountability for everyone – just as a truly civilised society always should.
Together, we can turn possibility into reality and create a society that truly works for everyone.
The Choice Before Us
We stand at a decisive moment in human history.
The turbulence we feel, the erosion of agency, and the encroachment of systems that strip away our independence are not distant threats. They are realities already shaping our lives.
The arrival of AI and the technologies that support it has brought us to a genuine watershed: either we continue down the path of dependency and control, or we choose to reclaim balance, fairness, and justice through new systems built on empowerment, community, and sovereignty.
The Local Economy & Governance System, grounded in participatory democracy and people‑centric values, offers a practical and principled alternative.
It is not a utopia promised by elites, nor a nostalgic return to the past, but a framework for living that restores meaning to contribution, accountability, and shared responsibility.
Human ingenuity has always risen to meet the greatest challenges. If we believe it right to do so, we can build a society that works for everyone – where equity, equality, and open accountability are not ideals but lived realities.
The choice is ours. To continue sleepwalking into a future where humanity holds no value, or to awaken and embrace the possibility of a new civilisation. One that honours freedom, restores dignity, and ensures that life itself remains worth living.
In recent years, mounting challenges have threatened not only the livelihoods of farmers but also the nation’s ability to control its own food supply.
As policies and industry practices increasingly sideline independent food production, farmers face a pivotal choice: continue operating within a system that undermines their independence, or take bold steps to reclaim control and rebuild the UK food chain from the ground up.
This article explores the urgent need for change, the systemic issues facing agriculture, and the powerful impact that farmers’ decisions will have on the future of food security, communities, and the environment.
Farmers’ Choice: Reclaiming Control of the UK Food Chain
Farmers in the UK face a critical decision: either take back control of the nation’s food chain now, or risk losing everything—including the freedom that comes from managing our own food supply.
Background
In the summer of 2023, I published The Glos Community Project, which later evolved into An Economy for the Common Good.
Originally written as a book, The Future is Local, this project explored localising the supply of essential goods and services when our current system collapses.
It offered a practical vision for local communities, emphasising business models that prioritise people, communities, and the environment over profit. The central idea was to shift away from money as the core value and put people first.
Food and food security have always been central themes since I wrote Levelling Level in 2022. Through examining food production within a localised, circular economy, I realised just how pivotal food is to our future.
Unfortunately, the UK food chain’s importance is being sidelined and overlooked today.
The State of UK Agricultural Academia
My focus on UK food security led me to postgraduate study at the Royal Agricultural University in late 2023, where my concerns about the establishment’s approach to agriculture were only amplified.
There are glaring contradictions in the current system – contradictions that academic institutions seem unwilling to address. This reluctance raises questions about the true purpose of agricultural academia if it won’t challenge the status quo.
However, this malaise isn’t unique to agriculture; it reflects a broader trend in UK higher education, which has shifted from providing world-class centres of learning to institutions focused primarily on turnover and getting every student they can through the door.
Challenges Facing Farmers
The experience at the RAU mirrors the state of UK farming today. There is widespread recognition that something is fundamentally wrong, yet calls for change are often muted and deferential to the establishment.
Many across the industry still believe that government, the public sector, and corporate players will prioritise the needs of small businesses and farmers. However, history shows that this is rarely the case.
While farmers, industry speakers, and advocacy groups continue to speak out, their efforts often amount to little more than noise. Many hope that politicians will eventually address the industry’s difficulties, or that a change in government will bring solutions.
But the reality is that UK food security is not being treated as a matter of common sense or urgency.
Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future
The Farm Inheritance Tax issue highlighted how every part of the UK food chain lacks the priorities that working family farmers and the public deserve.
The system is rigged against independent UK food production because the establishment resists any sector that could foster independence from the current system.
Sadly, instead of helping, advocacy organisations often reinforce the myth that government supports UK farming by prioritising the relationship they have with politicians and officials, even as policies make it increasingly difficult for independent producers to survive.
The reality is that no matter how they are presented, the changes are all designed to encourage the end independent food production in the UK.
Control over the food supply is power. Like other productive industries, UK farming has been systematically undermined under the guise of progress, innovation, and economic policy.
This process began with the adoption of the Neoliberal FIAT money system and the push for global business, and deliberately misled previous generations into believing that joining the Common Market and making increasing commitments to the EU methodologies would benefit everyone.
The Consequences of Inaction
For decades, we have been distracted by consumer culture and promises of continuous improvement, while key industries have been hollowed out.
This has allowed a small group of wealthy individuals and corporations to consolidate control over land, businesses, and resources, often through changes in rules and regulations that once existed to support people, communities and the environment.
While some may dismiss these concerns as conspiracy theories, the evidence is clear: the consequences of these actions have been real and damaging. Many still struggle to believe that such harm could be inflicted for the sake of control and profit.
The Reality Today
Food and our food supply are critically important, yet many fail to grasp this.
Some policymakers believe traditional farming is obsolete and that future food will be produced in factories, regardless of the health or freedom implications.
Reports on farming profitability are rarely taken seriously, as the industry’s problems are symptoms of long-term, deliberate changes.
Governments of all parties are invested in a collapsing system, unable or unwilling to enact meaningful change.
Their solution is now to tax everything in hopes of reviving that failing system, but this approach is unsustainable too.
The Choice for Farmers
Farmers now face a pivotal choice: continue operating within a system that works against them, or walk away from government and industry expectations.
By starting anew and rebuilding the UK food system from scratch, farmers can reclaim control and create a future that prioritizes people, communities, and the environment.
Key Points Summary
Urgency for Farmers: UK farmers must act now to reclaim control of the food chain, or risk losing their livelihoods and the nation’s food security.
Local, People-Focused Economy: We must shift from profit-driven business models to ones that prioritise people, communities, and the environment, as outlined in the newly published Local Economy & Governance System.
Systemic Issues in Agriculture: There are deep-rooted problems in UK agriculture and academia, with institutions reluctant to challenge the status quo, and a broader trend of prioritising financial gain over genuine learning and improvement.
Government and Industry Inaction: Despite widespread recognition of problems, calls for change are often muted. Many in the industry hope for government intervention, but history shows that politicians rarely prioritise farmers’ needs.
Control and Power: The UK food system is structured to prevent independent food production, consolidating control among a small group of powerful interests. Advocacy organisations often reinforce the myth of government support, even as policies undermine farmers.
Consequences of Policy: Decades of policy have hollowed out key industries, transferring land, resources, and businesses to wealthy corporations and individuals, leaving communities and the environment vulnerable.
Dismissal of Concerns: While some may dismiss these issues as conspiracy theories, most recognise that the negative impacts are real and significant.
Misguided Beliefs: Policymakers increasingly believe traditional farming is obsolete, favouring factory-produced food without considering health or freedom implications. Reports and studies on farming profitability and the problems the industry faces are rarely taken seriously.
System Collapse: The current system is unsustainable, and governments are unable or unwilling to enact meaningful change, resorting to increased taxation in a failing attempt to keep the system afloat.
A New Path Forward: Farmers are encouraged to reject the expectations of government and industry, and to rebuild the UK food system from scratch, prioritising independence, community, and sustainability.
There’s something very wrong with the AI story that we are all being sold:
Nobody seems to have noticed that the script of man’s pathway to the pinnacle of human intelligence is about to come to its end, by handing our ability to think, over to machines.
As I write, I’m wondering if the name ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was a deliberate way to hide the truth in plain sight, all along.
Not because the technological breakthroughs that are coming at us thick and fast aren’t very clever.
But because just like the surrender of our value set to an artificial, valueless and damaging world dominated by money that manipulates everything about the way we think, we are about to give away our ability to even do that, to systems and technologies that cannot genuinely benefit any human being – other than those who own and run them.
In my eBook Actions Speak Louder than Digital Words, I talked about AI only having the ability to look back at history and the past. Even where back meant what had been published or ‘sensed’ by the Internet up to the very moment when the system was responding to a specific command.
This overlooked or deliberately whitewashed flaw of AI echoes one of the greater faults in the Human experience, where we inherently look backwards to our past experiences to provide guidance for the future.
This should be troubling enough.
But what wasn’t apparent even when I published that book in June 2023, was that as AI began filling everything across the web and digital sphere with its own responses, muses and anything else we can give AI-derived content as a name, it would then begin leveraging just as much and increasingly more of its own diluted content as a source, which is almost certain to increase as human input or creativity dries up.
And the contribution of human creativity and intelligence to the smorgasbord board of information and data that the AI engines feast on is most certainly drying up, as more and more of us surrender to the narrative we have been fed that tells us AI is now the only way, and jobs are threatened by the accompanying suggestion that AI can do things that we can never do!
Dictating our future by using the past as our point of reference certainly holds us back and creates all sorts of difficulties at all levels of life that we didn’t ever need to have.
However, the one thing that makes that experience manageable and, in some ways, arguably beneficial too, is that our human creativity and ability to look at every new situation and make sense of it and its context in ways that allow us to build bridges into the future, means that we are making progress all the time. Even if that progress is slower, whereas a machine that is limited only to reading what has already happened simply cannot.
People – and many of them too – genuinely accept the stories and myths that we have and are now being sold.
They believe and, in many cases, have become fearful that AI can already or very soon will take over every function that humans currently carry out within any business or organisation. Despite the reality that anyone using their common sense or daring to listen to their inner voice will recognise a very big question, ‘Where in this future does that leave any need for me?’
AI is very fast at what it does and is able to look at potentially all the information that is available to us in digital form at the very moment in time that a question is asked or an instruction is given.
That – and only that – is the real magic of AI.
It is the reason that we are all just accepting the idea that AI is already infinitely cleverer than Humans could ever be. Just as those who benefit from us believing this to be true intend us to believe.
However, our acceptance that we no longer need to be creative or think for ourselves, means that we will not only increasingly become dependent upon a pool of ‘knowledge’ outside of ourselves – albeit a very large one of everything that has been recorded, spoken, considered and then committed to the internet and digital platforms up to some point in history before. But this pool of knowledge that we will use for everything will become increasingly diluted by the growing amount of poor and corrupt information, data and ‘understanding’ that our already burgeoning use of AI with everything is now spaffing out into the digital ether.
As you read, Humanity is literally giving up the ability to think and create for itself, to a machine-driven world that is incapable of doing any more.
What is more, Humanity is surrendering these cornerstone abilities for survival voluntarily. Because someone who benefits from us believing we are inadequate without technology has told us this, when a change of the kind that overreliance on AI could be about to usher in would have needed something akin to an extinction-level event to take place at any time in world history before.
This uncomfortable truth will not stop those who stand to benefit from the AI takeover from pushing and promoting this path. They will continue peddling the myths that the AI takeover will be in our best interests and will be inevitable all the same. When it is nothing of the sort.
The Technology we have available to us today will not live up to its greatest potential. Because the greatest potential any technology that man invents will have, is to help improve the lives and experiences of all men, rather than to replace any one of them.
We know this to be true, as this has regrettably been the way that technological advancements have always impacted Humanity since the ending of the Agricultural Age.
Technology has always been employed to make money for those who own and control it since then.
The rise of new technology has always been at the cost of all others at some level. No matter who they are or what their connections might be.
The reality we face is that it may already be too late to save the world we recognise from a fate that we have all unwittingly chosen. Rather than there being any kind of event or catastrophe at the heart of future change that no one person could have been responsible for.
However, if we are to address the slide towards universal ignorance, with the accompanying potential to take us back into the dark ages once more, we must reassess, reimagine and regulate the uses of every kind of technology. So that technology’s master can only be the public good. Rather than profit and the disaster that is following hard in its footsteps right now.
If we value the Human experience and wish to improve it, it is time to learn, share and then live the truth that there is no need for any technology to replace jobs, other than so just a few can increase their profits and control.
The best way for everyone and everything to live well, is without the complications and diversions that misappropriated technology imposes upon us, and the technology we do embrace should always be used for the greater good and for the benefit of everyone involved.
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 