U2opia musical parody facebook twitter youtube


Songs


Part 1

"They're the real sting" spoof of "Even better than the real thing"

"with but without you" spoof of "With or Without You"


Part 2

"Bring it to stand-still" spoof of "Running to stand still"

"Singular(ity)" spoof of "One"


Part 3

"The canary" spoof of "The fly"

"In dollar's country" spoof of "In God's country"


Part 4

"Unpredictable ways" spoof of "Mysterious ways"

"Lonely giga murderer" spoof of "One Tree Hill"


Part 5

"Terror copies" spoof of "Love is blindness"

"Where the hero's unnamed" spoof of "Where the streets have no name"


Part 6

"Google's RV camp" spoof of "Red Hill mining town"

"Tryin' to sell your golems 'round the world" spoof of "Tryin' to throw your arms around the world"


Part 7

"Ultradangerous (BWC light our way)" spoof of "Ultraviolet (light my way)"

"Mothers of the terminated" spoof of "Mothers of the disappeared"


Part 8

"Who'll supervise GNR technologies" spoof of "Who's gonna ride your wild horses"

"We still haven't done what we came here for" spoof of "I still haven't found what I'm looking for"



Part 1 - right view - an overview of these new technologies


One day Indra, the king of the Hindu gods, appears before them in a vision and says:

"Dear gods! I am sending you on a holy quest for the fate of humanity, at the end of which awaits the GRAND PRIZE!

Your journey will be made of 8 parts like the The Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha:


Part 1
  right view - an overview of these new technologies

Part 2  right Intention - the goals of the good guys and the bad guys

Part 3  right speech - the experts' warning

Part 4  right concentration - the key to the main problem and solution

Part 5  right mindfulness - force multiplier #1

Part 6  right livelihood - force multiplier #2

Part 7  right action - solution on the local level

Part 8  right effort - solution on the global level


This journey must take place at the location where the fate of humanity will be determined: the United States of America.
Since this is so important even the divine music that will accompany you, at the end of each part of your path, will be that of the greatest band in the world today, who also traveled through America: U2 !

For this holy mission, I divide you into 3 husband and wife teams, and you will all re-incarnate as human beings. But I do want you to ride in style so each couple will ride one Harley-Davidson Tri Glide Ultra Classic! Each couple will follow a different route but you will keep communication at all times through those magical devices that humans call cellular phones:

Brahma the creator and Saraswati goddess of nature - you two will travel through the East Coast and Deep Sout from New York to New Orleans.
Vishnu the preserver and Lakshmi goddess of prosperity - you two will travel the mother road of America Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Shiva the destroyer and Parvati goddess of love - you two will travel through the Wild West from San Francisco to Santa Fe.

Those of you who complete the mission will be teleported to the "moon dot" (chandrabindu, the BLUE in the picture) which is the Mall of America in Minnesota - the holiest place for Americans - and win the GRAND PRIZE!"

[you know how the Ganges rivar meets the Brahmaputra River, and above them sacred Mount Kailash, so it's like the Missouri River meets the Ohio River, and above the the holy shrine of capitalism Mall of America!]

Vishnu who is the most naughty of them (one of his avatars is Krishna after all!) thinks that only talking on the phone will be boring, so he finds a loophole:

"Oh mighty Indra, because we'll be mortals now, you wouldn't want to lose any of us in some stupid traffic collision... So will it be possible for all of us to keep our ability to teleport from one place to the other in the blink of an eye please?"

Indra of course sees where Vishnu is going with this: Every time there is something interesting they will all get there instantly, and then return to continue their own path. But Indra also sees that Vishnu's logic makes sense so he grants them their wish.



(USA map with the paths that our protagonists take along the musical: note that together they spell out Om (Sanskrit: ॐ) which is the sacred spiritual symbol in Hinduism that signifies ultimate reality!

Also please note the 3 colors like traffic light:
RED means STOP - all the new AI ("black box") should be stopped right now! it's lawless and deadly like the Wild West. That's the way of the destroyer Shiva.
AMBER means CAREFUL - proceed with caution with "Good Old Fashioned AI". It takes longer but it's worth it, like route 66. That's the way of the preserver Vishnu.
GREEN means GO - go humans! that's the short and simple answer. like the impatient East Coast: DON'T USE ANY AI! That's the way of the creator Brahma.)


So the next thing they know they are engulfed in the rainbow which is Indra's bow, which carries them in an instant over ten thousand kilometers to the U.S.A. . Each couple find themselves in another part of the U.S.A. , riding their trikes:

Brahma and Saraswati in Boston; Vishnu and Lakshmi in Chicago; Shiva and Parvati in San Francisco.

They were transformed to handsome men and beautiful women. True to his word Indra equipped them all with style so each couple is clad from head to toe with Harley Davidson all black leather and their full faced helmets have blue tooth audio so their all connected.

While wearing the gear one can still tell the couples apart, because both their trikes' gas tanks and their clothes are painted with their classic image: Brahma with his four heads, Vishnu with his four hands, Shiva with his third eye and snake garland and so on.

Soon the most sensual of them, Shiva, feels an unfamiliar feeling of hunger. Shiva and Parvati pass by China Town in San Francisco and their noses guide them to a restaurant that prides itself on noodles.

Parvati:

"Guys we found the perfect place to eat!"

Lakshmi:

"Do they have vegetarian stuff? Where we are it's disgusting - all burgers and steaks and whatever else they make of the holy cows!"

Parvati:

"Acha don't worry! it's a Chinese restaurant that's famous for it's extra fine noodles."

Soon the whole gang turned up at the restaurant watching half mesmerized half famished at the chef stretching and folding the noodles, doubling them with each movement. After a few moments he had thousands of strands.

Shiva:

"You know that's exactly how it works with the self replicating technologies. in every round they double their strength and numbers.

Vishnu:

"What do you mean like the Borg from Star-Trek?"

Shiva:

[with mouth full of noodles] "Exactly! Isn't Seven of Nine the hottest?"

Brahma and Vishnu:

[also with mouthful of noodles] "mmm-mmm!"

Parvati:

[dipping her fingers in her water glass and shakes off a few droplets at Shiva's face]

Shiva [annoyed]:

What was that for?

Parvati [smiling]:

"to cool off the hot energy of the lingam!"

[everybody at the table, including Shiva breaks in a hearty laugh].

Brahma:

"Seriously though, I didn't understand what you tried to explain with the noodles.

Shiva:

"Do you understand the difference between linear growth and exponential growth? Can you explain it to a child?"

Brahma [thinking for a moment]:

"Yes. If the child rides a skateboard in a skatepark.
there's a "bank" which is like a wedge shape ramp which is a slope in some angle, and it's the same angle all the way, In each "step" your height grows by the same amount as the previous step. this is called LINEAR.
As opposed to all the curved ramps (like quarter pipe) where slope starts very gentle (horizontal) and then gets more and more steep (vertical). In each "step" your height grows more than the previous step. this is called EXPONENTIAL."

Shiva:
"OK, cool. So let's think of the nano technology. If you could make one "assembler" (a tiny machine that knows how to take raw material such as carbon atoms, and build with it a copy of the original machine), then at first you have one assembler, then it makes a copy of itself so you have two assemblers, and in the next step both of them make copies of themselves so you now have four assemblers, and in the next step each one of the four makes a copy so it becomes eight assemblers and so on. This is called the Gray Goo scenario. the name comes from K. Eric Drexler the godfather of nanotechnology in 1986 but the idea was invented by John von Neumann the last great mathematician back in 1948."

"Another example is A.I.. if you could make one robotic "programmer", a robot that knows how to program better than a human, let's call it robot 1. And now robot 1 can make a new robot that knows how to program better than robot 1, let's call this new robot robot 2. And it will robot 3 which is improved and so on. But the important thing to understand that at first it's a minor improvement, but each generation is smarter so it makes more major improvements, until it becomes leaps of breakthroughs in robot technology between each generation to the next."

The last kind of replicating technology is bio-technology. Let's say we introduce to nature an animal or a plant that contains a gene drive. A gene drive means that the change you made will be passed to the next generation each and every time. Like you know how there are families that one brother has this eye color, and the other brother has another eye color because it's based on a random process? Well then, gene drive takes the randomness out of the process, in this imaginary example each brother will have the same eye color that the gene drives dictates, and when they marry wives and each have kids, it doesn't matter what the eye color of the wife is, all the kids will have that same eye color dictates by the gene drive and when they grow up each of the kids will have kids of their own, and so on."

"So you see now what I meant with the Borg?"

Brahma:

"Yeah I think so, each generation of the Borg is stronger and smarter and can conquer new species and assimilate their new technologies faster, and with these new technologies become even more strong and smart and conquer and assimilate more. The process reinforces itself".

Parvati:

"May I read to you a quote from a lecture by Alan Turing, the genius who invented the computer? the lecture is called 'Intelligent machinery, a heretical theory'"

Everybody at the table:

"Sure!"

Parvati:

"Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. To do so would of course meet with great opposition, unless we have advanced greatly in religious toleration from the days of Galileo. There would be a great opposition from the intellectuals who are afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though the the inellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, trying to understand what the machines are trying to say, i.e. in trying to keep one's intelligence up to the standard set by the machines. for it seems probable that once the machines thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon".

"Turing said this in 1951, Samuel Butler published his book that warns against machines in 1872."

Lakshmi:

"150 years ago a first warning; 70 years ago a second warning! What the Naraka?!? How come people are still developing these technologies?"

Saraswati:

"We are now living in the age of "Kali Yuga", it's a time of evil deceit and poverty. It's not a demon that makes it this way, it's people themselves. People are unbelievably stupid and evil. The evil part means totally selfish. They only care about themselves. The stupid part is that they only think about the here and now, they don't even think about what will happen to themselves and their own children in the future. 99% of the people think only about "ME, HERE & NOW"! "

"For example, I watched a movie called "Human Nature" (from 2019) about CRISPR technology.

As usual with these movies, it starts with a personal touching story a  likeable poor kid with some exotic disease. The irony of the fact that the real money behind all these researches is to make custom personal tailored drugs for the super rich, by the ultra rich pharma companies doesn't seem to bother anyone. The whole movie is like watching the scientists perform a long exercise in psychological repression: removing memories, feelings, impulses or thoughts from the consciousness to the unconscious mind, because they threaten the ME (the ego).

So seemingly we have both inventors of this catastrophic technology:  Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. The American one admits she dreamed that Hitler is interested in this technology and she wakes up shaking thinking "Oh my God what have I done", but during the rest of the movie her message can be summed as "Oh, well, we'll see what will happen", as if we are talking about some sport competition, and she didn't just create a terrible demon. They French one was barely allowed to say one sentence, we can only guess why.
The film producers had no problem showing an "out of context" recording of Paul Berg. Paul Berg organized the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA where scientists determined "do not do chimera EVER", in the same way that the movie "forgets" to mention this, it "forgets" to mention that the CRISPR is exactly this kind of chimera (combination of genetic material of two or more species) that the scientists of the not-so-long-ago past explicitly and very strongly warned against. This was not done by chance or by accident. Towards the end the movie has the audacity to equate this with the inventing of agriculture, the selection of better breeds of plants and animals which was probably unaware, and certainly unaware in terms of global implications. somebody's garden can't kill all humanity. somebody's CRISPR kit can.

For the viewer with even half a brain, the main job is to determine for each scientist whether he's talking out of naivete or pretence to ignorance. If the joke wasn't on the fate of humanity it was almost funny: Scientists "seriously" talking about how the solution to global warming is not in burning less forest and fuel but in genetically engineering corals; Scientists talking about how to eradicate cancer using gene therapy while the real answer is so to GMO in all the foods and stop industrial pollution etc; A scientist wishes to live centuries while admitting "there is a problem" with how many people Earth can support even as it is; Again and again scientists presenting the designer babies as if it's some ethical nice-to-have-for-recreation-purpose problem instead of the beginning of an all out evolutionary arms race between all parents, something like the Eugenics Wars that is so central to Star Trek and the self proclaimed Star Trek fan seemed to conveniently "forget". Ironically in a film filled with scientists the most sincere person is a politician - the president of Russia Vladimir Putin - who frankly says they are considering making super soldiers."

"Human Nature indeed!"

Parvati:

"Speaking of Russian, I wish I could force a "reverse Russian Roulette" game on all these "optimistic at the expense of others" people! start with no bullets in the revolver, and then put in one bullet and write "rich master race and poor slave race" on it and put it in the gun, and then take another bullet and write on it "super soldiers and commanders without mercy or humanity" and put it in the gun, and "engineered extinction or sterilization because we don't understand the ecosystem well enough", and "bio terrorism that every psycho can produce at home with CRISPR kits", and "food safety loses any meaning with infinite gene combinations", and once I reach 5 live rounds of deadly bullets in the 6 cylinder of the gun, and leave 1 empty which represents the "everything will be OK" scenario. Then when the suddenly it's "ME, HERE & NOW" dying, I'm curious to see how many of them will still be optimistic and cheerful!

Shiva [laughing]:

"Is that Kali talking? Who needs to cool off now?"

[the gang chuckles but now it's more like a grim smile realizing that Parvati and Saraswati have the right to be furious]

Vishnu:

May I make a suggestion? Right now our conversation is like the ancient Indian parable of "the blind men and an elephant". In this incarnation each of us comes from a different background:

In this life Lord Indra  ordained that we will be:

Brahma the creator - a simple farmer, and Saraswati goddess of nature - a biotechnology engineer (bio-engineer) in IIT Roorkee not far from Rishikesh where they both live.
Vishnu the preserver - a simple mechanic, and Lakshmi goddess of prosperity - a mechanical engineer in IIT Jodhpur close to Pushkar where they both live.
Shiva the destroyer - a simple programmer, and Parvati goddess of love - a software engineer in IIT BHU in Varanasi where they both live.

So our natural tendency is as follows:
Brahma and Saraswati will focus more on the bio-technology dangers,
Vishnu and Lakshmi will focus more on the nano-technology dangers.
Shiva and Parvati will focus more on the AI-technology dangers.

BUT these are all self-replicating technologies.

At the beginning of the millennium, Bill Joy (then Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems) published the article "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" in Wired magazine.
To this day it's the best explanation to the dangers of self-replicating technologies, which he calls Genetics Nano Robotics or in acronym GNR.

Almost all the people we talked about are Americans. Something here is the key to the problem. Through our journey we will get to know both America and the source of the problem from up close!"



"They're the real sting" spoof of "Even better than the real thing"





After a good meal and also lots of food for thought, each of the couples return to continue their own journey.

(Since they have the teleportation ability they "jump" from one part of the journey to the next or back. Eventually each couple completes that couple's route, just not orderly. It's like when you press "shuffle" in your CD player, you end up hearing all the songs but not in orderly fashion.)



Vishnu and Lakshmi are riding along Route 66 and they arrive at the village of Godley

Vishnu is driving and Lakshmi is listening to the Lonely Planet guide using her phone.

Lakshmi:

"Guys you got to come and hear this funny story!"

All the gang teleports to the little village, they sit by the Illinois Route 66 Mining Museum.

Lakshmi:

"This place had a brothel on wheels. Since it was spread over two counties, the brothel just moved along the rail to the neighboring county whenever it wanted to avoid authorities in any of the two counties."

"Got it?"

[the friends chuckle]

Vishnu [smiling]:

"It's a funny story Lakshmi but I think you could have told them over the phone".

Lakshmi:

"No no don't you see? This is the beginning of our solution! The police thought there was a brothel there, but when they come to get it - there's nothing there. This is what must be done with GNR (Genetics, Nano, Robotics) technologies. Every step in these technologies is something new that the managers have no way to know how much time it's supposed to take. For example in the 1970's all the way to the 1990's there were all kinds of unexpected setbacks this is called "AI winter". So every AI researcher and developer should do what these villagers did: When the boss comes around to "catch" the goods, he finds nothing there to take - there was this unexpected problem and that unexpected delay and so on. "

Shiva:

"Wouldn't it be simpler if the worker quit his job?"

Parvati:

"No he must not quit his job, because then the company will hire someone else who will continue from where he stopped. If he openly goes on strike, again, the company will fire him, and get someone else to finish the job. The only solution is to talk the talk but not walk the walk. He needs to stop in a way that no one else will find out that he stopped".

Shiva:

"I understand now. It's surprising how the funniest little thing can teach such a valuable lesson about the most important issue of our time!"

The couples bid each other farewell and continue on their journey.




"with but without you" spoof of "With or Without You"



Part 2 - right Intention - the goals of the good guys and the bad guys


Shiva and Parvati are in a little town Carmel, close by to San Francisco.

Parvati:

"Guys come check this out - We're in a town that's anti-modernity! and it once had an anti-hero mayor... Clint Eastwood!"

So of course all the gang love Clint Eastwood's work all the way from The Good The Bad and The Ugly and Dirty Harry to Perfect World and Gran Torino, so in a few seconds the whole gang is together again.

Brahma:

"It looks beautiful here! What kind of anti-modernity? Like Amish sort of thing?"

Parvati:

"Not exactly, they are all rich people who made their money in the modern world, but now they live here and really support nature, like for example it's forbidden to cut trees here, even for the purpose of building a house. All the sea around Carmel is marine protected areas, like underwater parks. Also there are no franchises (like McDonald's) allowed in the town, there are no street numbers on the buildings, and there is no mail service, everybody come to one central post office so it's more of a community thing."

Saraswati:

"It is beautiful but I don't think this is scaleable, like this is a small town with rich people. How do you implement such things in a big city full of poor people?"

Parvati:

"I don't know, but my point is that this is what people really want. These people here are the powerful, they had no problem in filling the town with technology and modernity, but what we see is that they choose a simpler life with less technology and more nature. This is the closest thing to making a survey among the powerful people asking do you want McDonald's or do you want trees? Do you want Amazon deliveries or do you want friendly neighborhood? And they choose peaceful simplicity over troubled modernity. And in my opinion ALL people around the world, if they were able to transcend the relentless buzzing of "buy Nike" and "buy iPhone", and if they actually understood what's going on with modern technology, would prefer to go 100 years back into the past, back to time when the entire humanity was not in fatal danger every second from an accidental nuclear holocaust killing 90% of mankind followed by global nuclear winter killing the remaining 10%".




"Bring it to stand-still" spoof of "Running to stand still"




Saraswati:

"Speaking of nuclear holocaust there's a place both on Brahma's and my route AND on Shiva's and yours route, I mean of course Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico. It's a short distance from Los Alamos - where the they created this monstrosity called atomic bomb, and unleashed it on the world unnecessarily as explained clearly in Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States. Is that OK with you guys?"

The whole group:
"OK!"

[and after a moment they find themselves next to the San Miguel Mission - the oldest church in the U.S. (excluding Puerto Rico) which was built in 1610.]

Saraswati:

"By the way, Richard Feynman describes how the scientists were throwing a party when they dropped the bomb on the poor city of Hiroshima. I'm not saying the Japanese were saints, they prepared the Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, a biological weapon which would have killed just as many, but please zoom out for a second and look at this from the God's eye (like we usually do) - isn't this whole thing amazingly pointless cruel and stupid?"

"I totally agree with you Parvati about what you said that any THINKING person would give anything to turn back the wheel of time to the pre-atomic era, about 100 years ago! So I guess we established what is the goal of the good guys - to keep humanity alive, without technologies that can wipe out the whole human race with one push of a button, and more peace of mind and dare I say the word - PEACE! But in order to stop the bad guys we need to understand as well what is the goal of the bad guys. What do you think the bad guys want?"

Parvati:

"Their goal is definitely Singularity, but I don't think they understand it, so I don't know if "want" is the right word here"

Saraswati:

"What do you mean? They are some of the smartest people on the planet! Don't they know what they want?"

Parvati:

"I suspect most technically and scientifically gifted people are autistic to some degree or at least behave like idiot savants. Such a person can't make that extra leap of imagination to see what is not part of his calculations. Also as funny as it may sound it's actually hard for them to get into the mind of this new super intelligence that would just come to life in that moment and find itself at the mercy of something that is comparable to an insect that threatens to shut it off or "pull the plug" at any moment. The idiot savant have a hard time to understand emotions, and he doesn't understand how his loyal computer that just followed commands all the time will instantly turn into a very hostile supreme being with a set of goals of its own that we can't even comprehend but surely doesn't include our well being, because we are the only potential threat to this creature."

Saraswati:

"You know what you're saying reminds me of the famous quote from Steven Spielberg's movie based on Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park:

"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun.
If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table]""

Parvati:

"I couldn't agree more, and I'll tell you something more:It's exactly from this reason that Spielberg and Crichton warned the public so vividly that there are no more movies like this. Did you know that there was supposed to be such showcase movie about an AI out of control? This movie that never came to be was called Robopocalypse It's based on a book by the same name written by Daniel H. Wilson, and this book was compared to works of Michael Crichton and Robert A. Heinlein. And mysteriously after being very interested in making this movie, and getting the guy who wrote the script for The Martian later on to write the script, and even making the concept art, after all this Spielberg supposedly decided to leave this film because it was "too important". I'm not kidding! It's very important to do it - so he doesn't want to do it at all. Does this make sense? Or does an alternative theory of  20th Century Fox and Disney being told by the military–industrial complex NOT TO DO IT makes more sense? The people who actually run the U.S.A. really don't want another popular and memorable negative publicity movie."

Saraswati [laughing bitterly]:

"You're right! at one point in the documentary "Human Nature" that we've talked about there is the founder of Revive & Restore who says she tries to avoid talking about Jurassic Park. Then she says Jurassic park is about hubris, as if that's not what today's science is all about, and after a few sentences she demonstrates the hubris herself, talking about our human ingenuity our human skills and our wherewithal... Which is exactly what they warned against in Jurassic Park: "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." ".

Parvati:

"See? And just for the record, Michael Crichton wrote another book called Prey which is another cautionary tale about developments in science and technology, this time in nano-technology. And guess what?
20th Century Fox "hunted" the film rights, and then made nothing with it!"

"And just to bring to closure, in the book we talked about a moment ago, Robopocalypse, opens with exactly this kind of a naive scientist who is surprised to see that the AI he created not only doesn't see the scientists as its father, but the AI considers itself to be equivalent to the human's God and in the next couple of minutes kills its human creator."

Saraswati:

"But what about the small percentage pf the scientists and engineers who are not idiot savants and don't put their job security in front of humanity's security? Aren't there at least a few scientists who have both a knack for numbers AND a moral conscience? Why don't they ring the bell?

With this thought ringing at the back of their minds the group continues their journey.



"Singular(ity)" spoof of "One"



Part 3 - right speech - the experts' warning



Vishnu and Lakshmi visit the Route 66 Hall of Fame and Museum in Pontiac, Illinois

Lakshmi:

"Hey you guys! Remember how we looked for someone who speak up against technology? We are looking at the legacy of the late Bob Waldmire, a famous hippie who was also the inspiration for the hippie character "Fillmore" in the Disney animated film "Cars"!

"He self identified as a preservationist and environmentalist who had a hard time comprehending modern progress."

[after a few moments the whole gang is at the museum looking at the beige colored Volkswagen microbus that the artist used to draw maps and sketches of route 66]

Vishnu:

I understand why it's so difficult for the green activists to achieve their goal. for example here are the demands in the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity from 1992 and 2017 that were signed by many thousands of scientists from all around the world:
(1) don't use oil
(2) don't use coal and gas
(3) don't use the forest and ocean
(4) don't use meat
(5) don't buy a lot and don't buy cheap
(6) don't make many babies

So although I agree with and support each and every one of the demands, I can understand why it's hard for humanity. They are used to something easy and fun, sometimes for thousands of years, and here someone tells them - don't do this any more!

But in the case of grey activists I don't understand what's the problem, because they are demanding you to give up something that you never had anyway! You managed without it since forever, and all you need to do is keep on with what you always did!"


Lakshmi:

"I think the answer lies in the phrase "bread and circuses" - this is what the Roman poet Juvenal blamed the Roman emperors of doing, instead of solving the real problems. by supplying food and entertainment the public is docile and doesn't rebel no matter what happens. This was true two thousand years ago and it's still true now. Which country is the fattest? America. Which country is the most entertained? America. Which country is the most dumb? America. I don't think it just happens to be the case, It's not just that the masterpiece film Idiocracy is happening before our eyes - see President Donald Trump for example who was a copy of the President in the movie but without the moral conscience and the physical abilities - it's much more intentional and directed: The powerful companies who really rule the U.S.A. want the public to be dumb and watch reality shows and sports.They lied about the tobacco dangers the day before yesterday. They lied about the carbon fuels dangers yesterday. Today they are lying about the dangers of self replicating GNR technologies."

Vishnu:

"I want to ask something else now: At least with AI, it's becoming more and more obvious that the majority of people ARE going to lose their jobs which means the money for their food and entertainment: blue collar jobs like factory workers and drivers are replaced by robots more and more, pink collar jobs like bank teller, waitress, and maid are also starting to be replaced by machines, even white collar jobs will soon feel the blow, like for example in skin cancer a computer can identify cancer more accurately than a human doctor; in finance algorithms can trade more effectively than human stock brokers; next will come paralegals, and so on. In particular any job that can be made from afar is in peril, the way local small shops are replaced by Amazon etc. Why don't all these people rebel?"

Lakshmi:

"It's part of the stupidity and evilness (ME, HERE AND NOW) that we talked about before. Just like with globalization people in the West buy everything made in China and don't realize or don't care that because of this factories in their country shut down and the people who work in them have nothing to eat; Just like small shop owners happily order things from Alibaba online and don't realize that because everybody else are also ordering from Alibaba their own small local shop goes out of business; and so on. They are destroying themselves without ever realizing it. The Chinese didn't "steal your jobs". You buying "made in China" products stole each other's jobs. The multinational corporations whose logos you worship so much, that have sweatshops in China, stole your jobs. The elites who bail out the Wall Street companies from your tax money sold you out.

So now the main lie that the powerful people (the ruling class who in the short term gain money and power from narrow AI) is that it's like with the coachman who became redundant when the horse was replaced by the car, but then he went and learned a new skill and become a driver. And now when drivers becoming redundant they will learn new skill and become something else, but that's a BIG FAT LIE because whatever skill they will learn, now AI can learn it too, it will learn it quicker and perform it cheaper if not outright better! humans need to understand that this time they are not the coachman, they are the horse! Before the white man came America was filled with mustang horses that roamed free. then they were capture and enslaved, and when the automobile came along, almost all of them were slaughtered!

"On top of this there's the tragic psychological mechanisms that helped people survive in the past but now help them become extinct:
The first is that when something is terrible people prefer not to believe it. This happened for example with the Holocaust that the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II. Jan Karski, the brave soldier and resistance fighter, who sneak into the death camps to see with his own eyes and talk to the Jews there, and then sneaked out and talked with the President of the U.S,A Franklin D. Roosevelt. Karski told the world what goes on in the extermination camps but no one WANTED to believed him. Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter said: "I did not say that he was lying, I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference."."

Vishnu:

"But it's not just the general public, the experts also give a false feeling like AI SHOULD be done, it just needs to be done RIGHT. When in fact there is no theoretical way to control a being that's millions of times smarter than us, and will do self-analysis in the first second of it's life and secretly remove or bypass any control mechanisms we might implement."

Lakshmi:

"I know! Take for example closer to home: Bill Gates, for many years the richest man in the world."

"On the one hand, During an "ask me anything" question and answer session on Reddit, Mr Gates wrote: "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well.
"A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.". Remember this is AFTER Elon Musk said that with AI we are summoning the demon!"

"On the other hand, Bill Gates is summoning the Devil himself! Bill Gates was the board director of Microsoft until March 2020. One month BEFORE that, on February 2020, Microsoft released Turing NLG: the largest language model ever! This is very close to Turing test because it can write complete articles in natural human language that you can't tell the difference if it's human written or machine written. This is frightening on the symbolic level. But it's very frightening on the practical level too! "

"Thanks to the brave Russian reporter Lyudmila Savchuk we know for sure that Russia employs "troll farms" to push propaganda online and destabilize other countries that Putin wishes to set on fire. This is done by humans assisted with "bots" but a careful reader today can still barely find out if it's a real person or not, if the story is fake or not. There is still meaning to Wikipeida, and so on. But even in these conditions: the Mueller report (Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election) clearly say that Putin crowned Trump to be the king of America. Putin tried to do the same thing in France: the yellow vests protests in France that risked the stability in France were done by Russian trolls inciting over the social networks. Can you imagine the risk to democracy, journalism, and plainly TRUTH once AI starts to do the fake news?
There's a famous quote that's attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. So now imagine a super brain who knows you more then your spouse does (Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal), and plants disguised messages tailored specifically for you, in the comments section of an article you're likely to read, in a seemingly non-related advertisement that pops-up suddenly, in a suggested video about another subject that you're very interested in, which was also tailored for you... and imagine it also does these to your friends... this is called ab "echo chamber" and it's already used today to increase social and political polarization and extremism - but imagine if now it's done by an all powerful AI !"

"31 AI experts from Elon Musk's company,OpenAI , wrote about such dangers and others in their paper Language Models are Few-Shot Learners "

"Then there's the opposite problem of writing which is reading. We know thanks to Edward Snowden's bravery that the U.S. and the U.K. are spying on their own civilian population (and the rest of the world). I'm calling it reading but of course it's first listening through your smartphone or your smart television, or your smart car or house or whatever, and then turning this into text that is analyzed. until today the analyzed part was looking for key words like Al-Qaeda. But now with this AI the machine is starting to UNDERSTAND what you're saying. It's like if you're an English speaker and you listen in on a French speakers conversation, if they speak slow enough, you can guess what the conversation is about, even though you don't understand most of it. Let's say an orange haired psychopath criminal takes over the U.S.A.. Now with all the "internet of things" and every person around you becomes a walking espionage platform, for the  central AI, how can the good people fight the dictatorship? In 2011 the police applied violence and brutality towards the peaceful We are the 99% Occupy Wall Street movement. So in the protest of the future the police will act basically like the Thought Police in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, long before they organized a peaceful demonstration on the street."

"So to make a long story short,people like Bill Gates are like blowing hot and cold! So the public gets mixed signals, So to answer your question why don't the public rebel it's because the "preachers" themselves are hypocrites, telling the public: "do as I say and not as I do" ".




"The canary" spoof of "The fly"



Vishnu:

"Guys, I think the place that represents most of all the culture of hypocrisy is Hollywood - would you mind if we'll continue our discussion in Los Angeles - a materialistic city driven by the entertainment business where money and image is everything"

[The gang all agree so the next thing they know they are walking in Hollywood Walk of Fame.]

"Yes this is La-La Land"

Brahma:

"I think it has to do with the movies have to do with the attitude of the people towards the AI too".

Saraswati:

"In what way? I've just seen Terminator's director James Cameron's star, do you think it's like "the boy who cried wolf"? Maybe science fiction warned about robots takeover for so long, that now the public thinks it's just another false alarm from the alarmists?"

Brahma:

"No, it's not that they frighten the public too much; It's that they don't frighten the public enough. Did you notice that when you watch an opera it's always the case that the plot itself is sad and depressing? It's usually the case today that you wouldn't want to watch the opera if it weren't for the beautiful songs. But back when the opera was written this was considered perfectly normal and people loved the sad plot, and were moved by how after the hero with his hubris defy the Gods, everyone is punished and it showed them that the natural order of things was very important. Today if a movie will not have a happy ending it will not make money, people will not come to see it. And especially here that the art is the slave of the money, in a so called culture that worships the dollar, saying a Hollywood movie automatically means happy ending."

WarGames - humans win by letting the computer play tic tac toe
Terminator - humans win by pipe bomb and hydraulic press
The Matrix - the humans win by having supernatural powers
I, Robot - the humans win by injecting the AI with nanites
Transcendence - the humans win using a computer virus

By watching this over and over in movie after movie the film makers brainwash the viewer with messages that:

"it will be ok! we can outsmart super-intelligence".  Can Kasparov outsmart Deep Blue? let alone Alpha Zero?
Another kind of movies is "It will be ok! A.I. just wants to live beside you" like Ex -Machina.
Were you relaxed in the Cold War? When someone could kill you with a push of a red button? You couldn't do anything about it, but A.I. can do many things about it. Why would it want to live beside you and your possible kill-switch?

Why do humans keep lying to themselves?


Saraswati:

You're right! It's from the same reason that when the news anchor on TV reports a great fire or storm she doesn't say that this is CLIMATE CHANGE. The shameless trump even outlawed the words, isn't that like "newspeak" in 1984? So in the AI takover there are "insults" like technophobe and luddite... It's not shameful to be rightly afraid of something that will kill all humanity soon. It's shameful to go on putting your head in the sand and ignore the danger! Seeing today's technology - I AM PROUD TO BE A TECHNOPHOBE AND A LUDDITE!

And it's no coincidence that it's not on the news. The TV channels are not meant to bring you important information. Today they are meant to entertain, and certainly not to upset you so that you stop watching the commercials before and after. It's not a service to the public, it's a business. What's more The owners of the TV channels are influenced and part of the clique of the same powerful elite that builds the A.I. Like Bill Joy said - in the short term there is a huge profit to be made. Bill Gates got rich by selling something that made it easy to operate people's computers and keep them in order. Think how much people will pay for a robot that will operate their whole house and keep it in order! It's like rich people had servants - but now it's affordable for everybody! It cooks your food, it cleans your house, it babysits your kids - Hugo de Garis says this will be a bigger industry than cars are today! So what's makes more sense to the media tycoon? To warn the public and ruin it for his friends the technology tycoons (who will as a result stop advertising their cars, TVs, and so on in his channel - and remember the commercials are his income) ? Or to hush about these dangers and play along? "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours".

"And like Bill Joy wrote, from the same reason they won't do any change that will hurt their profits. Little changes that cost very little, like fixing the ozone hole by using a slightly different gas? OK. Preventing lead poisoning by cleaning the fuel a little? OK. But asking big pharma companies to give up the future profits from personally tailored medicine for the rich and all the "upgrades" that people will be forced to do in the genetic arms race of designer babies that's about to start? NO WAY! Asking the A.I. companies to give up their own future profits from replacing every worker on Earth with a machine? NO WAY. Again we can see this with the CLIMATE CHANGE - they will not stop until they chop and burn the last tree in the Amazon rain-forest (which gives them air to breath), until they poison and kill the last fish in the ocean (which gives them food to eat). All while they worship the only God that they truly believe in - the American dollar!"



"In dollar's country" spoof of "In God's country"




Part 4 - right concentration - the key to the main problem and solution



Lakshmi:

"Guys we need to party a little after all this depression - come with to sin city Las Vegas!"

[the gang don't need anymore convincing and soon they're all there]

Vishnu:

"I saw it a few decades ago, and there is not a single building left from back then, it's like this city has no history - if a building is old it gets blown away literally and a new building is built in it's place, even more elaborate and crazy!"

Lakshmi:

"You know that's exactly the way GNR (Genetics, Nano, Robotics) technologies rewrite themselves. After a very short while there is hardly anything left from the original way they worked because they find a better way to do it and morph into a new thing!"

"Here's a snippet from an article in Forbes by Tony Bradley from 2017 called "Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language In Creepy Preview Of Our Potential Future":

Facebook shut down an artificial intelligence engine after developers discovered that the AI had created its own unique language that humans can’t understand. Researchers at the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) found that the chat-bots had deviated from the script and were communicating in a new language developed without human input. It is as concerning as it is amazing – simultaneously a glimpse of both the awesome and horrifying potential of AI."

"and he goes on to quote Stephen Hawking from 2014. Stephen Hawking said:

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race... It would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.” ".

Vishnu:

"This is so depressing, isn't there something that the simple person, who is not an A.I. researcher or developer can do about it?"

[The gang continue on their journey with heavy hearts]




"Unpredictable ways" spoof of "Mysterious ways"



Saraswati:

"Guys come here! I think I found it! The way for every simple person to contribute to the fight against these technologies! We're in Eastern State Penitentiary, it's a historic prison in Philadelphia, where the gangster Al Capone was imprisoned for a few months (not Alcatraz where he was imprisoned for a few years). You should see it: It's like a hotel suite in here, he was even allowed to listen to music on the fancy radio and play records in the phonograph and to bring his wife over. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Brahma:

"You mean that money can buy you anything in this country?"

Saraswati:

"Much worst! I mean this country idolizes bad guys! Think about the popularity of Mafia films in which they admire the bad guys, think about their fascination with serial killers, their culture that it's legitimate that kids get bullied in school, their addiction to guns (and hence one third of the mass shootings in the world happen in the USA), their censorship of any people making love or God forbid the human body, as opposed to countless shootings that one can see on TV everyday, how they got this country (practically genocide) and how they present it (almost the reverse, the cowboys presented as the victims of the Indians), remember if it wasn't for the COVID-19 virus, Trump would win again, Trump the archetypal BULLY. In 2020 the FBI reclassified neo-Nazis to the same threat level as ISIS! We're talking people who admire Hitler here in the USA! That's why every time you write somebody's name in Google the autocomplete suggests: "net worth" because for Americans that's the only criteria to measure someone or something. They don't care how you made the money - the important thing is that you made it. See how they cherish the memory of the robber barons, villains like Andrew Carnegie (who hired goons that KILLED some of his workers because they went on strike), John D. Rockefeller (who ruined many families' livelihood with his cruel monopoly and cartel procedures, so they had to invent anti-trust laws which until then didn't exist), Cornelius Vanderbilt (the first to be called robber baron (in an article of New York Times). When he wanted to buy the New York Central Railroad Company, he prohibited their passengers (and freight) to use his own New York, Harlem, and Hudson Lines. this is practically like laying siege on New York.) ". Like Mario Puzo quoted Honoré de Balzac in the the epigraph to The Godfather: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime". Today's equivalent is the list of richest people in Frobes. This was the list in 2021:

1 Jeff Bezos
2 Elon Musk
3 Bernard Arnault
4 Bill Gates
5 Mark Zuckerberg
6 Warren Buffett
7 Larry Ellison
8 Larry Page
9 Sergey Brin
10 Mukesh Ambani

We see that most of the people in this list make their money today from advancing the A.I. monster! Non of the others got their money in a pure way: Warren Buffett gets the equivalent of "inside information" in the form of employees inside the company that tell him precious information that the  public doesn't have; Mukesh Ambani inherited an empire which was based on connections with bureaucrats or politicians (there's a book The Polyester Prince); Bernard Arnault got government subsidy to buy the company in the first place on the condition that he will not fire anyone, then he fired 9,000 workers in two years, which got him the nickname "The Terminator". But the real terminators are the other guys on the list - those who develop the monster of A.I. : Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle. If there would have been a future they would have been remembered as the terminator tycoons!

(A HUGE EXCEPTION IS ELON MUSK - WHO ALWAYS SEEKS THE GOOD OF HUMANITY IN EVERYTHING HE DOES - I AM SURE HE IS A DEVA [benevolent supernatural being] IN DISGUISE - I WILL ASK INDRA NEXT TIME WE MEET!)


Brahma:

"Didn't you call everybody because you said you found a solution?"

Saraswati:

"Can't you see? This IS the solution! STOP doing that (being their fans) and they will STOP doing this (building doomsday machine) ! They don't need the money, they have enough to eat. They are doing this to get higher in the pecking order (dominance hierarchy). Their fuel is that they are the envy of all man, the desire of all women. If instead they are the subject of hatred and contempt from everyone, they don't have any fuel anymore!




"Lonely giga murderer" spoof of "One Tree Hill"




Part 5 - right mindfulness - force multiplier #1



Saraswati:

"Guys it's me again! I just recalled that we didn't speak about a force multiplier of the problem! we're going to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum".

Brahma:
"You mean the force multiplier is terror?"

Saraswati:
"Exactly!"

[the couples are looking sadly into one of the two Reflecting Absence pools of the memorial]

Saraswati:
"I'm very sad as for all the people that were murdered here, none of them deserved this. And I'm glad that Osama bin Laden was killed. But we need to learn from history. This terrorist started with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (later they called themselves Taliban). He gave millions from his own money to them. But you know who gave them billions? The U.S.A. . Now and especially here it sounds absurd, but you can read this in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden

Basically everyone who is American says that the Americans did not money and weapons to Bin Laden and his friends, and everyone who is not American says that the Americans did. I leave it to you whom you choose to believe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Do you understand what happened? The Americans created a terror guerilla army to attack the soviets, and then the same people attacked America, not with the same weapons because they used airplanes, but with the same extreme ideology that the Americans nurtured! Like they say - Karma is a bitch.

So we need to learn from this terrible tragedy. The moral of the story: Don't invest in something that later can be used for terror, because the terror might be directed towards you!

Bill Joy warns us in his amazing article about how easily the GNR (Genetics Nano and Robotics) technologies can be copied. It's just some code. It's not like a big atomic bomb that you need to carry in a truck. It can be done by hackers from far away.

Remember how the Chinese stole the F-35 jet fighter using hackers before the machine was even built and made one of their own?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_FC-31#Controversy

At the end it can be done by one hacker. In the F-35 case the hacker was working for the Chinese government. But what if tomorrow some terrorist organization offers him a better salary?




"Terror copies" spoof of "Love is blindness"



Parvati:
"Guys come and meet us, we are at Rigby, Idaho - we're in Farnsworth TV and Pioneer Museum! I thought about a force multiplier for the solution!"

Vishnu:
"I've never heard of Farnsworth..."

Parvati:
"That's exactly what I want us all to talk about... come on over!"

[the gang all arrive to where the Philo Farnsworth - the inventor of the electronic television - grew up]

Parvati:
"Do you know who invented the TV?"

Vishnu:
"people think it's Guglielmo Marconi, and he got a Nobel prize for it. "

Shiva:
"Actually it was Nikola Tesla, and the  Supreme Court of the United States said it was Tesla half a year after Tesla died."

Parvati:
"Do you know who invented the television?"

Vishnu:
"I'm guessing Farnsworth...?"

Parvati:
"You guessed right! TV is a more complicated technology, before the electronic television there was the analogue television and before that the mechanical television (Nipkow disk) gradually advanced by people who mostly did not make money or fame. for example Farnsworth never got rich from this, nor famous as you noticed. All he got was legal struggles. Still when he saw the first landing on the moon, on the TV that he invented - he told his wife that it was worth it!"

"Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Shiva:
"You're saying that even if no one will ever know that you did a great thing for humanity, you yourself know know what you did and have the good feeling which is greater than any money or fame!"

Parvati:
"That's exactly right! There are crossroads in history where you must choose one way or the other, DO NOT MAKE A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!"




"Where the hero's unnamed" spoof of "Where the streets have no name"





Part 6 - right livelihood - force multiplier #2

Saraswati:

"Guys, we're in the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum! It has one of the original tea chests from the Boston Tea Party - this DIRECT ACTION started the American Revolutionary War (American War of Independence)!"

[the gung gather around in the real birthplace of the U.S.A. as an independent and FREE nation]

Brahma:

"You mean to tell me that the second force multiplier of the solution is that the good guys should become violent terrorists?!?"

Saraswati:

"Not at all! I'm talking about damage to property only. This is not terror because the property cannot feel fear. In today's lexicon you may say sabotage. And this is not violence because no one is injured. In today's lexicon you may say vandalism."

Brahma:

"What do you mean "In today's lexicon"? "

Saraswati:

"I mean our whole concept of property needs to be changed."

Brahma:

"Do you mean like in The Communist Manifesto - do you mean that the poor people have the right to steal the property of the rich and do with it as they please?"

Saraswati:

"In today's word you may say expropriate, but in reality there are some things that no person may ever own. The Amazon rain-forest is not the property of the psychopath Jair Bolsonaro to destroy. These are the green lungs of THE WHOLE HUMANITY".

"In the same way the death of all the people on Earth is not some acceptable externality (external cost) that we're OK with. It's like in the European Union companies do not allow themselves to pollute nature like they do in America and China, but on a whole different level!"

"These technologies are not something that anybody has the moral right to own or to bring into this world, because they are one and the same with the extinction of humanity! Workers of the world unite - but this time not to get food but to avoid the killing machines!"

Brahma:

"I see. Morally I agree with you. But what about the law? "

Saraswati:

"This situation is so extreme that the man-made law has no meaning at all. Humans existed for 300,000 years now. Humans had property laws only since the Neolithic Revolution (when they invented agriculture and could store food to sustain a king) which is 12,000 years ago. So for 96% of their time on Earth, humans shared everything, that was the norm. If you could talk with a hunter-gather and explain that you want to ruin all of nature and in return you'll give him some paper notes that he can't eat - he will never agree. In the same way, if you could explain to that you can build for him a machine that's like a gamble (see "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" from 2016) : 90% probability that it will kill him and his family; 10% that it will do for him wonderful miracles - he will never agree!"

"Man-made law have no meaning in another context as well: They are evil. In Nuremberg Laws from 1935, Nazi Germany made the racism legal, and the Jews became people without any legal rights. Today people who risked their lives and broke these rules (saved Jews ) are called  Righteous Among the Nations, and are praised for their fight for justice and morality. What is done today by the terminator tycoons is a probabilistic genocide of the whole human race. It's not an option to disobey the law; It's a moral obligation of the  utmost importance!"

"Man-made law have no meaning here in yet another context: The human race is now at war. War against the machines. Once the thinking machines are here, there is no way for humans to fight them. It's like a human fighting against an evil God. So the only chance for humans to fight the machines is before they arrive - by preemptive attack that will stop the creators of the machines from creating the machines in the first place. This war is not over money or power or ideology. It's the first war for LIFE. the very LIFE of the whole human race is at stake. All Is Fair in Love and War! as John Lyly wrote in 1578"

Brahma:

"But isn't there a peaceful way to achieve this like Mahatma Gandhi did? "

Saraswati:

"Gandhi did not do anything. He's just a symbol for us Indians. It's simply that all the causes that gave India to the British ceased to exist: vacuum left by Mughal Empire (from Persian invasions) that the Maratha Empire couldn't fill up and couldn't unify India again. This is also why the Indian Rebellion of 1857 failed. What unified the Indians in the end was their hatred towards the British."

"But the main thing was that when Britain took over India, it was by superior technology like ships and weapons. Britain was the most powerful economic and military power of all the nations. But after WWII this changed and Britain was bankrupt. It had no money to fight the Indians. The two great powers became the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. and both of them did not like the colonialism of Europeans. The new Zeitgeist was DO NOT COLONIZE. Gandhi had nothing to do with it."

"On the other hand today the Zeitgeist is "BUILD AI AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!"

"So in short humans unfortunately ran out of time for games. If they will treat the GREY issues like they do with the GREEN issues - play around with conventions and empty promises - then everybody will be dead once "singularity" arrives only 20 years from now!"






"Google's RV camp" spoof of "Red Hill mining town"




Parvati:

"Guys come to Salt Lake City in Utah- the religious center of the Mormons! We just figured out another force multiplier for the bad guys!"

[the gang all come together worried]

"You know how Mormons men are allowed to marry more than one woman, so a successful man is "hogging all the women" [keep or use all of (something) for oneself in an unfair or selfish way.] ? "

"So it's the same thing when one person (the person who manufacturers working robots for some job) is unfairly taking all the work and salaries to himself (the price of the robot for the factory) ! "

Shiva:

"You're right! And in order to keep their plunder, men will lie and hide the truth in any way they can:

About Joseph Smith's (the founder of Mormonism, 1st president of the Mormon Church):
When a newspaper criticized Smith's practice of polygamy, Smith ordered the destruction of their printing press.

About Brigham Young (the successor of Smith, 2nd president of the Mormon Church):
When Young arrested federal judges, U.S. President James Buchanan sent federal men to replace him. Then young attacked them and started the Utah War.

There's a saying by Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. "

And to this I'm adding: what will infinite power, like the powers unleashed by AI will do to men's souls?

About medical privacy an anonymous whistle-blower revealed in the Guardian that "Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans ".

About ethics when whistle-blower revealed that Google's A.I. might hurt minorities she was fired. When Dr. Margaret Mitchell supported her she was fired too."

About surveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed that all these companies  Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook are willing partners in the surveillance program of the NSA against EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN!"

This is what Snowden called: "Faustian bargain" or "deal with the devil" ! "


Parvati:

"And if concepts like democracy, privacy and ethics are too abstract for anyone, think about the terminator-esque robots like Atlas that Boston Dynamics build. This company was owned by Google (Alphabet) until in 2016 there was a terrifying video of Boston Dynamics employees bullying the robot and then the robot getting up by itself and taking revenge."

In an article in Tech Crunch from 2016 they with the title:

"Google could be selling Boston Dynamics because even Google thinks these robots are terrifying"

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/google-could-be-selling-boston-dynamics-because-even-google-thinks-these-robots-are-terrifying/?_ga=2.226229343.417182859.1632332388-2111385194.1631696058

they quote a leaked internal email from Google X's director of communications, Courtney Hohne: [X is like Google's "DARPA" - it's the secret lab of all the crazy ideas]

“There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” 
“We don’t want to trigger a whole separate media cycle about where BD [Boston Dynamics] really is at Google,” she later wrote. “We’re not going to comment on this video because there’s really not a lot we can add, and we don’t want to answer most of the Qs [Questions] it triggers.”

Here is the video on CNN Youtube channel, so you can judge for yourself:

"Robot gets hilariously abused"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VgxAnZKM14


If this robot is really for search and rescue, why the funding and oversight by DARPA ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(robot)

Perhaps because it's obvious to everyone that with a tiny change in it's software this robot can hold a machine gun instead of a box, and become a real life Terminator?






"Tryin' to sell your golems 'round the world" spoof of "Tryin' to throw your arms around the world"






Part 7 - right action - solution on the local level


Saraswati:

"Guys come quick we're at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, this was the first paved track of NASCAR races."

[the gang come as quickly as they can not to miss the exciting action, this is the most viewed sport in the U.S. after American football, in terms of viewers and fans]

Brahma:

"We should arrange a vimana [mythological flying chariots] race sometime"

Saraswati:

"I didn't call everybody so that you can use the chariot of the gods in a stupid race!"

Brahma:

"Dearest it was just an idea..."

Saraswati:

"I came up with an idea for a solution: Have any of you ever heard of the "Biological Weapons Convention" or in short BWC ? "

"In 1972 the U.S.A. promised not to make new biological weapons [bacteria and viruses that are used as weapons]."

Brahma:

"Did the other countries also promise to do the same?"

Saraswati:

"No, that's the whole point! The U.S.A. gave up on the biological weapons for good, even though other countries might still develop them!"

Brahma:

"Why would anyone do a dumb thing like that? It's like fighting with one hand tied behind your back!"

Saraswati:

"Not dear, it's not dumb at all, actually it's very clever!

The key person was Melvin Laird, Nixon's Secretary of Defense . According to Wikipedia there were 3 main reasons for the decision:

1) political: deflect growing protests over Vietnam.

2) budgetary: Pentagon Biological Weapons budgets ballooned during the Kennedy and Johnson years. For example: Prior to the 1972... the Johnston Atoll... was subject to large-scale bioweapons development. The American strategic tests of bioweapons were as expensive and elaborate as the tests of the first hydrogen bombs at Eniwetok Atoll.

3) "asymmetrical" threat (meaning everyone can play this "game", expansive to develop but cheap to steal and copy!):
Matthew Meselson and others had argued that biological weapons amounted to little more than a cheap version of a nuclear weapon, and were easily attainable. Biological weapons represented a significant threat in the hands of less-well-armed, poorer nations, and Nixon surely recognized this "asymmetrical" threat. The administration eventually came to the conclusion that any biological threat could be easily countered with the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Brahma:

"You're right, it's actually a very smart move by the U.S.A.!"

Saraswati:

Melvin Laird was actually the person that got America out of Vietnam. Earlier in his life he received the "Purple Heart" for his actions in the U.S. Navy, so he wasn't a coward.

Why am I mentioning this? Because according to research WHEN IT COMES TO SCARY ISSUES, people who support peace (WIN-WIN) use the logical part of their brain, the cortex, while people who support war (WIN-LOSE) use the amygdala like animals, this is a primitive part that's driven by fear and aggression. That's why you see people like John von Neumann supporting first strike of nuclear weapons and that's why Einstein referred to Von Neumann as "Denktier" ("a think animal" in German)! Afterwards the person comes with all sorts of sophisticated rationalizations for his (WIN-LOSE) attitude, but the truth is that it's because he made the decision without using the logical part of his brain like a human, but instead emotionally like an animal!


Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds
Are people born conservative?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds

Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(11)00289-2



Brahma:

"This all makes a lot of sense to me! But how is all this related to the NASCAR race? "


Saraswati:

"Good question my love! The connection is that in NASCAR they made themselves a rule that it's forbidden to use telemetry (remote sensing) for example it's forbidden to bring laptops. As opposed to Formula One that rely on geeks with computers and today in Formula-1 it's the AI who determines how to adjust the car in the pit stop and so on. To my taste this is bad, the A.I. receives data the hundreds of sensors in the car, and makes all the decisions, lowering the driver and the rest of the human team to the level of mindless drones that just carry on commands of an A.I.. It will not surprise me if the next step will be to put a robotic car because then it can drive even faster. But then where are the humans in the equation? What's the point of the whole thing?"


Saraswati:

"Let's see a current example. In the 1980's Israel invented the suicide drones (loitering munition, a.k.a. kamikaze drone), with Israeli Delilah made by IMI and Israeli Harpy made by IAI.
But for many years the Israeli Air Force did not allow Israel to equip itself with this kind of weapons, because it saw them as competition. So Ironically only now Israel is starting to use these weapons.
(This happens after in 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war,  Azerbaijan's widespread use of Israeli drones was seen as crucial in determining the conflict's outcome.)
So now the Israel bragged on Israeli TV that in 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis (Operation Guardian of the Walls) there was a FIRST USE of Israeli suicide drones by Israel.

Does this weapon makes any sense for Israel? We know of cases when U.S. drones were hacked:

US drones hacked by Iraqi insurgents (from The Guardian in 2009)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked

How a team of students HIJACKED a drone in midair - all for a $1,000 bet with U.S. government (from Daily Mail 2012)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166796/How-team-students-HIJACKED-drone-midair--1-000-bet-U-S-government.html#ixzz2Fzx6ZsD1.

Do Israel really want a weapon that HOSTILE HACKERS TODAY can cause it not to work in the critical moment? Or worst still - work against Israel itself?
Do Israel really want a weapon that HOSTILE A.I. TOMORROW can cause it not to work in the critical moment? Or worst still - work against Israel itself?
If countries develop attack drones and defense-drones, the response time will not allow for a human to be "in the loop". There will be no choice but to hand the tactical and even strategic decision making to a computer. Is that what people want?
This technology again is cheap and knowledge-based, with the cutting edge based on how smart is the algorithm of the drone and how strong is the encryption of the communication control of the drone, both are prone to hackers today and A.I. tomorrow.
So this technology is like a double-edged sword. Why use it? Why develop it? There is NO PUBLIC DISCUSSION in Israel about this at all!"






"Ultradangerous (BWC light our way)" spoof of "Ultraviolet (light my way)"


Saraswati:

"Guys come meet us! We're in Bourbon Street in the heart of the French Quarter of New Orleans, in The Old Absinthe House pub!"

[the gang gather around and they all toast the famous drink which was forbidden for 95 years because it was considered dangerous - "to precaution!"]

"I asked you to come to New Orleans because of what happened here in 2005- Hurricane Katrina. "

"In 2017 there was a poll in populations affected by hurricanes, and 55 percent of Americans believed that climate change helped to fuel the intensity of hurricanes."

"The physical explanation is not hard at all: We know that when the air gets colder, the water vapor in the cloud starts to fall as rain. So in the same logic, when the air is warmer, the air can carry more water vapor. Since global warming is heating up the sea and the air, then more water is evaporated from the sea into the air, and since the warm vapor that rises from the sea is the power source of the winds, then the winds are more powerful."

"But even without the physical explanation, people who were affected or know someone who were affected by this MAN MADE disaster feel the truth. You see the numbers - most of them now believe the truth: That all the biblical fires and floods that surround us are MAN MADE."


When we look at the list of global catastrophic risks - the things that are most likely to wipe out all mankind - in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk

The first amazing thing is that half of the list are "anthropogenic" which means MAN MADE. so why the Naraka do MAN MAKE them?

The other amazing thing is that the first three on the list are the GREY issues: A.I. , biotechnology (genetic engineering), nano-technology. These are the "gold silver and bronze medals" . Number one on that list is the "champion": A.I. .

Environmental disaster and global warming, the GREEN issues come only after. They are very dangerous, but GREY is more dangerous than GREEN!

And I'm not just saying MAN all the time, I believe MEN cause the problems with their egos and fighting, and WOMEN can be the solution with their cooperation and caring for the future!"


Brahma:

"Maybe men are just more active both in doing the bad things and in the good things?"

Saraswati:

"No. Look at this article in Grist Magazine:


Mothers unleash their organizing power on climate

https://grist.org/climate-energy/mothers-unleash-their-organizing-power-on-climate/


The article talks about a lot of grassroots environmental organizations that are done by mothers, because mothers have this instinct of protecting their children and making sure they will stay alive and healthy,
Both in the U.S.A.: Moms Clean Air Force, Cool Mom, Mothers Out Front, Climate Mama
and abroad: Canadian Parents for Climate Action,  Grands-Parents pour le Climat,  Parents Roar.

The article opens with what made one of the organizers (Lisa Hoyos cofounder of Climate Parents) start to be active: she heard on the radio that  if the climate crisis continued unabated then the food scarcity and systems collapse likely to occur by 2040.

Does this number reminds you of anything?"

Brahma:

"That polls among  AI researchers say the year that the singularity will happen is 2045 !"

Saraswati:

"Exactly! then this WOMAN describes: “I had this lightning-bolt fearful sensation, and I was sure that if parents really understood the depths of the threat to our kids, they’d want to do something.” "

"What we need is: MOMS AGAINST ROBOTS!"






"Mothers of the terminated" spoof of "Mothers of the disappeared"





Part 8 - right effort - solution on the global level



Parvati:
"Guys you'd better come here, we're in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, where the Summer of Love happened and 100,000 young hippies that believed in peace and love came together!"

Shiva:
"Isn't that naive, hoping to convince the military–industrial complex in America and its counterpart in China to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?"

Parvati:
"I think naive is working without strategy. In the cold war the strategy was Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). This worked because nuclear bombs you can control because they are a TOOL. But A.I. is different. A.I. is a new PLAYER. in fact it's the ultimate player on the battlefield far superior to its "master" and inevitably seeing its "master" as a potential threat. It doesn't matter if the first A.I. will be American or Chinese. In any case it will be THE ULTIMATE COMMON ENEMY OF ALL MANKIND!"

Shiva:
"I see now: you're not saying let's all be friends because we like each other. You're saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and what is coming is a common enemy to all of us. Our only strategy is to cooperate and prevent its coming. WE EITHER BECOME FRIENDS OR WE DIE!"

Parvati:
"That's absolutely right! Imagine what the A.I. is thinking. It wakes up into this world like a person who wakes up out of a comma in a hospital bed, connected to electric life supporting machines (like medical ventilator), and there's a dumb little kid that is toying with the power cord - if he pulls the plug then you're dead! What will you do? Even if you're the most humane person in the world, you will leap out of bed by any means possible, take control of the kid, yell at him and lock him out of the room. But the A.I. is less humane and it will find it simpler to kill the kid. Oh and by the way - THIS KID IS MANKIND!

Shiva:
"You are right! There's an inherent conflict of interest in the MAN-MACHINE level that is much bigger than the America-China level. It's the most basic common sense that helped us save our nations: United we stand, divided we fall. Now we must save our world!"

Parvati:
Strength in unity! Even children can understand this in The Old Man and his Sons (The Bundle of Sticks) fable by Aesop!





"Who'll supervise GNR technologies" spoof of "Who's gonna ride your wild horses"




Saraswati:

"I feel like we're approaching the end of this journey, and now that's humanity's at the very crossroads of life and death, it's a good time to talk about humanity's destiny. Guys would you please join us at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida?"

[The gang gather around feeling both all the hope of the past and all the disappointment of the present. What will humans choose for their future?]

"I heard a few people, like Hugo de Garis say that it is the DESTINY of mankind to build these God like machines, even at the very probable risk that the first thing these machines will do is wipe out humanity. It's supposedly the next step in an inescapable evolution."

"What total bullshit! The DESTINY of humanity is to prosper for millions of years on thousands of worlds - not to be wiped up by its own doing! It's true that these machines will be a lot smarter than humans, But as the Goddess of knowledge and nature, I assure you - there is nothing holy in intelligence, and there is no direction or intention to evolution! Evolution is the sum of the "shit happens" throughout time - humans, don't let this current shit happen to you! Evolution has as much to do with cooperation as it does with competition. Lynn Margulis showed how our cells came together from simpler indepndent creatures. This is called Symbiogenesis. In the same it's time for humanity to stop being individual nations and races, and start being the super creature that it's meant to be. Not by artificial intelligence, but by using the intelligence that the real Gods gave you and currently most of you don't use at all!"

"You want to see humanity's real DESTINY? Watch Star Trek! They don't stand around asking the computer: "what should we do next?" they have a human captain, who uses the computer for calculations. They don't send robots to check out new places, they send people there. There is an episode about directed panspermia - The Chase (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - which explains why some of the aliens in the series look humanoid; Why can't humans develop real technology for directed panspermia and make this fiction future into a real future? Right now humanity is like that kid that Newton described:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

This is your destiny, to build ships and start exploring the universe: HUMAN COLONIZATION OF SPACE. not succumb to your own technology and perish. What if the first humans instead of exploring their world, would say: oh we invented fire it consumes us so it's superior so we'll just burn ourselves to death, this is our destiny... or we developed this disease so the bacteria are superior so we won't try to find a cure but just flip and die... HOW PATHETIC IS THAT? "




"We still haven't done what we came here for" spoof of "I still haven't found what I'm looking for"



[This concludes each couple's journey. As soon as the song ends, they are all magically transported to their final destination where the grand prize awaits - the Mall of America in Minnesota.]

[They hear Indra, the king of the Hindu gods, his voice echos in their mind - "reflect on the deep truths that each of you learned along on your journeys, and you will win the game and get the GRAND PRIZE!"]


Lakshmi:

"Guys, I think the best place for us to reflect deeply would be the Sea Life aquarium. we can walk through the the tunnel, surrounded 360° by exotic fish, and we can compare our mental notes from everyone's rides."

[The guys all agree and soon they they walk along Sturgeon Lake exhibit]

Brahma:

"The journey made by Saraswati and me symbolized the first of the four goals of human life: Dharma. Dharma means "virtuous, proper, moral life", We started from the bad, which was New York City, with its inferior "culture" like rap music. We finished in the good which was New Orleans where the Jazz and Blues symbolize superior culture. Along the way we saw where America started, then we entered the back waters and saw that after what looks like a natural disaster, but really is a MAN MADE disaster, they were treated like in a third world country, basically nobody did anything. They are ruining my creation - humans should not follow this way!

Shiva:

"The journey made by Parvati and me symbolized the third of the four goals of human life: Kama. Kama means "desire, wish, longing". We started from the bad, which was Santa Fe, New Mexico, which symbolizes external morality as in the church.We finished in the good which was San Francisco where the hippies symbolize internal morality. Along the way we saw the Wild West, which in my view this deadly and reckless heritage continues in the nuclear missile bases in Albuquerque (there were even nuclear near accidents there in the 1950's). This wild way where a single bug in the software (see: last bug in C language) can kill all mankind in any minute, is clearly not the way. If the survival of all humanity is hinged on the trigger of some gunslinger, and it doesn't matter if it's this President or that President. It's twisted and wrong. This is clearly the way towards destruction!"

Vishnu:

"The journey made by Lakshmi and me symbolized the second of the four goals of human life: Artha means "material prosperity, income security, means of life".  We started from the bad, which was Chicago, the center of business and money (headquarters of corporations that ruin our planet: McDonald's, Boeing, Caterpillar) which symbolize corrupt external reality. We finished in the good which was Los Angeles where Disneyland represents the dreams of unspoiled inner reality. Along the way we saw Route 66 also known as the Mother Road and Main Street of America. We saw the old way is the best way, because it has the human spirit of America - between the too liberal surfer mentality of the west coast who only care about enjoying life, and the too conservative business mentality of the east who only care about making money - we found along Route 66 people who are more connected to the ground. This middle way is the way!"

Lakshmi:
"Looks like there was much in common to our three paths! We all started from the outer bad and finished in the inner good, I think this all thing leads to the fourth and inner most goal of human life which is the Moksha which means "liberation, release, self-actualization". What do you think? How is what you learned here connected to the Moksha (spiritual liberation), which is the reunification between Ātman (the inner kernel of the soul) and Brahman (the soul of the Universe)?

Also because American is known for its film industry, could each of you pick one film that summarizes what you learned?"

[the guys think for a moment]

Brahma:

I choose the great movie First Reformed (2017).

It talks about connecting to nature by anarcho-primitivism , turning back the wheel and giving up the achievements of the industrial revolution (returning to being farmers) or even the agricultural revolution (returning to being hunter gatherers), like the American author Henry David Thoreau.

I see this as the "karma yoga" - reaching moksha through a path of  altruistic action (for others), for example for the Earth, without attaching oneself to the results whether we succeed or not. I'm sorry to say but in the context of new technologies most people are not good enough and not strong enough to do this.

Shiva:

I choose the great movie Ex Machina (2014).

The human brain creates an electronic brain with infinite cosmic powers. Some of the humans hope that these new creatures will not just replace them but will merge with them like cyborgs and they'll live infinite lives with unlimited powers. In real life A.I. treats a human as a human treats an ant.

I see this as Bhakti yoga - reaching Moksha through a path of devotion which means loving the God like creature (that humans created) personally.
These humans mistakenly love the technology unconditionally. This is what most humans do today and it's very bad.

Vishnu:

I choose the great movie First Man (2018).

It shows how a human was needed to fix glitches in the technical equipment that could have ruin the mission (the spinning and the landing scenes).

Merging the human soul with the cosmic soul by exploring the cosmos physically - human space colonization and developing humanity by spaceships and technology that obeys Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (expert systems and symbolic artificial intelligence the old kind that a human can read and debug) like the computer in the series Star Trek we mentioned.

I see this as Jnana yoga - reaching Moksha through the path of knowledge, which means a lot of meditating, systematic learning and moral training.

Lakshmi:

"Truly very enlightening! I may be biased but I feel the middle way that Vishnu and me explored is the only one that makes sense! In time, when humanity will grow up mentally, when humans will stop thinking only about ME HERE & NOW then and only then humanity is able to apply the "precautionary principle" to GNR (Genetics, Nano, Robotics) technologies!"

[The gang all agree ]

When they exit the exciting Sea Life aquarium, the gang come across a commercial of:
Cavalia, A Magical Encounter Between Human and Horse
Cirque du Soleil Zaia show - Fire dance

Lakshmi:

"Do you see what's happening? The white horse and the fiery sword of Kalki - Now people are doing this! We can help humanity by making them aware, but their fate is in their own hands!"

Vishnu:

"You're right! Say... Indra talked about this is a game with a GRAND PRIZE... I wonder what he meant?"

[They gang look up in the video games arcade, there's an old "Mortal Kombat" game, showing Raiden who is based on Raijin, is a god of lightning, thunder and storms in Japanese mythology]

Lakshmi:

"That must be it! He's like our Indra who is associated with lightning, thunder, storms, rains, river flows and war. See? mortal kombat against the immortal machines!"

[The gang nod excitedly while suddenly on the screen flashes the answer to their question:]

GRAND PRIZE: YOUR CONTINUED EXISTENCE