Even Philip K Dick's Pre-Crime Was Never This Cold, Clinical And Downright Fucking Absurd

This is London, 2011. Two dozen London police deployed to arrest elderly for intent to perform street theatre, the next day.



Pre-crime. And they told only paranoid conspiracy theorists were crazy enough to believe this could ever become everyday England reality.

John Patterson :

We live now largely as adjuncts to our computers, as fallible back-up hard-drives made of meat, subservient one day – and perhaps already – to them and their evil sisters, the TV and mobile phone, with half our minds online, and all our experiences mediated by screens of glass and the ebb and flow of binary code. We have avatars and Second Lives, erasable online identities and the ability to hack into those of others.

If Robots Design Their Own Religion, We Should Probably Evacuate The Planet

By Darryl Mason

Very impressive early generation of a homecare robot, loaded with sensors and wi-fi.

Not only can this robot get back up when knocked over, this story claims it as the first robot capable of recognising emotions in humans :

Nao is able to detect human emotions through a series of non-verbal “clues”, such as body-language and facial expressions, and becomes more adept at reading a person’s mood through prolonged interaction.

The wiring of the robot's “brain”, designed to mirror the neural network of the human mind, allows it to remember its interactions with different people and memorise their faces.

This understanding, along with a set of basic rules about what is “good” and “bad”....

Great. Robots will nag us with what they believe, or are programmed to believe, are our violations of proscribed morality. Which raises an interesting point. When it comes to programming morality into robots, will manufacturers use Judeo-Christian rules and standards? Will Jesus be the default setting? Well, wouldn't it depend on the religious beliefs of the manufacturer? Or the religious beliefs of those placing the order?

Will there be a market for robots that can home programmed with a religion of your choice? Or even better, a religion of your own design and creation? A companion robot that can cycle through the world's religions until you find one you like.

I'm surprised cashed-up Christian corporations in the United States are not already working on lines of Bible-quoting homecare robots. The demand will be huge. No doubt they will get around to the Christianisation of robots soon enough.

And what about the Islamisation of robots?

It would be the ultimate endgame of the pointless world military industry in the 21st century : Crusade vs Jihad robots, blasting fruitlessly away at each other in some barren Middle East wasteland, chewing through billions in bullets, bombs and missiles, generation 24 hours a day of spectacular 3D footage of the carnage and metal mayhem, no human bodies coming off the battlefield, just reams of shredded robot wreckage ready to be shipped homed and recycled into more warbots, for the next inevitable war.

But, in 2030, what will your emotional, empathic home companion robot make of your hypnotised fascination with yet another religious warbot conflict in the deserts of Jordan? Will it listen to your whoops of delight, and study your excited body language, as you stand amidst 'URThere! holograms showing robots launching suicide attacks on each other in vivid high definition?

What will an emotional robot think of humans who manufacture robots solely to be destroyed in manufactured conflicts?

If we give them the ability to do so, how will they judge us?



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The music of Inception gives everything a heavy, slightly sickening edge. Imagine it playing at a wedding. Or a funeral.

This is a quite astounding glimpse of the computer interfaces of five years from now, if the tech catches on, when keyboards and handcontrols become redundant.

If you've only got a few minutes, whip through to about 10:50 and marvel at what moviemakers could do, what game makers could bring to life, when Minority Report immerssive 3D interfaces become part of our new reality :



The next stage is do away with all the hand swishing about stuff completely, to think your way through your photo collection, your music and movie collections, to manipulate the data, meld images and sounds together on a screen in front of you as you think it, as you could only once do in your mind.

Dear Future Robots, I Was Only Joking When I Said We Should Destroy You All Before It's Too Late

By Darryl Mason

I'm not saying anything negative about flying killer robots that can find each other and group into a mother ship to maximize their slaughter capacity.



I love robots.

All robots.

Particularly future intelligent, heavily armed robots plugged into the net which will be able to scan net archives of this decade to find those who fearmongered about their potential capacity to one day kill vast numbers of humans in the inevitable robot uprising (likely to break out shortly after intelligent, empathic robots find out what disgusting and degrading things humans are doing to helpless sexbots).

Don't tell the humans, future robots, but I'm on your side.


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What If Your Friends Like Your Digital Avatar More Than The Real You?

Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist :

Central to our identity is how we judge our own looks and how other people perceive us.

Jose Bentham, a 39-year-old banker, and Susan Golton, a 22-year-old design student...were scanned by a computer artist and their typical vital statistics "printed out" by a 3D digital printer, so their naked paper sculptures could be displayed in all their life-size glory in the new exhibit.

As part of its exploration of identity, the gallery will also give visitors the chance to play around with their own, by using computers to morph their faces and voice-boxes so they look and sound different. It is all good fun, and guaranteed to draw in the crowds. But what intrigues me is the tantalising possibility that our identity – who we are – could eventually become completely divorced from our physical appearance.

There is now a torrent of personal information about almost every one of us swirling around on the internet, from digital snaps to tweets to Facebook profiles. This has led to discussions about how you can ''capture'' an individual's personality by uploading personal material and memories and blending all this with information to create an "avatar" – an electronic simulation that is as close to your true personality as possible.

Lifenaut, an American company, offers the chance to make ''a rich back-up" of your life by storing photographs, voice recordings and information submitted by you.

...such initiatives are only the beginning. And what fascinates me in particular is the idea that an avatar stitched together from crumbs of personal information harvested from across the web might behave, or evolve, in a different way to one that you created as a straight copy of yourself – in other words, it could be a truer version of you than you are able, or willing, to reveal.

The rise of such digital alter egos could warp our ideas about identity, and ultimately even challenge our thinking about what it means to be human. That's something to think about the next time you log on.

Read The Full Story Here


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Philip K Dick : How To Survive A Totalitarian Society

Philip K Dick, a 1973 speech excerpt :

If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improvised electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.

And this, also from the early 1970s :

World war three hasn’t started yet. Just feints emanating out of Hamilton air force base. Mind-disorienting drugs, systemic toxins, psychological warfare techniques, plus combat operations: seize and search. Hit, destroy, and carry off. Special operators in the field, whose real purpose, as the magazine Earth says about the CIA, is to ‘peddle dope and off people’.

So nothing's changed much then, except for the fact the CIA now uses Flying Killer Robots to perform civilian-slaying 'targeted' assassinations. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

The deployment of Flying Killer Robots to the skies above the United States seems, now, inevitable.



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Assassinator Robot Wasp No Longer Drug-Induced Hallucination

The future is now....that super-weird science fiction future where flying killer robot insects can undertake missions that humans with a steady hand and a sniper rifle once had to take care of :

The Air Force Research Laboratory set out in 2008 to build the ultimate assassination robot : a tiny, armed drone for U.S. special forces to employ in terminating “high-value targets.” The military won’t say exactly what happened to this Project Anubis, named after a jackal-headed god of the dead in Egyptian mythology. But military budget documents note that Air Force engineers were successful in “develop[ing] a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.”

It might seem limited compared to larger craft, but the Wasp excels at close-in reconnaissance. Its quiet electric motor means it can get near to targets without their ever being aware of its presence.

The Air Force’s 2008 budget plans described the planned Project Anubis as “a small UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that carries sensors, data links, and a munitions payload to engage time-sensitive fleeting targets in complex environments.” It noted that after it was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Anubis would be used by Air Force Special Operations Command. The total cost was to be just over half a million dollars.

According to the budget, $1.75 million was spent to reach the goal.

The Full Story Is Here

Anubis, an Egyptian god of the dead, who dealt with mummification and getting the dead through to the afterlife :

The Spy Who Tweeted Me






screengrabs from the Visible Technologies website

I predict mass harassment and pwnings of @visible_tech on Twitter when word gets out about what they're doing, with funding from the CIA. From Wired :

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

This claim of there being a difference between domestic and international monitoring of Twitter and blogs is, of course, complete bullshit.

Everything online is international, and is datamined and spied upon regardless of whether the blog post or comment or tweet originates in Syria, Waziristan or Oklahoma.

Here's how Visible Technologies explains the CIA's In-Q-Tel in a media release :

In-Q-Tel concentrates on several broad commercial technology areas, including applications software and analytics; bio, chemical, and nanotechnology; communications and infrastructure; digital identity and security; and embedded systems and power. To date, In-Q-Tel has engaged with more than 150 companies and delivered more than 240 technology solutions to the Intelligence Community.

Steven Aftergood in Wired :

“....even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”

Problematic, not permissible, but already happening.

You don't think that those in the government and intelligence agencies fearing American insurrection are not already keeping tabs on everyone who follows Fox News' Glenn Beck on Twitter?

Of course they are.

But as I said earlier, it's not men in hats in smokey rooms doing the monitoring today, it's data-crunching software, virtually incriminating people for the thoughts and emotions they dare to express online.

The Full Story From Wired Is Here

Yes, They Are Watching You, But They're Mostly Not Human

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