Government and Corporate Actors Are Coordinating to Regulate AI to Keep us “Safe”

The government is claiming that they need to regulate AI to keep us "safe."  Once again, they claim that they need to protect us from, at bottom, words and ideas. Where have we heard this before?

We can be certain that they want to censor us because they always want to censor us, regardless of who is in power, because censorship gives them control over us. They won't admit that they are trying to "censor" us. No censor admits that he or she is engaging in censorship, but that is exactly what they are aiming to do. Sayer Ji connects the dots for us:

Si's post is actually a long thread of posts (and this article). Here are his first four posts:

The world is being flooded with warnings that AI could destroy humanity.

But the panic itself is creating something just as consequential:

A justification for controlling the systems that will increasingly shape what billions of people can know, say, and even think.

The first censorship regime was easy to recognize.

Your post disappeared. Your account was shadowbanned. Your video was labeled. Your reach was throttled.

The next one may be almost invisible. Because it won’t necessarily suppress what you say. It may help compose what you say before you say it. Think about what has changed. Search once gave you competing links. Now AI gives you one synthesized answer. Autocomplete once finished a word.

Now AI drafts your email, summarizes your meeting, answers your child’s questions, edits your argument and increasingly speaks for you.

That is a fundamentally different kind of power. Call this emerging layer speech infrastructure.

AI is becoming the mediation layer between:

you and information

you and your audience

you and your doctor

you and your government

you and eventually even other human beings. Control that layer and you don’t need to censor millions of individual posts.

What is Si reacting to? An undeniable and coordinated psyop on the same scale as the COVID psyop. We are currently being bombarded from what appears to be many directions, but it is actually a focused attempt to rip control from ordinary people and hand it to a select group of elites (including the government and some of the biggest sellers of AI), who want all of the vast power that AI already has, and more. Working with the government, none of them will ever be satisfied, because the People cannot ever be trusted with self-governance.

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U.S. States Working Hard to Protect Israel from Criticism

When you decide to become a legislator or governor of a state, you are required to take a pledge to represent the people of your state, not the interests of a foreign country. You'd never know this, however, based upon recent actions (and existing statutes) of various states. Here's Glenn Greenwald reporting reporting on the censorship-based iron dome Arkansas is offering to Israel:

This action by the Arkansas governor is not surprising given that Arkansas has a wide-ranging anti-BDS statute that prohibits state entities from contracting with private companies unless the company certifies that it “is not currently engaged in, and agrees for the duration of the contract not to engage in, a boycott of Israel. In 2022, nine judges of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals sitting en banc upheld that statute. I almost fell out of my chair reading it. The majority concluded no free speech problem here! If you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this decision, read the dissent by Judge Jane Kelly, which IMO should have been the unanimous majority opinion.

What else are states up to? Greenwald also reports on Florida: [More . . . ]

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Freedom of Speech is Designed to Protect Political Minorities.

The first amendment is not a weapon wielded by the rich and powerful. Many of these people of influence are apprehensive of the protections offered by the First Amendment, because the First Amendment is a limitation on their ability to shut the rest of us up. Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) explains why the First Amendment is especially important for political minorities and those who are victims of political opression:

You only need a special protection for freedom of speech, like the First Amendment, for people who are either unpopular with power or unpopular with the majority. This is why revolutionary figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech. It's why John Lewis, someone I was, I got to meet actually because he was in my neighborhood a lot. The great John Lewis, civil rights icon, he would argue. He would often say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. They understood that free speech was not the weapon of the powerful. It is the best check on power ever invented.

Consider visiting the website of FIRE, a completely non-partisan nonprofit organization, dedicated to free speech for all. You can spend days at the FIRE site reading about the most important free speech cases in the United States, as well as warning about the many people from across the political spectrum that FIRE has represented.

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The Branding Problem of Free Speech on Campus

Q: "I'm really curious to hear from you why you think free speech has the branding issue that you know it tends to have, and why for young people, there's this perception that you know is warped. "

Greg Lukianoff: "This is probably a rough thing to say in a group full of educators, but I do think that a lot of the quote, unquote, branding issue with freedom of speech came out of K through PhD. When I was working at the ACLU back in 1999 I could see something happening, what I called the slow motion train wreck on college campuses in particular. We qualified for public assistance when I was a kid, and then I ended up at a place like Stanford Law School. And this was definitely a very weird experience for me, and it was the first time I really ran into kids who were pretty mediocre, a little ambivalent about freedom of speech. Working Class liberals were very pro freedom of speech. I thought that's what made a liberal, a liberal. But it was only when I started meeting more upper class people who came from, you know, the 1% and tended to go to the fanciest schools, that I started really running into this very anti liberal kind of idea, and that's a very typical dynamic that essentially, once your politics become a super majority of an institution--you want free speech when you're the minority, because free speech protects minority opinions. You don't need it to protect the majority. The popular vote protects the majority power. And in higher ed, there was this intentional, clear shift that free speech started being problematized partially because the people in charge of higher ed kind of thought, well, if I'm the one deciding what will get you punished and what won't, I can be trusted with that. And that's the temptation of power always."

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About the Transgender Treatment Censorship Tsunami

The you remember the inorganic wave of brand new "obvious" things we were all supposed to believe and say about transgender topics? I agree with Greg Lukianoff that it was surreal. I spoke up with questions and concerns that were repeatedly blasted with religious fervor. But here we are now, and it's clear that the transgender religious movement distorted everything around it, including our First Amendment rights. One big moment to upright the ship was the Cass Report. Another was the mass closing of transgender clinics. And now a new Finnish study.

[You can see many many posts on this topic (I published more than 150 articles at this site) here:

Greg Lukianoff:

In my career defending academic freedom and free speech, I never saw anything become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground.

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