The Eric Schmidt phenomenon represents the melding of the military-tech-political machine in pursuit of permanent power.
As Binoy Kampmark notes in Off-Guardian, War Mongering for Artificial Intelligence, the testimony of Schmidt to the Senate Armed Services Committee was "generously spiked with the China threat thesis". This is the familiar dialectic: we arm China and point to it as a threat, while demanding more money to arm ourselves.
No one has been more central to the technological weaponizing of China that Eric Schmidt's Alphabet, the inside-joke-of-a-company-name that in turn runs Google.
The essence of power is do what I say, not what I do. Schmidt once said: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." He didn't agree when CNET researched Schmidt's own salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations.
It all comes down to power, which is the primary issue with AI: whose power it serves. As a system for real-time, communal decision making of the People, by the People, for the People, AI could make possible a harmonious future, resolving competing wants with minimal conflict. So why is the debate around AI so often confined to surveillance drones, predictive policing, threatening robots and war machines?
The problem of AI lies in saying, 'no'. In order for the machines to know what to do, the humans who program them must first also say, 'no'. Eric Schmidt is the poster child for the boy who can't say, 'no'.
That's been his strength and weakness in his personal life, business relationships and his approach to the boundaries of what is acceptable in technology and politics. If his judgement has sometimes been questionable -- and it may seem unfair to single him out — he has put himself in the limelight. Indeed, he has done society a service by his plain speaking, will to act and open pursuit of power and wealth.
Take Schmidt's quote: "Here is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
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Photo source: Pixabay. Creative Commons. |
Aficionados of horror movies have a good grasp of creepy: an unpleasant, even repulsive, sense of unease. The problem with the creepy line is its other meaning: the line creeps. There are no fixed limits. It creeps as in mission creep. Several times Google employees have protested at the company's involvement in building military drones, China's social credit system and tailoring of the Dragonfly search engine to the CCP's need for censorship. Google's AI work for the Pentagon has attracted particular protest. A dozen employees resigned form Project Maven in 2018. Post-Schmidt, Google fired two scientists from its AI ethics team, one in Dec 2020, the other in January 2021.
MANAGED OUTCOMES
Modern government faces a huge ethical challenge once you move from minimal to total control. Presenting humans with free will, subject to firm boundaries, is one thing. The concept of equity, in which you handicap particular humans in the race for academic, sporting, material or political success, and pick the winner, is quite another.
You have changed the algorithm from freedom:responsibilities to interests:outcomes. There is no room for moral decision in such a system because the moral correctness of the outcome was decided a priori. The only correct behaviour is not moral but political, which is to say you acquiesce in the rules even though they may prompt you to indulge in contradictory, irrational behaviour from one day to the next.
Guides to life like the Ten Commandments provide a poor metric once you are in the business not of governing humans but manipulating them.
Schmidt himself moved into the territory of managed outcomes during the 2016 election campaign. He might argue that for all his efforts, his favoured candidate Hillary Clinton did not win. I would counter that perhaps that was considered part of the risk: it was the dry run for the manipulation of elections whose stakes were much higher than the political career of one Clinton.
It is no secret that the Democratic Party has become the party of the CIA. By transforming into the natural home of the politicised bureaucrat and the secret policeman, electoral politics confronts the reality of the Democratic Deep State — constitutional in that bureaucrats take control through elections; unconstitutional in that it folds the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government into one party of permanent rule. Parallels with technocratic regimes like China are obvious.
In the run up to the 2016 election, Eric Schmidt created the Fake News mantra, according to journalist and ethical researcher Sharyl Attkisson, while he was helping to manage Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Schmidt weaponized Fake News through a non-profit called First Draft.
According to Quartz magazine Schmidt recognized "how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs."
He donated $1.5 billion to create for Hillary the U.S. Digital Service which tried to control the 2016 presidential election results. Schmidt also created The Groundwork, "according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists... part of efforts by Schmidt to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election."
Election studies became a bit of a family business. In an article for The Canary, 13th May, 2017, Serious money is buying and selling our votes, and democracy is the loser, Tom Coburg wrote:
Previously The Canary reported the links between Britain’s pro-Brexit campaigns and associates of US President Donald Trump. As well as the subsequent investigations by statutory bodies into those links and possible undeclared spends. The Canary also alleged that US-based technology agencies used or advised on behavioural management technologies to ensure a Brexit win.
Reportedly, Sophie Schmidt advised SCL head Alexander Nix to check out the work of US data intelligence agency Palantir Technologies. Schmidt, the daughter of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, used to work for SCL Elections (which was later renamed Cambridge Analytica).
Robert Epstein, a psychology professor, for several years had been alleging that Google had the ability to swing U.S. election results [American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, PDF]. The allegations appear to have stung Schmidt deeply. If so, his problem with boundaries cropped up again. Google attacked Epstein in the media and even prompted a mock news report in the Huffington Post: "Google Critic Killed in “Ironic” Car Accident: Struck by Google Street View Vehicle.
In July 2019, Epstein gave testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee that Google would be able to swing the 2020 presidential election. Five months later, two days before Christmas, Epstein's wife was killed when her car spun out of control across several lanes, as it came off the ramp to join a highway. An unfortunate accident perhaps.
In 2020 it was Facebook's turn to "fortify" the election, as Time magazine put it. Mark Zuckerberg and Chinese-American spouse Priscilla Chan invested $400 million to ensure that swing states used the Dominion machines, providing funding if they could not afford to buy them. They also prepared polling stations and counting centres for the dramatic increase in mail-in ballots, including the poll workers who would count them.
After the 2020 elections it became clear that Georgia's Secretary of State had unilaterally and illegally changed the ballot procedures. On Dec 4th, Governor Brian Kemp called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to conduct an audit of votes. Simply overturning the Georgia vote could deliver victory to Donald Trump.
On Dec 8th, Governor Kemp's daughter's boyfriend died in an explosion that observers said was more like a car bomb than a gas tank, the engine block was ejected almost 60 yards away after colliding with a truck. Voters heard no more from Governor Kemp.
If these deaths were even construed as threats, there are clearly much bigger forces than the Schmidts or Zuckerbergs at play.
THE OCTOPUS TURNS CANNIBAL
We may be witnessing what happens when the state eats itself — or to put it another way, when the rival imperatives of "national security," which in plain English is simply state security, combine with the interest of corporations and come into conflict with the other legs of the octopus.
There is a reason for the separation of powers that has nothing to do with democracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted 200 years ago, the voice of the people in the United States is strangely subdued. His enthusiasm for the still-young nation prevented him following his observation to its conclusion: the U.S. is not a democracy; it is a republic and, an oligarchic one at that, as several academic studies have asserted recently.
Even an oligarchic republic needs the separation of powers in order to save it from itself. A nation is not an operating system and neither is AI. They are protocols governed by a Constitution. In place of 'if this, then that', the Constitution pauses one leg of the octopus and gives priority to another: 'if this perhaps not that, at least, not yet'. The legislature is supposed to provide updates to the Constitution while the judiciary advises the executive on how to interpret them.
Such a system is already way ahead of AI, and yet even the political system is still only a poor simulacrum of the human mind in the presence of other competing minds, under the system of a shared moral code reflected, imperfectly, in written laws.
BENT TO THE WILL
And here we find Eric, toiling away to replicate the human mind but to whose interests? To perfect the republic? To create a working democracy with modern networks that could go some way to replace the clunky political system and balance the popular will in real time?
No, sadly not. While AI is put to work in elections, it is not to create a new participatory systems but to game the existing one. It is the mutual interest of big tech and the military that provides the impetus and the ethical framework to AI — and both are constantly shifting. What's acceptable is what "we" want: more military contracts, more power and the global reach to seize the minerals and raw materials essential to feed those resource-hungry tech and defence projects. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," or a version thereof.
There are many tangents worth exploring. The reason why Google recently fired two scientist-ethics specialists from its AI team, for example. The impact of monopoly on the shape of the big tech, big data, social media sector— and its impact on the political system in return. The trend towards censorship and its effect on science, which is especially topical while YouTube imposes limits to the discussion of vaccines as Google and associated companies invest in vaccines, health care and DNA research.
Google's famous culture of unleashing beta products on the public not only makes the public the guinea pig but also changes the contractual and moral relationship with the end user: you accept the product in an unfinished state with no guarantees (on the customer side) as to performance, while the purposes for which we (Google) offer the product can be changed or withdrawn at any moment. Today my gun shoots a blank, tomorrow a bullet. It's not a different product, just a different iteration.
Schmidt is working within a nest of interest groups that have evolved from the Military Industrial Complex that President Dwight Eisenhower described in 1961. It is now a military-tech-media-petro-pharma complex that manipulates the political system by military and commercial means. If that requires arming the police, bringing the craft of war to the shores of America, imposing military censors in the press, instigating Color Revolutions at home [sorry, "fortifying" elections] or at the very least influencing search results so that they favour an outcome, social, political or commercial, so be it: success is defined by achieving the outcome. In military-commercial logic, might makes right.
If the creepy line exists at all, it is set by those same State Corporatists: or to put it another way, the end justifies the means.
What Mr Schmidt represents is not a geek turned activist with budding political ambitions but someone birthed by the military-technocrat complex. With so much at stake, they take no risks with meritocracy. Like the rest of the big tech overlords he is put in a role to do a job. Any system with which he is involved — building Google's data-gathering empire, its Nest surveillance, the Pentagon's AI or the Democrats' election preparations — is bent towards the same aim.
The State Corporatists know what they want and it is not a system emerging ad hoc from scientific debate or political negotiation. As James Corbett reminds us, in this video, the NWO-technocracy-global governance agenda is at least a century in the making.
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