December 2, 2024
4 Steps to Protect Against Government AI
Dear Subscriber,
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| By Nilus Mattive |
I grew up on movies like “The Terminator,” “War Games” and “Robocop” … all of which featured various storylines involving sentient computers gone awry.
So, this partly explains why I have such a visceral reaction to what’s in the news lately — everything from more than a dozen fatalities linked to Tesla’s (TSLA) self-driving cars to China’s new army of machine-gun-wielding robotic dogs.
Indeed, what used to be a dystopian science fiction tale now looks completely possible based on the rapid evolution of AI.
Consider a recent experiment in which Carnegie Mellon University researchers taught an AI network how to identify and track humans inside their homes simply using information from their internet routers.
They were able to see multiple people positioned inside buildings as accurately as if they had full pictures using data from the devices already inside.
As Popular Mechanics explains it: “This pathway opens the options for low-cost, broadly accessible human tracking through walls.”
Heck, what could possibly go wrong?
Where Government Surveillance
Meets AI Firepower
I am not an expert on technology generally or AI specifically.
But I’ve read enough to know that AI is currently best used for crunching massive piles of data in ways that actual manpower simply can’t match.
And there are some terrific use cases for this special computing power …
Take scientific research, where an AI model just shared in a Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Two professors created a model called AlphaFold to predict protein structures based on their genetic code.
In simple terms, the model can continually learn from protein structures previously discovered through experiments to make new — and highly accurate predictions — about unknown structures.
Breakthroughs like this could hugely benefit mankind, especially in areas like drug development.
However, this same predictive ability also allows things like I mentioned earlier — where an AI model is already able to “see” us moving around in our houses simply based on data from our Wi-Fi routers.
When you combine that fact, with the type of power in the hands of the government, it’s a recipe for disaster.
As is often the case, it starts with largely good intentions.
For example, a recent CNN exclusive revealed the following:
“Machine learning AI helped the U.S. Treasury Department to sift through massive amounts of data and recover $1 billion worth of check fraud in fiscal 2024 alone, according to new estimates shared first with CNN. That’s nearly triple what the Treasury recovered in the prior fiscal year …
“The Treasury Department credited AI with helping officials prevent and recover more than $4 billion worth of fraud overall in fiscal 2024, a six-fold spike from the year before …”
Nothing bad about this, eh?
Indeed, it would be great if the government continues applying this same technology to other areas like Medicare, which saw an estimated $100 billion in fraud last year alone.
The problem is that having power like this creates a very slippery slope.
As that same story also explained:
“AI can be very helpful in fighting financial crime by combing through almost endless streams of data and detecting subtle patterns — all in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do it. Experts say that once sophisticated AI models are trained, they can sniff out suspicious transactions in mere milliseconds.”
Soon enough, every single taxpayer could see their entire return scrutinized in much the same way — essentially audited annually by a sophisticated computer — with the onus on the taxpayer to then defend anything deemed suspicious.
And that’s hardly the worst-case scenario.
For example, consider the FedNow program that I have discussed here before.
Washington says this new government-run payment processing system was designed to make financial transactions faster and more efficient. But it also makes it far easier for lawmakers to monitor, and even block, Americans’ everyday purchases should they ever want to do so.
Couple that with the power of AI, and it’s easy to envision scenarios worthy of the scariest sci-fi stories.
After all, a combination of the new FedNow program and rapidly advancing AI technology opens the potential for the government to cast a far wider, far more “efficient” net across the United States … essentially covering an entire world of digital financial transactions.
All the White House would have to do is declare some type of new emergency and nearly every single financial transaction we make could be quickly scanned, analyzed and categorized by government computers.
Payments could be declined, frozen, seized or transferred automatically without any need for human intervention or oversight at all.
Imagine currently separate databases all communicating together … monitoring real-time information across the entire country’s population … and you start to sense what a totalitarian nightmare this could become.
Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take now. In fact, Dr. Martin Weiss outlines all four of them in a brand-new presentation here.
I urge you to take his advice. I certainly am.
Best wishes,
Nilus Mattive
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