IMPORTANT SKYWATCH NOTICE: This series is being offered in the leadup to THE UNVEILING—an urgent Defender Virtual Conference event (May 13) wherein experts from around the world will update the public on (among other things) swiftly developing Human Enhancement / Hybrid Age advances directly tied to ancient prophecy and a coming seven years of Great Tribulation. Are you aware governments are enacting legislation NOW to protect the rights of the coming Human-Non-Human genetically engineered entities?
It’s a familiar premise in many films and books today: Humankind is nearly extinct, and the few men and women who have managed to stay alive fight for survival in a dystopian future dominated by machines. Robotic engineers and scientists who were too late to see the threats for what they were when we reached the technological Singularity—that moment that many futurists and tech experts had predicted—gave birth overnight to some version of the artilects, who suddenly came online as conscious, living super-minds, immensely more powerful than human beings.
In 2011, my wife Nita and I imagined what this might mean in our groundbreaking work, Forbidden Gates [FREE WITH AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY HERE!]:
“As a metaphor for mind-boggling social change, the Singularity has been borrowed from math and physics,” writes Joel Garreau in Radical Evolution. “In those realms, singularities are the point where everything stops making sense. In math it is a point where you are dividing through by zero [and in physics it is] black holes—points in space so dense that even light cannot escape their horrible gravity. If you were to approach one in a spaceship, you would find that even the laws of physics no longer seemed to function. That’s what a Singularity is like.”[i] Ray Kurzweil, who is credited with groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence and is, among other things, the co-founder of an interdisciplinary graduate studies program backed by Nasa known as the Singularity University, appreciates the comparison between the coming Technological Singularity and the physics of black holes:
Just as a black hole in space dramatically alters the patterns of matter and energy accelerating toward its event horizon, the impending Singularity in our future is [a] period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.¼ The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the rate of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury.[ii]
In plain language, Abou Farman says Kurzweil’s work on the Singularity:
“…analyzes the curve of technological development from humble flint-knapping to the zippy microchip. The curve he draws rises exponentially, and we are sitting right on the elbow, which means very suddenly this trend toward smaller and smarter technologies will yield greater-than-human machine intelligence. That sort of superintelligence will proliferate not by self-replication, but by building other agents with even greater intelligence than itself, which will in turn build more superior agents. The result will be an “intelligence explosion” so fast and so vast that the laws and certainties with which we are familiar will no longer apply. That event-horizon is called the Singularity.[iii]
Kurzweil elaborates further on what the Singularity will mean:
Our version 1.0 biological bodies are frail and subject to a myriad of failure modes. The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands [and] the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.
We are now in the early stages of this transition. The acceleration of paradigm shift as well as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology are both beginning to reach the “knee of the curve,” which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable. Shortly after this stage, the trend becomes explosive. [Soon] the growth rates of our technology—which will be indistinguishable from ourselves—will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity.
The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.[iv]
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DREW GRAFFIA PREPS TO UNVEIL A MAJOR MYSTERY ABOUT THE “TEMPTATION OF CHRIST”
In 1993, critical thinking about the timing of the Singularity concerning the emergence of strong artificial intelligence led retired San Diego State University professor and computer scientist Vernor Vinge, in his often-quoted and now-famous lecture, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” (delivered at Vision-21 Symposium sponsored by Nasa Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute), to add that when science achieves “the technological means to create superhuman intelligence[,] shortly after, the human era will be ended.”[v]
In contrast to Vinge, cyborgists like Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University in England who endorsed de Garis’ book, believe Singularity will not so much represent the end of the human era as it will the assimilation of man with machine intelligence, like the Borg of Star Trek fame. This is because, according to Warwick, Technological Singularity will not occur as a result of freestanding independent machines, but inside human cyborgs where human-machine integration is realized and enhanced biology is recombined to include living brains that are cybernetic, machine readable, and interfaced with artificial neural networks where transhumans with amplified intelligence become so completely superior to their biological counterparts (normal humans) as to be incomprehensible—ultimately “posthuman.” The technology to accomplish this task is already well underway and is considered by researchers like Warwick to be one of the most important scientific utilities currently under employment toward man’s posthuman future. As a result of this bridge between technology and human biology being attained this century, nothing less than the wholesale redesign of humans, including genetic integration with other life-forms—plants, animals, and synthetic creations—will be realized.[vi]
As incredible as it may seem, the scenarios above are under intense research by DARPA and other national laboratories as no pipe dream. Such brain-to-brain transmission between distant persons as well as mind-to-computer communication was demonstrated not long ago at the University of Southampton’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research using electrodes and an Internet connection. The experiment at the institute went farther than most brain-to-machine interfacing (BMI) technology thus far, actually demonstrating brain-to-brain (B2B) communication between persons at a distance. Dr. Christopher James, who oversaw the experiment, commented: “Whilst BCI [brain-computer interface] is no longer a new thing and person-to-person communication via the nervous system was shown previously in work by Prof. Kevin Warwick from the University of Reading, here we show, for the first time, true brain to brain interfacing. We have yet to grasp the full implications of this.” The experiment allowed one person using BCI to transmit thoughts, translated as a series of binary digits, over the Internet to another person whose computer received the digits and transmitted them to the second user’s brain.[vii]
But, as me and my dear late friend Dr. Chuck Missler famously pointed out in “The Hybrid Age” Strategic Perspectives Presentation of 2012, a very real danger may develop when a two-way communications portal is built connecting human-mind-to-synthetic intelligence. What none of the anxious secular technologists are asking is whether metaphysical or supernatural agents may take the proverbial “ghost in the machine” to a place where no modern man has gone before, bridging a gap between unknown entities (both virtual and real), perhaps even inviting takeover of human minds by malevolent intelligence. Note that the experiments above were being conducted at Southampton’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. Some years ago, scientist Vic Tandy’s research into sound, vibration frequencies, and eyeball resonation led to a thesis (actually titled “Ghosts in the Machine”) that was published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Tandy’s findings outlined what he thought were “natural causes” for particular cases of specter materialization. Tandy found that 19-Hz standing air waves could, under some circumstances, create sensory phenomena in an open environment suggestive of a ghost. He produced a frightening manifested entity resembling contemporary descriptions of “alien grays.” A similar phenomenon was discovered in 2006 by neurologist Olaf Blanke of the Brain Mind Institute in Lausanne, Switzerland, while he was working with a team to discover the source of epileptic seizures in a young woman. They were applying electrical currents through surgically implanted electrodes to various regions of her brain, when, upon reaching her left temporoparietal junction (TPJ, located roughly above the left ear), she suddenly reported feeling the presence of a shadow person standing behind her. The phantom started imitating her body posture, lying down beneath her when she was on the bed, sitting behind her, and later even attempting to take a test card away from her during a language exercise. While the scientists interpreted the activity as a natural, though mysterious, biological function of the brain, is it possible they were discovering gateways of perception into the spirit world that were closed by God following the Fall of Man? Were Tandy’s “ghost” and Blanke’s “shadow person” living unknowns? If so, is it not troubling that advocates of human-mind-to-machine intelligence may produce permanent conditions similar to Tandy and Blanke’s findings, giving rise to simulated or real relationships between humans and “entities”? At the thirteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research at the University of Vienna in Austria, an original paper submitted by Charles Ostman seemed to echo this possibility:
As this threshold of development is crossed, as an index of our human /Internet symbiosis becoming more pronounced, and irreversible, we begin to develop communication modalities which are quite “nonhuman” by nature, but are “socio-operative” norms of the near future. Our collective development and deployment of complex metasystems of artificial entities and synthetic life-forms, and acceptance of them as an integral component of the operational “culture norm” of the near future, is in fact the precursory developmental increment, as an enabling procedure, to gain effective communicative access to a contiguous collection of myriad “species” and entity types (synthetic and “real”) functioning as process brokeraging agents.[viii]
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WHY IS “THE UNVEILING” CONSIDERED SO IMPORTANT THAT OVER 2-DOZEN INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED EXPERTS ARE GATHERING TO DISCLOSE DEVELOPMENTS TIED TO THE END TIMES!?
A similar issue that returned to my memories from past experience with exorcism and the connection between sound resonance and contact with supernaturalism has to do with people who claim to have become possessed or “demonized” after attempting to open mind gateways through vibratory chanting at New Age vortices or “Mother Earth” energy sites such as Sedona, Arizona.
By the time mankind realizes that the artificial intelligence they build and connect to the cloud or digital hive mind (that most people will gladly plug into) has the potential to become conscious, independent, self-educating, self-upgrading, self-repairing, and self-replicating electro-gods we humans might have no hope of controlling, the plans to exterminate the pesky Homo sapiens may already be underway.
And as much as this story outline has, in the past, only inspired people to grab the popcorn and wiggle further down into the couch cushions, computer scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, et al, have more recently taken this sci-fi concept seriously. The idea of whether machines have the potential to dominate or replace humans in the extremely near future is not as far-fetched a notion as it once was.
Again, it’s already happening and expanding exponentially.
First, there is a matter of how AI has already influenced human employment in the recent past. Second, there is hard evidence—based on documented demonstrations of automation technology (not just statistics or estimates)—showing how AI could influence human employment in the immediate future, as soon as regulation permits.
Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University—both chiefs of the Department of Economics in their own schools—joined forces to further investigate these matters. They published their findings for the “Economic Fluctuations and Growth: Labor Studies” program at the National Bureau of Economic Research in March of 2017. The report, Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, stated that for every robot inserted into the US economy, human employment is reduced by 5.6 workers.[ix] “Because there are relatively few robots in the US economy, the number of jobs lost due to robots has been limited so far,” the report states, but it goes on to say, “the world stock of robots [is estimated to] quadruple by 2025.”[x]
Not only do machines work more precisely and efficiently, learn new skills at the press of a programming click, never receive a paycheck or benefits, never disagree with their bosses, and never require a break on the job floor, they have already demonstrated the ability to replace far more humans at this moment than has actually been implemented because of social-acceptance complications. In other words, it would be considered creepy, alarming, or inappropriate to the public for robots/machines to fulfill certain occupational positions. (Nobody yet wants to order a glass of wine from a bartender made of metal and wires, especially if it means the human who had the job previously was replaced, but the day is coming soon when this will be a regularity.) But just because our society is not ready for it doesn’t mean that machines haven’t previously proved an efficient replacement of humans in countless job positions. In many cases, automation has already been slated to replace humans as soon as it does become socially acceptable.
According to the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, as of 2015, “currently demonstrated technologies could automate 45 percent of the activities people are paid to perform.” In case you missed it, McKinsey’s collected data shows that almost half of all job-related actions presently carried out by humans could be accomplished by a machine at this moment in time if the red tape were cut. Their report went on to say that “about 60 percent of all occupations could see 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated.”[xi] According to their downloadable “Technical Potential for Automation in the US” chart, machines have already demonstrated the ability to carry out 78 percent of all human jobs within the “Predictable Physical Work” category. That might not be a huge surprise any longer, simply because we’re growing more accustomed all the time to seeing astounding machinery work in the manufacturing industry, but there are other categories—such as healthcare, weighing in at 36 percent technical potential of automation!—that require more imagination for us to wrap our brains around.
The report explained three central functions that relate to this healthcare calculation: food prep, medication administration to patients, and data collection… Imagine your mashed potatoes, Jell-O, ice water, and pills being wheeled in on an electric delivery-bot while you’re being treated at the hospital. Instead of a human nurse asking you how you feel and what your medical history looks like, the bot presents you with a stylus and a screen survey, and when you’ve finished, it takes your temperature and blood pressure and loads the update into your electronic medical file before wheeling away.
You know that feeling of extreme frustration we get when we are confused about a bill in the mail, but when we call the company to straighten it out, we can’t get a human on the line?
NEXT: I, ROBOT
[i] Joe Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human (New York: Broadway, 2005) 71–72)
[ii] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York: Penguin, 2006) 7–8.
[iii] Abou Farman, “The Intelligent Universe,” Maison Neuve (8/ 2/10) http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2010/aug/2/intelligent-universe/.
[iv] Kurzweil, 9.
[v] “The Coming Technological Singularity,” presented at the Vision-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute (3/30–31/93).
[vi] Tom and Nita Horn, Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare (Crane, MO: Defender Publishing, 2010), 130–133
[vii] “Brain-Computer Interface Allows Person-to-Person Communication Through Power Of Thought,” ScienceDaily (10/6/09) (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091006102637.htm).
[viii] Charles Ostman, The Internet as an Organism: Emergent Human / Internet Symbiosis (Vienna, Austria: Thirteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research at the University of Vienna, April 9–12, 1996) emphasis added.
[ix] Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, “Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets,” NBER Working Paper No. 23285, March 17, 2017, National Bureau of Economic Research, last accessed January 12, 2018, http://www.nber.org/papers/w23285. (Note that this website requires a fee to access the original report. At the time of this writing, the report is available for free through MIT’s Department of Economics at the following link: https://economics.mit.edu/files/12763.)
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Michael Chui, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi, “Where Machines Could Replace Humans—and Where They Can’t (Yet),” July 2016, McKinsey Quarterly, last accessed January 11, 2018, (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/where-machines-could-replace-humans-and-where-they-cant-yet), emphasis added.
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