Mohamed’s Reviews > New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future > Status Update

The new dark age: a place where the future is radically uncertain and the past irrevocably contested, but where we are still capable of speaking directly to what is in front of us, of thinking clearly and acting with justice.

What was missing in Rwanda and Srebrenica was not evidence of an atrocity, but the willingness to act upon it. As one investigative report on the Rwandan killings noted, ‘Any failure to fully appreciate the genocide stemmed from political, moral, and imaginative weaknesses, not informational ones.’11 This statement feels like it could be the punchline to this book: a damning indictment of our ability to either ...

Schmidt’s – and Google’s – worldview is one that is entirely predicated on the belief that making something visible makes it better, and that technology is the tool to make things visible.

The view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. Just as a huge number of these videos are created by automated pieces of software – bots – they are also viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. The arms race between bot makers and Google’s machine learning algorithms is one that Google lost a long time ago across most of its properties. It’s also one that it has no real reason to ...

Chemtrails have been around for a while, since at least the 1990s, when, according to the conspiracy theorists, the US Air Force let slip what they were really up to. In a report entitled ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’, a group of Air Force researchers proposed a series of measures by which the US military might use weather modification to achieve ‘battlespace dominance to a degree ...

Wikileaks’ original intent was not to become a kind of mirror to the NSA, but to break the whole machine. In 2006, in the very early days of Wikileaks, Julian Assange wrote an analysis of conspiratorial systems of government and how they can be attacked, entitled ‘Conspiracy as Governance’. For Assange, all authoritarian systems are conspiracies because their power depends on keeping secrets from their peoples....

Technical possibility breeds political necessity, because no politician wants to be accused of not doing enough in the aftermath of some atrocity or exposé. Surveillance is done because it can be done, not because it is effective; and, like other implementations of automation, because it shifts the burden of responsibility and blame onto the machine. Collect it all, and let the machines sort it out.

For example, a network trained on Japanese–English and English–Korean examples is capable of generating Japanese–Korean translations without ever passing through English.33 This is called ‘zero-shot’ translation, and what it implies is the existence of an ‘interlingual’ representation: an internal metalanguage composed of shared concepts across languages.

Things get stranger still when these dream images start to interleave with our own memories. Robert Elliott Smith, an artificial intelligence researcher at University College London, returned from a family holiday in France in 2014 with a phone full of photos. He uploaded a number of them to Google+, to share them with his wife, but while browsing through them he noticed an anomaly.30 In one image, he saw himself ...

Half of police services in the United States are already employing ‘predictive policing’ systems such as PredPol, a software package that uses ‘high-level mathematics, machine learning, and proven theories of crime behaviour’ to predict the most likely times and places that new crimes can be expected to occur: a weather forecast for lawbreaking.