Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.
Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. According to its marketing materials, it views deployment by law enforcement agencies as a “common use case” for this technology. Among other features, the company’s materials describe “person tracking” as an “easy and accurate” way to investigate and monitor people. Amazon says Rekognition can be used to identify “people of interest,” raising the possibility that those labeled suspicious by governments — such as undocumented immigrants or Black activists — will be seen as fair game for Rekognition surveillance. It also says Rekognition can monitor “all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports,” at a time when Americans are joining public protests at unprecedented levels.
This is only one piece of the full panopticon toolkit, of course: various technologies which allow for seeing thru walls will mean that eventually the authorities and most large corporations will know or be able to know everything you do, all day, no matter where you do it, but it is still part of an escalation.
China has particularly been a keen adopter of this sort of technology (though not from Amazon, obviously).
The core problem authorities are trying to solve here is part of the surveillance paradox: in the past surveillance societies have just been too costly. When you need to have people watching other people, it takes too many people, and the watchers aren’t productive.
The second part of the paradox is harder to deal with, it is that surveillance societies tend to become uncreative: when you know everything you do or say is being judged, you tend to internalize the external rules for safety.
This surveillance doesn’t have to be governmental, of course, a measure of creativity in America shows decline from the 80s on in children, almost certainly due to the widespread adoption of helicopter parenting and the tethering of children, so that they do not control their own time but are constantly under adult supervision.
This is only a real problem, however, if you have societies which are more free than yours. If everyone is a surveillance society, then there is no competitive issue: everyone has drones (er, human drones.)
But elites are also betting that mechanical drones, AI, robotics and so on will reduce the need for humans to be creative: machines will do that, and do it in ways that their masters approve of. Much safer than letting humans be creative.
Ironically, it may be that widespread social collapse due to various environmental issues may be our best bet at avoiding our masters desire for a steady state authoritarian dystopia.
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It is said that once upon a time, Siddhartha Gautama, before he was the Buddha, was sitting on the ground and was overwhelmed by a great feeling of sweetness towards all that lived, from the bug he saw on the ground, to the grass, and trees, to all the people, and including himself, without any distinction. He remembered that he had felt this way before, as a young child, and he realized in this feeling part of the solution he had sought to the problem of ending suffering.
One of the great problems with the mandate to love that is one of the keys to most, perhaps all, great faiths, is that it is taken as a moral commandment.
Thou must love, or you’re a bad person.
By the time Siddhartha had this insight, in the stories (who knows what happened in reality), he’d been seeking for a long time. He had studied under many masters, was an expert meditator, and so on.
He was seeking an end to suffering, that is all. His goal wasn’t to be a good person.
But here’s the thing, when you truly love, and I’m not talking about the lust that often passes for love, especially in the early throes of infatuation, but that tender warm sweetness, you can’t feel fear.
Cannot.
Likewise, anger and hate and so on are disabled while you are in this state.
Being loving protects you from a lot of suffering. It doesn’t stop pain, but it reduces the suffering of pain.
If you love, all and everything, and combine this with deep equanimity, you fall deep into parasympathetic mode. You are relaxed, you do not tense against pain and loss, and so the effect of them is reduced.
The effect of love becomes confused when the insights of mystics become the dogmas of religion.
Love is, as best I can tell (and many great mystics disagree with me), not the highest. But it is an easy path towards the highest, as it allows easy concentration and complete relaxation, with all the attendant benefits.
There are other ways to do this, but oddly, if you relax enough, love tends to arise. It is a strange sort of dispassionate love; felt for everyone and often everything, with little compulsion to action.
And it is an unconditioned love. When mystics look at what secular people call love, they find it a sickness. We love people because they make us feel good, and when they stop making us feel good we usually stop loving them. This isn’t love, to a mystic, it is a transaction.
The practice of loving kindness is simple enough. Find someone or something you can love unreservedly (the Christian God is usually bad for this, since most people are terrified of him and hate him, though they will not admit it. After all, if you displease him, he will have you tortured for eternity.)
Feel love to that person (a puppy or a young child, or a God who isn’t a torturer are good candidates). Imagining open you arms wide for a big hug (or even starting by actually opening them) can be a good start.
Then once you can feel this love on demand, move it to people you love, but do have mixed feelings on, and slowly work your way to loving people you hate or fear or despise.
The trap to be careful of here is not falling into misery. If you spend too much time on how these people are suffering, instead of feeling love, you can wind up sad, and that’s not the point.
Deep lovingness allows the body and mind to rest and relax. It allows muscles held in contraction, often for decades, to let go. It allows concentration, because fear and worry and other compulsive thoughts are reduced.
It is NOT the entire path and there are many who think it is, because it can get you very very far, to the point where you’re both genuinely a sage, and a really wonderful person (and other people can feel it when they’re around someone who has developed like this.)
But it feels really great and gets you a long way, and of the techniques that the Buddha is associated with, it ranks next to concentration on the breath as one of the two main spars of practice. (There are other pieces to the practice, like insight meditation. More on that in a later piece.)
And remember, the most important person to love, and often the hardest, is yourself. Don’t start there, as a rule (few people have uncomplicated feelings towards themselves), but somewhere along the path, spend a lot of time loving yourself.
There’s a ton of cultural baggage and conditioning in the West that says one shouldn’t do that: that it’s selfish, that we’re bad people who don’t deserve love, and so on.
Forget it. Even if you’re a terrible person who has done terrible things, to walk this path and reduce suffering, you’ve got to love yourself. It’s not about “deserve”, full loving kindness includes loving terrible people, it’s a technique to do something.
Nor need you fear that you’ll be unable to take care of yourself if you’re loving. You don’t have to become a pushover just because you love people. Kill them with love if necessary. You’ll just be far less likely to hurt others as a default action.
Where loving kindness becomes crippling is where it is taken as a moral prescription, rather than as skillful means. You aren’t loving because others deserve it (they neither do nor don’t), you are loving because it is a far better way to live than being angry, hateful and scared.
More on anger and hate later.
And, uh, before you love your neighbour as yourself, learn to love yourself. The way some people treat themselves, I’d rather they hated me.
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America is what America is. And what America is is a nation whose leaders commit mass murder and assassination with impunity, and which rewards those who do either, or both.
This bit from the Intercept on one of Haspel’s victims speaks loudly.
“I have evaluated Mr. Abdal Rahim al-Nashiri, as well as close to 20 other men who were tortured as part of the CIA’s RDI [Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation] program. I am one of the only health professionals he has ever talked to about his torture, its effects, and his ongoing suffering,” Dr. Sondra Crosby, a professor of public health at Boston University, wrote to Warner’s legislative director on Monday. “He is irreversibly damaged by torture that was unusually cruel and designed to break him. In my over 20 years of experience treating torture victims from around the world, including Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mr. al-Nashiri presents as one of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen.”
Warner, of course, supported Haspel, because Warner is scum. Competent scum, according to people I trust who know him, but scum.
America and those it elects have been very clear to the rest of the world. They support the Iraq War and Torture and always have. In 2004 when George W. Bush was re-elected everyone knew about the torture, and by then the fact that Bush had lied about WMD was becoming clear as well.
The New York Times, which helped lie the US into Iraq, kindly did not release a story showing Bush’s administration was spying on Americans till after the election. They explicitly said they were worried he might lose if they ran it. Despite all their caviling over the years, when it mattered the NYT was for illegal war and torture. That’s who the NYTimes is when the chips are down, and it’s only when the chips are down that it matters.
The bottom line is that Americans and their leaders are really, truly, ok with illegal wars and torture whenever the decision has to actually be made, and today America’s leaders showed that they do not even feel any actual remorse, or even that torturing was a mistake that matters.
This is just who America is.
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So, Palestinians protested moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, and Israel shot and killed somewhere between 52 and 60 of them, and injured hundreds more.
The rule of international law (yes, I know, a dead letter) is that force must be proportional to threat.
This is disproportionate.
The simple fact is that too many Israelis now think of Palestinians as sub-human: animals to be killed if they are inconvenient.
Israel is an apartheid state: a large chunk of the population is denied its rights, including its right to vote. And both the West Bank and Gaza are, yes, open air prisons.
The two state solution is dead. I’m not sure it was ever viable. It no longer is. Israel will either have to cleanse Palestinians from its territory (something the de-humanization is clearly working them up to) or Israel as a religious-ethnic state will inevitably end.
It is well noted that those who are abused tend to become abusers. The applicability to Israel is obvious and sad.
Still, while tragic, today’s events pale compared to what Saudi Arabia, with America’s assistance, is doing in Yemen.
Plenty of tragedies to go around on Earth.
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Sadr’s an interesting figure. His party (he’s not standing for election himself) ran on an anti-corruption, anti-American and anti-Iranian platform. His father opposed Saddam (and died for it) and the Sadrists opposed the US invasion (and rose twice against the occupation). Sadr became even more powerful after the invasion simply because the Sadrists provided security and services and were non-corrupt themselves.
To put it simply, even though he gained much from his father, he and the movement he is the head of appear to me to “deserve” their popularity. They have served their people and they have had integrity.
In this they are similar to Hezbollah, who, whatever one thinks of them, have served their people and done what they said they would: free their country from Israel, and keep it free.
As a general rule I admire those with integrity, whether I agree with them on everything or not. I am no Muslim, nor likely ever would be (only the Sufis appeal to me at all), but I can always get behind feeding the poor, genuine anti-corruption and the bravery and integrity to oppose tyranny.
I am sure there are nuances of the Iraq situation I’m missing, I don’t keep up, I don’t speak or read Arabic, Persian (to understand Iran), Kurdish and so on. And just getting the largest vote bloc doesn’t guarantee leading the government.
But overall this seems like a good thing to me.
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So, I see the usual suspects, in response to a large attack by Israel on Iranian targets in Syria, are saying the usual, “I support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
Really what they mean, of course, is “I’m scared of the Israeli lobby in my country, and of being called an anti-semite if I dare say the truth.”
The truth is that Israel attacks other countries far more than other countries attack Israel.
The truth is that the Iranian missile attack the to which the Israelis were responding was actually in response to routine Israeli attacks on Syria.
The truth is that Iran is an invited guest in Syria and Israel is not.
Modern Iran has not attacked multiple neighbours over the course of its history. Israel has, and taken territory from them to boot.
The Golan Heights was taken from Syria, by Israel.
And, of course, Iran has no nukes, and Israel, which claims Iran wants them, does have nukes.
Our entire “conversation” about Israel and the region around it is based on hypocrisy, fear and guilt over the holocaust, as if because Germany killed millions of Jews, it’s ok for Israel to treat Palestinians and everyone else in the neighbourhood monstrously.
Israel should remember that “the powerful do as they will, the weak suffer what they must” was replied to “what you do to us, will one day be done to you, because seeing how you treat us, no one will trust you or have mercy on you.”
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We have this view of the big nasty surveillance state which was set by the novel 1984. But 1984’s technology was primitive: Big Brother couldn’t record, for example, so if no one was watching a monitor while you did whatever Big Brother didn’t like, you got away with it.
But Big Brother had nothing on what is coming down the line. In China, businesses are already making their employees wear caps which measure brainwaves, and they will move you about or even send you home based on your brainwaves. It’s not all bad; if an air traffic controller’s brain waves went into a pattern which showed lack of concentration ability, for example, they would remove that controller.
MIT has recently announced a headset which can read speech we didn’t actually say:
MIT researchers have developed a headset that can identify words you think of but don’t actually say, by reading signals the brain sends to the face and jaw during internal speech.
The AlterEgo headset captures the neuromuscular signals that occur when people intend to speak. It then uses a neural network to reconstruct the word.
This isn’t the same as reading thoughts, but a lot thoughts we would never say do hit that neuromuscular network, then get inhibited. We’ve all had the experience of “biting our tongue” — carefully keeping things we really want to say to ourselves.
This is still early days, and these are early and crude technologies. We know that the part of our brain which is aware and which considers us tends to be behind the times: The decision to do something is made before we are aware of it, we then back-fill with justifications for decisions we already made.
We can tell that, and in time we will be able to tell that with cheap, mobile equipment, and I am reasonably sure we will be able to tell in advance what the decisions are. We will be able to read intention, and read thoughts that don’t get to the face and jaw, even.
I trust the implications for freedom are obvious.
And this is all before we get to behavioural modification. We’re better at this than we think we are right now, through the mode of gamification, used by terribly addictive social media websites like Facebook and Twitter; but we’re terrible at it in the nitty-gritty of neurons and neurotransmitters and so on, because it’s so complicated.
Still, in time, we will be able to directly manipulate the brain and body to produce emotions and even thoughts on demand as well as to inhibit them. We’ll be able to make people like, hate, love, or fear, and do it directly.
This will have vast therapeutic value, to be sure. It could create a heaven. But such direct control over individuals will be abused, and it will almost certainly be abused at scale, over entire societies.
Because it is control, and people with power (this doesn’t just mean governments) always want more control, and always use it unless forced not to.
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Yeah, so, it was a good deal and one of the very few real accomplishments of Obama’s foreign policy, possible only after Clinton was no longer Secretary of State.
The fear here is that this is part of a march to war against Iran, something many in the Republican party want, and something pushed hard by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
This was the danger of Republican win: Clinton was deranged about Syria, Trump is deranged about Iran. Both are allies of Russia, and Russia will not want to allow Iran to be destroyed by an American coalition. While the risk of a confrontation between the US and Russia is not as severe over Iran as it was over Syria, it is still very real.
Plus, of course, the Iranians don’t have nuclear weapons and just making enriched uranium didn’t mean they wanted nuclear weapons.
Fortunately, the Europeans are pushing back hard against this, and are willing to just cut their own deal. That may help somewhat.
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