Category Archives: Internet

Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Internet, Mental Health, Religion

Man’s worship of the machine: void of purpose

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

THE sometime 20th century supposition that man had supposedly “killed God” stemmed from the secularisation of the West which left a void. That was filled by many nation states who implemented a rights-based humanism of common purpose and shared endeavour. Today that purpose has withered, too.

Our loss of faith in God has been coupled with a loss of faith in each other. The void has opened up again and we are using technology in an attempt to fill it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the world wide web was meant to herald an era of human flourishing, of rich cultural exchange, and global harmony. Knowledge was to spread in a way the printing press’s greatest advocates could only have dreamt of.

But rather than usher in an age of hyper-rationalism, the internet has exposed an age of debased religiosity. Having been dismissed as a relic from a bygone era, religion has returned in a thin, hollow version, shorn of wonder and purpose.

Look around today, for all is clear to see. Smartphone use is almost ubiquitous (95 per cent of the population own one, with as good as 100 per cent of 16-24 year olds). Artificial Intelligence, from chatbots, recommended search engines, or work applications, has become an everyday part of life for most people.

Our use of these technologies is increasingly quasi-devotional. We seem to enact the worst parody of religion: one in which we ask an “all-knowing” entity for answers; many outsource their thinking and writing; it is ever-present, shaping how we live our lives – yet most of us have only the faintest idea how it works.

The algorithmic operations of AI are increasingly opaque, and observable to a vanishingly small number of people at the top-end of a handful of companies. And even then, those people themselves cannot say in truth how their creations will augment and develop for the simple fact they don’t know.

Whether videos with Google Veo 3 or essays via ChatGPT, we can now sit alone and create almost anything we want at the touch of a button. Where God took seven days to build the world in His image, we can build a video replica in seven seconds. But the thrill is short-lived, as we are quickly submerged under a flood of content, pumped out with ease. There is no digital sublime, no sense of lasting awe, just a vague unease and apprehension as we hunch over our phones, irritated and unfocused. Increasingly, we have become aware of our own loneliness (which has reached “epidemic” proportions).

And perhaps the strangest of all, we accept AI’s view of us. Once, only God was able to X-ray the soul. Later, we believed the high priests of psychology could do the same, human to human. Now, we are seeking out that same sense of understanding in mute lines of code.

A mere 18 months or so since the tech became widely available, 64 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds in the UK have used an AI therapist, while in America, three quarters of 13 to 17-year-olds have used AI companion apps such as Character.ai or Replika.ai (which let users create digital friends or romantic partners they can chat with). Some 20 per cent of American teens spent as much or more time with their AI “friends” as they did their real ones.

Digging deeper into the numbers available, part of the attraction of socialising in this way is that you get a reflection, not an actual person: someone “always on your side”, never judgmental, never challenging. We treat LLMs (Large Language Models) with the status of an omniscient deity, just one that never corrects or disciplines. Nothing is risked in these social-less engagements – apart from your ability to grow as a person and be egotistically fulfilled. Habitualised, we risk becoming so fragile that any form of friction or resistance becomes unbearable.

Where social media at least relied upon the affirmation of your peers – hidden behind a screen though they were – AI is opening up the possibility to exist solely in a loop of self-affirmation.

Religion has many critics of course, but at the heart of the Abrahamic tradition is an argument about how to live now on this earth, together. In monotheism, God is not alone. He has his intermediaries: rabbis, priests, and imams who teach, proscribe and slowly, over time, build a system of values. There is a community of belief, of leaders and believers who discuss what is right and what is wrong, who share a creed, develop it, and translate sometimes difficult text into the texture of daily life and what it means for us. There is a code, but it is far from binary.

And, so, while it is possible to divine in the statements of our tech-bro-overlords through a certain proselytising fervour, there is no sense of the good life, no proper vision of society, and no concern for the future. Their creations are of course just tools – the promised superintelligence is yet to emerge and may never actually materialise – but they are transformative, and their potentially destructive power means they are necessarily moral agents. And the best we get are naïve claims about abundance for all or eradicating the need for work. A vague plan seems to exist that we will leave this planet once we’ve bled it white.

There is a social and spiritual hunger that a life online cannot satisfy. Placing our faith in the bright offerings of modernity is blinding us to each other – to what is human, and what is sacred.

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Britain, Government, Internet, National Security, Politics, Society, Technology

Put social media bosses in the dock

INTERNET AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Intro: Lies and disinformation on social media is fuelling violence and the breakdown of society

The violent thugs and bigots rampaging through the streets of UK towns and cities in the dreadful days since the Southport killing of three young children deserve severe punishment for their appalling crimes.

The giant businesses that enable the lies and exaggerations that fuel the riots should also be in the dock – as should the people who own them.

For the online anonymity they facilitate allows anyone in the world the chance to say anything they want, however incendiary, and to escape responsibility.

Built into the internet from its inception decades ago, anonymity is hugely profitable for tech billionaires, but the horrendous price for this free-for-all is paid by the rest of us: mostly law-abiding, peaceful people who respect the truth. Internet anonymity is the default setting when you set up an email address or a social media account. You can pretend to be anyone, anywhere.

The anarchy and chaos unleashed after Southport highlights the danger. An anonymous account on X (formerly Twitter) called Europe Invasion first spread the incendiary lie that the suspect in the stabbing case was a Muslim immigrant. That post – completely invented – was viewed a staggering six million times.

We have no idea who is behind Europe Invasion, with its relentless and misleading crimes, and doom-laden commentary about ethnic strife. It gives no contact details or any other explicit clues about its funding, staff, location, or aims.

For those who have spent decades dealing with Russian disinformation, it may well smell and look like a Kremlin propaganda outlet in an attempt to sow dissension and mistrust in Western societies – a Russian tactic for many years.

Moscow has unwitting accomplices. Look at the man in charge of X, Elon Musk. A self-declared “free speech absolutist”, Musk closed the departments responsible for dealing with disinformation when he first acquired Twitter. And he has made it far harder to report abuse. The result has been to intensify the toxic mischief coursing through the veins of our democracy.

When Musk took-over the ailing Twitter platform two years ago, accounts with verifiable owners still benefited from a “blue tick” – an award which prevented pranksters and fraudsters impersonating public figures, mainstream media outlets, and businesses. Not any more.

One of Musk’s first moves was to offer blue ticks to anyone willing to pay for them.

That’s why, at a cursory glance, Europe Invasion looks like a regular media outlet – with the “blue tick” stamp of authenticity for which someone, somewhere, has presumably paid. Musk has also lifted the ban Twitter had imposed on such divisive figures as the far-Right firebrand Tommy Robinson who has been blamed for helping fuel violent disorder with his social media posts.

Musk contributes directly to the toxic atmosphere he has helped create. Adding insult to injury he is now embroiled in a war of words with Sir Keir Starmer saying that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain.

The sensible citizens of our land will conclude Musk is not just the wealthiest man in the world, but also the silliest. He knows nothing about this country – and is not ashamed to show it. But among his 200 million followers there will be many who believe him, with untold consequences for this country’s image abroad, and stability at home.

There is even a greater danger to our national security. The internet is the central nervous system of our civilisation, used in everything from finance to health care and transport.

It is horribly susceptible and vulnerable to carelessness (as we saw recently in the massive global disruption from a faulty software update). Yet it is being attacked by malevolent state actors such as Russia and China.

The reason for our plight is simple: greed. Checking identities costs money. So too does nailing lies, running a proper complaints system, and installing proper security.

For the tech giants, it is far simpler to let chaos rip, and watch the profits roll in.

Yet the answer lies in our own hands – and those of our elected politicians in parliament.

As a first step, our regulators and lawmakers should demand that tech bosses immediately remove material that constitutes incitement to riot. Unless they do that, they are aiding and abetting serious crimes.

The tech giants’ titanic lobbying efforts have cowed politicians for years. Curb the internet and you hamper innovation, the argument goes.

But the price now is too high. An American court has just handed down a landmark ruling that the online search giant Google is a monopoly that systematically crushes its rivals.

We need the same spirit here in the UK, with the media regulator OFCOM and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) working together to curb the power of these monstrous companies.

They behave like medieval monarchs, treating us as their digital serfs. It is high time to remove their neo-feudal protections and privileges and make them legally liable for the extraordinary harm they do.

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Cyber security, Economic, Government, Internet, Society, Technology

CrowdStrike: The risk is ours

INTERNET SECURITY

THE bleak lesson from the devastating global computer breakdown on Friday 19 July – which grounded flights, crashed payment systems, crippled NHS surgeries and hospitals, disconnected phone lines, and knocked media outlets off air – could have been even worse. With no end in sight, this malfunctioning has been dubbed the “digital pandemic” and has already incurred colossal costs in time and money.

To those unversed in the intricacies of computer technology, the speed and extent of the disaster are almost incomprehensible. Surely, many will say, computer systems should be designed to avoid crashes on this scale at all costs. We would not accept planes, trains, or automobiles that dysfunction so badly.

But the truth is when it comes to computers, we accept inherent levels of risk that would be utterly intolerable elsewhere. The technology companies’ profits soar and, when things go wrong, we – the digital serfs of this brave new world – must humbly accept the cost and inconvenience that our masters inflict on us.

To appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem, consider this thought experiment.

Imagine if we allowed almost every traffic light in the world to be made by the same manufacturer. Worse, imagine that all of them were made with a remote-controlled switch that turned them to red. And – catastrophically – that a simple error at the manufacturer or one of its suppliers could trigger this switch all over the world.

Traffic would be instantly gridlocked on every continent. To repair these traffic lights, technicians would in many cases have to dismantle them and fiddle around in the works.

That, in crude terms, is the story of CrowdStrike in this computer breakdown and collapse. Most computers in the world use Microsoft – which makes the ubiquitous Windows operating platform, as well as Word, Excel, and the Teams video-calling system. Many Microsoft customers also rely on other software – in this case the Falcon Sensor program provided by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Security software protects computers from attack, typically by screening incoming data to ensure that it does not include “malware” – malevolent programs that steal data, freeze computers, or scramble their contents.

To work properly, these programs must operate unhindered on our computers, phones, and tablets. And to protect against new threats, they must update regularly – and automatically. In this current incident, one of the automatic software updates from CrowdStrike contained a simple, devastating error. Automatically installing on computers that run Windows, it crashed affected devices, triggering a page containing Windows’s error message – the so-called “blue screen of death”.

The result: the world suddenly had to switch to cash payments and handwritten boarding passes, while shops were forced to shut, medical appointments cancelled, and aircraft at airports grounded.

It is little comfort that George Kurtz, the co-founder and chief executive of CrowdStrike, says he is “deeply sorry”. Fixing the problem will not just take hours, but days or even weeks. At best, computers will need to be switched on and off again, allowing a new update to install. At worst, affected machines will need hours of specialist attention.

Nor will it be any comfort to furious customers around the world that CrowdStrike’s share price has crashed, knocking £10billion off its £65billion capitalised market value.

It could have been far worse.

This does not appear to have been a cyber-attack by a foreign power. Microsoft systems in countries all over the world, including Russia and China, were affected.

Nor was it the work of cyber-criminals. The faulty update did not scramble our databases, leaving us open to ransom demands from crime gangs in return for a key to recover our information.

Nor – unlike many recent cyber-attacks – did it whisk our most precious private information away to the Chinese Communist Party’s spy services in Beijing.

A far worse – and narrowly avoided – cyber-attack earlier this year could have given our enemies the master key to hundreds of millions of computers around the world, enabling them to wreak deadly havoc. Known in tech circles as the “xy” attack, it involved a little-known but ubiquitous program that compresses data to improve efficiency.

This attack, probably the work of Russian spies, was uncovered and stopped by chance at the last minute. And because in the end the damage was minimal, it attracted almost no public attention.

That was a near-miss. Far worse was the SolarWinds attack, exposed in 2021. Hackers – almost certainly Russian – bugged an update issued by Microsoft for a widely used program. The targets were Western (chiefly American) defence and other government networks. The cyber raid also exposed data from the U.S. Treasury, Justice, and Commerce departments, and thousands of Wall Street’s top companies.

The internet has become the central nervous system of our civilisation. Yet it was never designed or intended for this. It was built to promote academic cooperation and technological innovation, not global security. It is wide open to abuse by pranksters, fraudsters, and rogue states.

A handful of operating systems and software that updates remotely and automatically create a sitting target.

We would hardly accept such a concentration of risk in other walks of life, especially if we had no control over the decision-makers in such systems, and almost no redress if they made mistakes. With most other products and services, you can sue the provider if there’s a malfunction – and gain additional compensation for any damage caused. Not computers.

Unlike other parts of our technological universe, computers, phones, and software are not sold with proper guarantees. The manufacturers can shrug at their products’ shortcomings.

Buried in the terms and conditions are clauses that exempt the manufacturer from almost all liabilities.

One might well ask how on earth we got to such a parlous state of affairs.

One reason is greed: tech giants like their profits. They lobby hard for their privileged status, just as they do for the right to sell our attention to online advertisers – and to resist demands for proper age verification on social media platforms like TikTok.

But a deeper reason is that we have been naïve and complacent in our headlong embrace of new but untrusted technology. We have prized innovation and convenience ahead of security.

These risks, we were told, were the price of admission to the brave new world of computer wizardry. Maybe. But we are paying heavily for it.

In the case of this cyber meltdown, the culprit was carelessness. But suppose the perpetrator had been some rogue regime, perhaps distracting us at a moment of geopolitical tension?

Imagine that this outage had stopped the trains running, frozen all cash machines and, for that matter, turned all our traffic lights to red – or worse, green.

We would have nobody to blame but ourselves.

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