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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: As the title indicates, this program brings up do date topics of discussion from previous programs and/or introduces new threads of inquiry.
In FTR #791, we highlighted research indicating that Hitler did not die in the Bunker as believed. The authors of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler posit that Allen Dulles and Martin Bormann reached a deal to exchange Hitler for German military expertise rendered under Project Paperclip and the sparing of the treasures of Western art. In FTR #864, we detailed Peter Levenda’s research indicating that Hitler may have ultimately found his way to Indonesia. As noted by Williams, Dunstan and Levenda, many documents about Hitler’s postwar whereabouts are still classified, more than 70 years after his alleged death. WHY?
The authors of Grey Wolf have been receiving death threats! It is difficult to imagine that death threats would be lodged against authors of a “disreputable” or “fantastic” volume, as Williams and Dunstan’s worthy book has been called. ” . . . Yesterday, Swansea-born Williams, who grew up in Coychurch, Bridgend, said: ‘We have ruffled some very big feathers. Traditional historians don’t like it and certain governments don’t like it. We have had some death threats already.’ . . . .”
After updating the inquiry about Hitler’s fate, the program sets forth some of the most recent repressive measures undertaken by Narendra Modi’s Hindu Nationalist/fascist government in India.
Modi’s trip to the Silicon Valley was the focal point of grotesque pandering on the part of sycophantic Silicon Valley executives, who looked to the RSS/BJP shill to open up the large Indian market to their products.
The tech executives have remained mum on Modi’s active moves to counter online coverage of his government that is less than favorable. Student protesters have been brutalized by New Delhi police, acting in concert with unnamed, out-of-uniform operatives, another phenomenon that has failed to draw the attention of Silicon Valley critics.
After reviewing Ayatollah Khomeini’s political evolution from a Muslim-Brotherhood-affiliated Shiite group, we noted the late Antonin Scalia’s networking with a group headed by a Habsburg–the Archduke of Austria.
The conclusion of the program revisits the increasingly surreal world of high-tech, cyber-terrorism and technocratic fascism.
After highlighting the mysterious case of a Boston subway train that “went rogue,” we detail the hacking of a water treatment plant and consequent tampering with the chemicals used in the water.
Reviewing information from FTR #901, we note that the skilled Nazi hacktivist and Glenn Greenwald associate Andrew Auernheimer (aka “Weev”) is developing methodologies suited to the new “Internet of things” and has caused printers to issue racist screeds.
More than a little scary is the story of Microsoft’s new Tay AI chatbot. Designed to interact with Twitter users, it soon morphed into a Nazi.
As one Twitter user noted, employing sarcasm: “Tay went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all concerned about the future of AI.”
Worth contemplating in this regard is the fact that the develoment of AI is seen as the primary focal point of high-tech commercial R & D.
The conclusion of the program details the enormous projected losses of labor to robotics and AI.
Program Highlights Include:
- An 83% chance that jobs paying less than $20.00 an hour will be replaced by technology.
- The massive loss of construction jobs to technology–this in a business that does much to drive the U.S. and global economies.
- The failure of Donald Trump and “Boinie” to address the technological replacement of jobs.
1a. In FTR #791, we highlighted research indicating that Hitler did not die in the Bunker as believed. The authors of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler posit that Allen Dulles and Martin Bormann reached a deal to exchange Hitler for German military expertise rendered under Project Paperclip and the sparing of the treasures of Western art. In FTR #864, we detailed Peter Levenda’s research indicating that Hitler may have ultimately found his way to Indonesia.As noted by Williams, Dunstan and Levenda, many documents about Hitler’s postwar whereabouts are still classified, more than 70 years after his alleged death. WHY?
. . . . During this period [the late 1940’s], the FBI was taking reports of Hitler being in Latin America very seriously. Thousands of documents pertaining to Hitler from these years are still classified as Top Secret on both sides of the Atlantic; nevertheless, and despite the very heavy censorship of the few files released into the public domain, some information can be gleaned. . . .
1b. The authors of Grey Wolf have been receiving death threats! It is difficult to imagine that death threats would be lodged against authors of a “disreputable” or “fantastic” volume, as Williams and Dunstan’s worthy book has been called. ” . . . Yesterday, Swansea-born Williams, who grew up in Coychurch, Bridgend, said: ‘We have ruffled some very big feathers. Traditional historians don’t like it and certain governments don’t like it. We have had some death threats already.’ . . . .”
“Death Threats for Hitler Book Author Gerard Williams;” Wales Online; 3/21/2013.
A South Wales author who has sensationally claimed Adolf Hitler escaped the bunker to live in Argentina says he and his research team have received death threats.
Former Bridgend Grammar School pupil Gerrard Williams, pictured, spent five years with military historian Simon Dunstan researching Grey Wolf – The Escape of Adolf Hitler. It claims Hitler spent 17 years in the foothills of the Andes in Argentina until his death in 1962.
The book also claims Hitler’s escape was carried out with the blessing of the US authorities who wanted rocket secrets and details of where priceless art treasures were hidden.
Yesterday, Swansea-born Williams, who grew up in Coychurch, Bridgend, said: “We have ruffled some very big feathers.
“Traditional historians don’t like it and certain governments don’t like it. We have had some death threats already.”
Williams, who studied journalism in Cardiff and worked for the BBC and Sky News, said: “I discovered the story while working on a documentary about the Falklands War in Argentina.
”History books say with Berlin’s Reich Chancellery virtually surrounded on April 30, 1945, Hitler shot himself, while his new wife Eva Braun bit into a cyanide capsule to evade capture. Their petrol-soaked bodies were then burned.
But Williams claims Hitler and Braun slipped out of the besieged Führerbunker via a secret tunnel and were replaced by doubles chosen by Reichsfuhrer Martin Bormann.He says they were then whisked by plane to Spain and by submarine to the Argentine coast at Necochea.
The body doubles were shot and burned. They later had two daughters. Williams said: “He and Braun separated in 1953, taking the girls to live in the town of Nequen. In the early 2000s the women were still alive.“Hitler died on February 13, 1962 at 3pm.”
Williams spent five years with military historian Simon Dunstan researching Grey Wolf – The Escape of Adolf Hitler.
It claims Hitler spent 17 years in the foothills of the Andes in Argentina until his death in 1962.
The book also claims Hitler’s escape was carried out with the blessing of the US authorities who wanted rocket secrets and details of where priceless art treasures were hidden.
2a. Narendra Modi’s government is setting up a new institution that will be tasked with round-the-clock monitoring of blogs, web portals of TV channels and newspapers, and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, among others. All comments and threads will be analyzed. The history and psychological profileof each poster will be assessed for possible subversiveness and radicalism.
When deemed necessary, counter-messages will be inserted into the threads to quell a possible snowballing of negative public opinion.
How exactly this initiative is supposed to quell the negative opinions generated by overt in-your-face Big Brother-tactics is unclear. One wonders how effective an agency dedicated to ‘plugging resentment triggered by news items’ is going to be at reducing resentment when the very existence of the agency is bound to generate even more resentment and all pro-government comments are just going to be assumed to be government-paid trolls.
Every time a negative narrative surfaces, a possible counter would be initiated — through press releases, briefings or press conferences, depending on the intensity or standing of the post,” said sources.
The Government plans to set up a special media cell to track content online, and counter news and comments that it decides are negative or provocative.
Last month, the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) proposed that a National Media Analytics Centre (NMAC) be created to keep monitor and analyse round-the-clock blogs, web portals of TV channels and newspapers, and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, among others.
“The government will keep a watch on the narrative in all such threads. Every time a negative narrative surfaces, a possible counter would be initiated — through press releases, briefings or press conferences, depending on the intensity or standing of the post,” said sources.
Last August, the government had directed all ministries to set up quick response teams — comprising senior ministry officials, nodal officers from the Press Information Bureau and independent experts — to defend its case in the face of negative news.
Sources said that the NMAC proposal is based on tracking software designed by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, an Assistant Professor at Delhi-based Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology.
The software will generate relevant tags to highlight “belligerent” comments or social media chats, they added.
At a deeper level, the software would comb posts and comments to classify them into negative, neutral and positive categories while highlighting relevant text, sources said. It will also show up if the negative posting was factually correct or “an intentional canard”, they said.“The software would also help recall the past pattern of the writer to check the number of times he took a negative or positive stand, his background, and preferences of websites and areas of interest to judge whether they were aimed at fomenting trouble or radicalisation,” said sources.
They said the objective is to come up with “instant counters” on social media to plug resentment triggered by news items so that personal opinions do not snowball into public protests and threaten law and order.
The feedback on covert or overt posts would be passed on to security agencies or higher authorities for possible intervention, they said.
The NMAC proposal suggests an inter-ministerial committee of officials from NSCS and the Home, I&B and External Affairs ministries for analysis, coordination, information dissemination and feedback on public perception and national security.
The NMAC would be the third observation post for the NDA government after the New Media Wing, the online eyes and ears providing daily reports on the world of social media, and the Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) that monitor 600-plus channels round the clock.
As reported by The Indian Express on August 29, the 200 content auditors at EMMC sends hourly reports and text messages of news breaking on any channel to top bureaucrats including the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, the National Security Advisor and the Cabinet Secretary.
The New Media Wing trawls websites, including micro blogs, as well as traffic relating to news breaks on the social media sites to pick up government relevant trends. It then undertakes a “sentiment analysis” to gauge public opinion.
The proposal for NMAC was sent to PIB director-general Frank Noronha by Deputy National Security Advisor Arvind Gupta for setting it up at the National Media Centre, said sources. However, they added, a four-member committee formed to examine the proposal has opposed locating it at NMAC due to “lack of space”.
...
2b. The Modi government is also implementing harsher tactics against those who protest its policies:
Even as Delhi Police on Monday faced widespread criticism over a video clip that shows the alleged assault on the students by male constables and some men who are not in uniform, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi said that instead of listening to students, Modi government was brutally beating them up.
“Shocking attack on students. Instead of listening to them, now the Modi government is brutally beating them up for protesting against the RSS,” Rahul said. . . .
. . . . In the short video clip, a constable is seen dragging a female protester by her hair and pushing her down. A youth is also seen being bashed.
Two journalists, who have alleged that they were beaten up and their cameras smashed while covering the protest, claimed that the police action was “unprovoked”, as per PTI.
The clip has gone viral on various social media sites.
Meanwhile, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today hit out at Delhi Police alleging that it was being used as RSS and BJP’s “private army” under a political dispensation that is at “war” with students across the country.
“Delhi police being used by BJP/RSS as their private army to terrorise and teach lesson to anyone opposing BJP/RSS. I strongly condemn attack on students,” he tweeted.
“FTII, Rohith case, Hyderabad University, IITs and now brutal attack on Delhi students. Modi government seems to be at war with students all across,” he wrote in another tweet. . . .
3. Khomeini was mentored by the head of a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate called the Devotees of Islam. As discussed in FTR# 352, Khomeini’s exile in France prior to assuming power was financed by Francois Genoud, one of the most important figures in the postwar Underground Reich. (For more about Genoud, see—among other programs—FTR#453.)
“Cold War, Holy Warrior” by Robert Dreyfuss; Mother Jones; January/February/2006.
. . . The regime of the ayatollahs in Iran grew out of a secret society called the Devotees of Islam, a Brotherhood affiliate whose leader in the 1950s was the mentor of Ayatollah Runollah Khomeini. . . .
4. Antonin Scalia spent his last hours with members from an Austrian-based secret-society dedicated to Saint Hubert, the Catholic saint of deer hunting, dating back to the 17th century. The head of the group is a member of the Hapsburgs!
“Justice Scalia Spent His Last Hours with Members of this Secretive Society of Elite Hunters” by Amy Brittain and Sari Horwitz; The Washington Post; 2/24/2016.
When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 12 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.
After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.
Members of the worldwide, male-only society wear dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes,” which means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures,” according to the group’s website. Some hold titles, such as Grand Master, Prior and Knight Grand Officer. The Order’s name is in honor of Hubert, the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.
Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John Poindexter and C. Allen Foster, a prominent Washington lawyer who traveled to the ranch with Scalia by private plane, hold leadership positions within the Order. It is unclear what, if any, official association Scalia had with the group.
“There is nothing I can add to your observation that among my many guests at Cibolo Creek Ranch over the years some members of the International Order of St. Hubertus have been numbered,” Poindexter said in an email. “I am aware of no connection between that organization and Justice Scalia.”
An attorney for the Scalia family did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Two other private planes that landed at the ranch for the weekend are linked to two men who have held leadership positions with the Texas chapter of the Order, according to a review of state business filings and flight records from the airport.
After Scalia’s death, Poindexter told reporters that he met Scalia at a “sports group” gathering in Washington. The U.S. chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus lists a suite on M Street NW in the District as its headquarters, although the address is only a mailbox in a United Parcel Service store.
The International Order of St. Hubertus, according to its website, is a “true knightly order in the historical tradition.” In 1695, Count Franz Anton von Sporck founded the society in Bohemia, which is in modern-day Czech Republic.
The group’s Grand Master is “His Imperial Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, Archduke of Austria,” according to the Order’s website. The next gathering for “Ordensbrothers” and guests is an “investiture” March 10 in Charleston, S.C.
The society’s U.S. chapter launched in 1966 at the famous Bohemian Club in San Francisco, which is associated with the all-male Bohemian Grove — one of the most well-known secret societies in the country.
In 2010, Poindexter hosted a group of 53 members of the Houston chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, according to a Houston society publication. A number of members from Mexico were also part of the ranch festivities that included “three days of organized shoots and ‘gala’ lunches and dinners.”
Poindexter told CultureMap Houston that some of the guests dressed in “traditional European shooting attire for the boxed bird shoot competition” and for the shooting of pheasants and chukar, a type of partridge.
For the hunting weekend earlier this month, Poindexter told The Washington Post that Scalia traveled to Houston with his friend and U.S. marshals, who provide security for Supreme Court justices. The Post obtained a Presidio County Sheriff’s Office report that named Foster as Scalia’s close friend on the trip.
Sheriff Danny Dominguez confirmed that a photograph of Washington lawyer C. Allen Foster is the same man he interviewed at the ranch the day of Scalia’s death.
From Houston, Scalia and Foster chartered a plane without the marshals to the Cibolo Creek Ranch airstrip. In a statement after Scalia died, the U.S. Marshals Service said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch.
The friend, Louisiana-born Foster, is a lawyer with the Washington firm Whiteford, Taylor & Preston. He is also known for his passion for hunting and is a former spokesman for the hunting group Safari Club.
In 2006, Foster was featured in The Post when he celebrated his 65th birthday with a six-day celebration in the Czech Republic. He flew his family and 40 Washington friends there to stay in Moravia’s Zidlochovice, a baroque castle and hunting park. The birthday bash included “tours of the Czech countryside, wine tasting, wild boar and mouflon (wild sheep) hunts, classic dance instruction and a masked costume ball.”
A secretary at Foster’s law firm said he is traveling in Argentina. The firm’s director of marketing, Mindee L. Mosher, said Foster was traveling and she would try to contact him. A woman answering a phone associated with Foster hung up when asked for comment.
Planes owned by Wallace “Happy” Rogers III and the company of A.J. Lewis III left from San Antonio and arrived at the ranch just after noon Feb. 12. The planes departed the ranch about 30 minutes apart Feb. 14, according to flight records provided to The Post by FlightAware.
Rogers owns the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum in San Antonio. He has donated $65,000 to Republican candidates since 2008. Lewis is the owner of a restaurant supplier company, also based in San Antonio. He has given $3,500 to GOP candidates since 2007.
Rogers and Lewis have both served as prior officers in the Texas chapter of the International Order of St. Hubertus, according to Texas business records. Rogers spoke to a Post reporter briefly on the phone and confirmed that he was at the ranch the weekend of Scalia’s death. He declined to comment further.
Lewis did not respond to several attempts for comment.
The Presidio County Sheriff’s Office released an incident report to The Post on Tuesday that revealed Foster’s name as Scalia’s traveling companion and provided details about the discovery of his body.
...
Law enforcement officials told The Post that they had no knowledge of the International Order of St. Hubertus or its connection to Poindexter and ranch guests. The officials said the FBI had declined to investigate Scalia’s death when they were told by the marshals that he died from natural causes.
5. Exemplary of the frightening developments that herald a new era of civilization is the MTA train that “went rogue.” Remembering the old folk song about Charley on the MTA, things are going to a new level indeed.
“A Boston Subway Train Just Went Rogue” by Steve Huff; Maxim; 12/10/2015.
Hack? Ghost Conductor? Whatever it was, something really weird happened on the Red Line.
Imagine you’re on a subway train, near the front, and perhaps you can see into the operator’s cab. It’s empty, but the train starts moving anyway. And it doesn’t stop. It’s a creepy scenario—and it happened early Thursday on Boston’s Red Line train, which left the Braintree Station just after 6 a.m. without an operator.
According to a statement released by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), the train ran without stopping until it was just north of the North Quincy Station, where MBTA staff managed to stop the train by switching off the electrified third rail.
Frank DePaola, general manager of the MBTA, said the incident was “highly troubling” and “under investigation by Transit Police detectives.”
No one was hurt during the ghost train ride, however Boston’s Fox affiliate spoke with a passenger who said “that she went into the booth where the conductor sits and saw something tied around the control panel. The passenger said the train went through several stations without stopping and that the lights went out.”
The same woman indicated there were more than 20 people on the train, and they were told that the conductor had been taken to the hospital.
Boston’s ABC affiliate reported late Thursday morning that a source told one of their reporters that the operator had left the train at Braintree Station to check on an issue. The train struck the operator and continued on its way.
In its release, the MBTA said its investigators were examining whether “a safety device within the train’s cab may have been tampered with.”
Boston’s subway system has been plagued with problems, such as multiple major issues during the severe winter of 2014–2015, when there were third rail failures, overwhelmed snow plows and whole branches of the system at a standstill. Recently, two people were struck and killed by trains in separate incidents.
Whatever’s going on with Boston’s rail transit system may not actually involve remote hacking or vengeful spirits, but it’s starting to look bad enough to prompt commuters to actually risk driving their own cars in Boston, which may be the most terrifying thing of all.
6. Who did this?
“Hacktivists Mess with Chemicals in Water Treatment Plant;” Nextgov.com; 3/24/2016.
Talk about your doomsday scenario. Hackers infiltrated a water utility’s control system and changed the levels of chemicals being used to treat tap water, according to Verizon Security Solutions.
Verizon describes the attack against the “Kemuri Water Company,” a pseudonym for a real firm in an unspecified country, in this month’s IT security breach report.
A “hacktivist” group with ties to Syria compromised Kemuri’s computers after exploiting unpatched web vulnerabilities in a payment portal that was connected to the public Internet.
The hack — which involved SQL injection and phishing — was made easier because login credentials for the operational control system were stored on the Web server.
The system regulated valves and ducts that controlled the flow of water and chemicals used to treat it.
Verizon discovered four separate connections over a 60-day period.
During these connections, the threat actors modified application settings with little apparent knowledge of how the flow control system worked. In at least two instances, they managed to manipulate the system to alter the amount of chemicals that went into the water supply and thus handicap water treatment and production capabilities so that the recovery time to replenish water supplies increased. Fortunately, based on alert functionality, KWC was able to quickly identify and reverse the chemical and flow changes, largely minimizing the impact on customers. No clear motive for the attack was found.
The hacktivists had manipulated the valves controlling the flow of chemicals twice – though fortunately to no particular effect. It seems the activists lacked either the knowledge or the intent to do any harm.
The same hack also resulted in the exposure of personal information of the utility’s 2.5 million customers. There’s no evidence that this has been used for fraud.
7. Following Microsoft’s panicked removed of “Tay,” its new artificial intelligence twitter bot that was converted into a neo-Nazi shortly after being exposed to the world, one of the unfortunate new questions in technology is now “which piece of hardware goes neo-Nazi next?” Given that state of affairs, should your print randomly started spewing out advertisements for The Daily Stormer, it probably didn’t become a neo-Nazi printer, although a neo-Nazi is probably using it:
“ . . . . This incident shows, once again, that the apparently bright future of the so-called Internet of Things has a dark side too: hackers can creep out babies taking advantage of insecure baby monitors, expose kids’ identities thanks to internet-connected toys that collect and leave their data exposed online, or send a hateful white supremacist flyer all over the country with two lines of code. . . .”
Well, at least the Weev hasn’t gotten around to hacking baby monitors and children’s toys to spew outwhite supremacist propaganda to impressionable young minds, although it sounds like it’s just a matter of time given the ease of hacking such devices and the Weev’s insationable appetite for Nazi trolling. So if you’d like to avoid exposing your kids to an uninvited “imaginary friend” living in your toys and household products (a friend who doesn’t seem to approve of your kid’s non-white friends), you’ll probably want to ensure your internet-connected devices aren’t one of the super easily hackable brands. There’s no shortage of reasons for securing your internet-connected devices, but you can now add “preventing the Weev from Nazi trolling my family” to the list.
“A Hacker Made ‘Thousands’ of Internet-Connected Printers Spit Out Racist Flyers” by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai; Vice Motherboard; 3/27/2016.
The notorious hacker and troll Andrew Auernheimer, also known as “Weev,” just proved that the Internet of Things can be abused to spread hateful propaganda. On Thursday, Auernheimer used two lines of code to scan the entire internet for insecure printers and made them automatically spill out a racist and anti-semitic flyer.
Hours later, several people started reporting the incident on social media, and eventually a few local news outlets picked up on the story when colleges and universities all over the United States found that their network printers were spilling out Auernheimer’s flyer.
Auernheimer detailed this “brief experiment,” as he called it, in a blog post on Friday. Later, in a chat, he said that he made over 20,000 printers put out the flyer, and defended his actions.
“I did not hack any printers,” he told me in a online chat. “I sent them messages, because they were configured to receive messages from the public.”
The hacker explained that all he did was create a script that would scan the whole internet to find printers that had port 9100, a common port used by network printers, open. Then, the script made them print the flyer.
“It’s a big internet, I didn’t have to ‘discover’ the printers were vulnerable, I knew there were going to be a whole lot of them on the internet,” he added. “That’s like an obvious fact, of any device, if you search for it somewhere on the internet you’re going to find it. There were less than I expected there to be really. Still a lot though!”
This incident shows, once again, that the apparently bright future of the so-called Internet of Things has a dark side too: hackers can creep out babies taking advantage of insecure baby monitors, expose kids’ identities thanks to internet-connected toys that collect and leave their data exposed online, or send a hateful white supremacist flyer all over the country with two lines of code.
Auernheimer himself said this “experiment” is “a lesson in how positively hilarious the [Internet of Things] will be in the future.”
Several college authorities are reportedly investigating these incidents, apparently along with the FBI as well. (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.)
Despite that, Auernheimer, who was convicted of hacking crimes in 2012, told me that he’s not worried. . . .
8. Taking a look at the future of fascism, Tay, a “bot” created by Microsoft to respond to users of Twitter was taken offline after users taught it to–in effect–become a Nazi bot. It is noteworthy that Tay can only respond on the basis of what she is taught. Inevitably, Underground Reich elements will craft a Nazi AI that will be able to do MUCH, MUCH more!
Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”
@TheBigBrebowski ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism
— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016
Some of this appears to be “innocent” insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her “repeat after me” she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses wereorganic. The Guardian quotes one where, after being asked “is Ricky Gervais an atheist?”, Tay responded, “ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.” . . .
But like all teenagers, she seems to be angry with her mother.
Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”
@TheBigBrebowski ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism
— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016
Some of this appears to be “innocent” insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her “repeat after me” she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses wereorganic. The Guardian quotes one where, after being asked “is Ricky Gervais an atheist?”, Tay responded, “ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”
In addition to turning the bot off, Microsoft has deleted many of the offending tweets. But this isn’t an action to be taken lightly; Redmond would do well to remember that it was humans attempting to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompting the system to attack Russia in order to eliminate its enemies. We’d better hope that Tay doesn’t similarly retaliate. . . .
9. Beware! As one Twitter user noted, employing sarcasm: “Tay went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in <24 hrs and I’m not at all concerned about the future of AI.”
The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence program over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement — not so much to professional game players as to Google’s competitors.
Many of the tech industry’s biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry’s lingo, the companies are engaged in a “platform war.”
A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow. Microsoft dominated personal computers because its Windows software became the center of the consumer software world. Google has come to dominate the Internet through its ubiquitous search bar.
If true believers in A.I. are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls A.I. could steer the tech industry for years to come.
“Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age,” said Pedro Domingos, a machine learning specialist and the author of “The Master Algorithm,” a 2015 book that contends that A.I. and big-data technology will remake the world.. . .
10. Much of Donald Trump’s base is blue-collar workers who have been most directly impacted by the convergence of a broad spectrum of changes, from the globalization to trade to the shredding of the safety-net. So it would seem that a discussion about how we deal with the oncoming changes of advanced AI and automation on those same workers would be a most useful and timely discussion. Especially since the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors just issued their annual report and it included a rather startling prediction about the potential impact of automation: for jobs where the person is currently $20/hour or less 83% will end up being automated:
“The Robots Are Coming for Jobs that Pay $20 an Hour or Less, White House Finds” by Steve Goldstein; Market Watch; 2/23/2016.
It’s intuitive that automation will take low-wage jobs.
But the White House, in its annual economic report of the president, has broken down just how much that is so.
There’s an 83% chance that automation will take a job with an hourly wage below $20, a 31% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage between $20 and $40, and just a 4% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage above $40.
The White House used the same data that underlines other research in the field of labor and robots to arrive at the conclusion.
The key question is what happens when a robot takes one of these low-wage jobs.
Traditionally, innovation leads to higher income, more consumption and more jobs, but the question is whether the current pace of automation may in the shorter term increase inequality.
One study found that higher levels of robot density within an industry lead to higher wages in that industry, the White House notes. However, that could be because the absence of lower-skills biases wage estimates upwards.
The White House says the findings demonstrate the need for training and education to help displaced workers find new jobs.
11. Generally speaking, the lower the pay, the likelier the odds of automation. For jobs where people typically make $20 or less today, there’s an 83% chance of those jobs getting automated. And that means that blue-collar GOP contingent that makes up a big part of Trump’s base is slated to have their jobs replace by some sort of technology–at least according to a report released by the White House. What a fun political topic!
It’s especially fun with Trump as the presumptive GOP nominee, since one of the biggest sectors of the economy that we should expect to be impacted by the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a sector Trump is quite familiar with: Construction.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump’s brand of Republicanism is apparently going to have a protectionist theme with policies like hunting down and expelling all undocumented Mexicans, building a wall with Mexico, and some sort of trade measures targeting China. But Trump has also proclaimed the US wages are too high and is proposing a slew of tax cuts that are so massive it would force a shredding of the government programs blue-collar workers inevitably need now or in the future.
Given all that, it seems like voters should be treated to some sort of Trumpian vision for how we’ll deal with the impacts of robots since robots and super-AI are way scarier to blue-collar workers than an undocumented immigrant ever could be. WAY scarier.
An estimated 5.1 million jobs are expected to be lost in the next five years [one Trump term–D.E.] due to advances in technology, specifically those in artificial intelligence, machine-learning, 3D printing and robotics, according to a report from the World Economic Forum.
Of those job losses, construction and extraction are anticipated to account for nearly 10 percent.
The findings are based on a survey of HR and strategic executives at 371 companies around the globe.
Though the vast majority of the total job losses are expected to be in the office and administrative job sector (4.76 million) manufacturing and production (1.61 million) and cosntruction and extraction (497,000) round out the top three.
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According to the WEF report’s executive summary, “Even jobs that will shrink in number are simultaneously undergoing change in the skill sets required to do them. Across nearly all industries, the impact of technological and other changes is shortening the shelf-life of employees’ existing skill sets.”
That certainly appears to be true in the construction industry as the, albeit limited, adoption of technologies like GPS, machine control and automation could nullify many of those skills contractors are currently so desperately seeking.
However, the report notes “technological disruptions such as robotics and machine learning—rather than completely replacing existing occupations and job categories—are likely to substitute specific tasks previously carried out as part of these jobs, freeing workers up to focus on new tasks and leading to rapidly changing core skill sets in these occupations.”
That could be the case in construction with operators transitioning from working inside the machine to a command center where they oversee the operation of multiple machines with the help of telematics, automation and drone monitoring. And all of that requires the development of new jobs and skill sets within the industry.
Another bright spot in the report for the construction industry is that these technological advances are anticipated to generate an additional 339,000 new jobs in architecture and engineering.
In terms of recommendations to avoid significant job losses, the WEF says the severity of those losses is largely in the hands of employers. And its advice is certainly something more construction firms would do well to heed, as it would not only prepare the industry for the disruption of automation, but also increase the number of skilled workers available today.
“During previous industrial revolutions, it often took decades to build the training systems and labour market institutions needed to develop major new skill sets on a large scale. Given the upcoming pace and scale of disruption brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, however, this is simply not be an option,” the report reads. “Without targeted action today to manage the near-term transition and build a workforce with futureproof skills, governments will have to cope with ever-growing unemployment and inequality, and businesses with a shrinking consumer base.
“… For a talent revolution to take place, governments and businesses will need to profoundly change their approach to education, skills and employment, and their approach to working with each other. Businesses will need to put talent development and future workforce strategy front and centre to their growth. Firms can no longer be passive consumers of ready-made human capital. They require a new mindset to meet their talent needs and to optimize social outcomes.”
You can read the full report here
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