*BOMBSHELL: An Inconvenient Truth ON Al Gore
By IgnoranceIsntBliss
Al Gore made a good movie presentation. Respectable actually, because he appears to truly believe that he is right and is truly devoting his every breath to trying to make a difference in his cause. But to what length will Gore go to save the earth? Can the man who 'create[d] the Internet' take the next step and 'create' the artificial intelligence Technological Singularity in time to save the earth?
"This is by far the most serious crisis civilization has ever faced". –Al Gore [Link]
Al Gore made a good presentation, and a great documentary. The best keynote "Powerpoint" type presentation you will find anywhere. I was impressed with some of his mentions on motivational concepts like "Boiling Frog Syndrome", which are good concepts or counter-directives for people to apply to just about everything. I must add that BFS is actually a myth, but still a great analogy for people to understand the incrementalization that goes on against what's best for the people and the world.
It must be pointed out that for the reason of it "trying to change your mind" it's "propaganda", especially because it contains certain emotional triggers. It's not really that 'bad' of propaganda (assuming his data is accurate) as he uses personal life experiences as metaphors instead of exclusively using raw fear driven media and dialog. A key part in his solution was actually caring about making a difference as individuals, which is one that people need exposure to, and he was rather inspirational about it.
However, there's a darker side to this whole Al Gore and his obsession with saving the planet issue. How far will Gore go to ensure that Earth survives under the feet of Mankind? Driven by the motivation that the point of no crossing back could be within 10 years from today, Gore has, since he "lost" the election in 2000, delivered over 1000 keynote speeches on global warming, and his film appears to be the ultimate product of his speech giving skills.
Also, in his spare time since Election 2000, he's been serving on the Senior Board of Directors at Google & Apple Computer. That's a good hobby place for Gore, as he's always had a knack for science, and also just so happens to be driven by fears of a "Malthusian" (man-made) global warming 'prophecy'. It's fun to use the term prophecy here, just as it appeared fun to Al when he cited the Book of Revelation in his blockbuster film debut.
There's no doubt that Gore is well known for his global warming endeavers, but what is probably even more well known is how he "created" the Internet. What's less known is his lip in helping to coin the phrase "Information Superhighway", which was repeatedly used in TV Land's heart-throb movie "The Cable Guy".
This stems from the exact same time as his well known 1986 "National Science Foundation Authorization Act", which was, in part, for the establishment of a global warming policy. What's typically overlooked is the 2nd part of that same Act that was for the drive for the NSF/DARPA "supercomputing" program, which was a keystone event in what became the Internet as we know it today.
Then, only 2 years later, in 1988, Gore argued to:
"ESTABLISH A HIGH-CAPACITY NATIONAL RESEARCH COMPUTER NETWORK, DEVELOP AND DISTRIBUTE SOFTWARE, DEVELOP ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMS,"
Al also campaigned for U.S. President that year, and according to him, his main goal of that campaign was more about increasing awareness of global warming than it was about actually winning.
It seems that Gore's weather hobby projects always seem to go hand in hand with his supercomputing and artificial intelligence hobby kits.
Speaking of hobby kits, Google was originally funded by the government NASA/DARPA/NSF agencies during Al's tenure as U.S. Vice President. Not only that, but according to en ex-CIA whistleblower, the CIA was also instrumental in funding Google at this time and throughout their early money-less years.
Gore surely tapped into certain offices at the CIA for added science project fun, before "losing" the election, sort of like he did with NASA all throughout his vice presidency. It's too bad the "Republicans" blocked the launch of his (finished) satellite, which was designed to 'float' perfectly in a zero-counter-gravity spot between the earth and the sun, and provide nonstop 24 hour video feed, of the best possible camera angle, for free to everyone on the Internet. Perhaps the "Big Business" Republicans didn't want for there to be license free video of earth, but this argument is of least concern here.
In more recent times, during Gore's tenure on the Senior Board of Directors at Google, NASA has publicly announced a partnership with Google:
"to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The new building [1 million square foot complex] would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers.".
Before NASA and Google had announced this 'merger', Gore's darling, NASA had already been well underway in their "Intelligent Archives" (IA) project. IA is literally intended to be an artificial intelligence supercomputing platform 'to take NASA to the moon and mars'. Its predicted capabilities include handy skills such as:
"large scale data mining", "self-awareness", "acting on information discovered", "extracting new information from its data holdings" (i.e. predicting, planning, solving capabilities), "coordination between intelligent archives and intelligent sensors", "adapting to events and anticipating user needs", "Continuously mining archived data searching for hidden relationships and patterns", "Identifying new data sources and information collaborators, and using available resources judiciously", "weather prediction", "aware of its own data content and usage", "can extract new information from data Holdings" .
To achieve this, NASA is working hand in hand with DARPA, who is responsible for the creation of the Internet (ARPANET). DARPA's numerous AI programs started becoming public between 2002-2003. DARPA, who is responsible for things like stealth technology and now AI driven cars, functions as a sort of shadow agency. DARPA sets sci-fi like goals, titled "thrusts", and then coordinates between any and all institutions within the United States to met those goals. This menu of institutions includes virtually any and all useful university or national labs, government agencies or departments, and even U.S. based multinational corporations.
With DARPA claiming that they'll have their AI orgasm in 2010, and NASA claiming theirs in 2012, it's no surprise that even Google has gone on the record stating that their goal is AI.
"The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly," Mr. (Larry) Page (co-founder of Google) told an audience of the digerati representing firms from Warner Music and AOL to BSkyB and the BBC. "You could ask 'what should I ask Larry?' and it would tell you."
This sings the same tune that NASA's IA just so happens to be singing:
"Enables archive to adapt to events and anticipate user needs" [NASA]
With Gore claiming that we'll have passed the "point of no return" to prevent cataclysmic global warming "mankinds greatest crisis" within 10 years, and his hobby project AI programs coming in just 3 years, timing couldn't be better for Gore to 'save the world' with his AI 'savior'. And what hobby kit would be complete without the worlds undisputed number 1 search engine who's "mission is to organize (all) the world's information"?
The following quote is from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who in the same interview discussed earth saving new power technologies:
"One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence." (October 26, 2005)
Gathering all of the worlds information the mission statement, and it's rapidly becoming reality. Google's asset & data holdings, not counting any special access they have to government systems, are astronomical. Google has complete copies of virtually every date of everything ever posted on the Internet (the Internet is said to contain over 6 billion pages), as well as search records & any other data they've compiled and archived through their other services like Gmail or Desktop. That's roughly the same data that the other major search engines store.
Google ups the ante by scanning complete university libraries (7 million manuscripts at University of Michigan alone) into machine language. The Google "Search" already understands the meaning of words and their correlations. Recently, they took it to the visual dimension by acquiring Neven Vision, the biometric tech firm that possessed the worlds finest "Machine Vision" biometric face scanning technology that can literally understand the people/places/objects content of images and video. Surprisingly, this worlds most advanced biometric technology was also designed for mobile device applications, and Google has been making powerplay moves all year to secure huge contracts with phone manufacturers and service providers to include Google in their phones.
Google's 'imagery' background doesn't actually begin there, it took it's first major step when it acquired Keyhole, which was a CIA startup through it's In-Q-Tel privatized technology front organization. This integrated the satellite imagery into their already impressive Google Maps feature, which was so adaptable that it allows for smooth hybrid map impressions over satellite imagery.
And all of these non-search projects are said to be the result of what the "civilian" outfit known as Google holds in public display: Simple side hobby tasks from all of the engineers, for their 20 percent 'hobby' time away from the 80 percent of their efforts that go to "Search".
Google and NASA are literally pooling their personnel together, and in some cases bringing people from out of the woodwork to participate in this trek to go where no man has gone before. Vint Cerf, who was a top head in the ARPANET project for DARPA, joined Google as a Vice President with the title of "Chief Internet Evangelist" in 2005. Cerf is one of the primary co-creators of the ARPANET, TCI/IP, the "Internet", Internet2, the (still current project) Interplanetary Internet and has affiliations with the NSF's Teragrid science network. Cerf and Gore go way back, and although Cerf wasn't still heading the ARPANET for DARPA in the late 80's when Gore was on the ball, Cerf still commended Gore as truly being a respectable force in the 'creation' of the Internet after Gore had taken heavy flak for his poor choice of words that became so famous.
They have some rather impressive 'data holdings' for a system with the capabilities as those specified by IA, and combined with the personnel such as Al Gore or Vint Cerf with virtually infinite resources, it's hard to imagine any better of a hobby kit for any science enthusiast. It's no wonder that Al presents such a positive outlook for stopping what he claims will happen within 10 years, despite the extremely high probability of him being full aware of how our society has been programmed to be self-deceivingly careless / politically biased and ignorant for some 80 years now.
It's rather curious that transhumanists also want A.I., and the best reason they can offer to justify such, besides the obvious techno-orgasm that would result, is to 'save the earth'. And optimistic they are, as can be seen here with Dr. Ben Goertzal, a leading AI expert who happens to work with NIST fro certain things: "Right now at least, no government in the world is trying to ban or place legal limitations on AI research" [(time) 10:20] Goertzal shows further optimism by stating: "…and where we'd like to be, which is having a thinking machine that's smarter than us nice to us and helps us solve all the worlds problems" [(time) 20:30].
It can be made certain what Gore's stance on "transhumanism", but according to the Immortality Institute's "Exploring Life Extension" film, Bill Clinton said: "Weve treated the Human Genome Project as a priority since day one because we all want to live forever", and, "We want to live forever, and were getting there." Many Transhumanists primary goals are the rapid evolution of mankind into immortal "post human entities", and also Artificial Intelligence in general. AI, which will rapidly become the "Technological Singularity", is, according to Goertzal, a critical first phase to get the rest of the techno-results in the shortest time possible.
The very nature of AI is that it will eventually be able to understand its own code and self-modify itself endlessly to become something that not even its creators will be able comprehend and in a potentially short period of time. Optimists like Goertzal warn about the dangers of a "hard takeoff", but oddly fail to mention anything about the Google/NASA/DARPA programs, and here's why:
Google alone has 22,500,000 results for a simple search like "programming tutorials". Anyone who's dabbled in computer software programming knows that there are virtually endless pages about programming, and scores of free "GNU" software suites that anyone can download and start writing programs themselves. Since Google has virtually the entire Internet archived, they surely have all of this sort of data. When you give an intelligence "all of the worlds information", including instructions on how to program in every software language known to man, it's pretty safe to say that it'll figure things out on its own. Technocrats will soon rejoice, their 'savior' god on earth isn't far away.
