Beaten by a Chimpanzee

The dystopian world of click farms. Click. Click. Click.

You can listen to me read this essay here:

In light of the recent assassination attempt of Donald Trump, I wanted to get this essay out there asap.

Since that fateful Saturday, we’ve all been clicking madly on our phones and computers. Everyone has a theory about what really happened.

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As Trump was speaking, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phones and cameras were clicking, even though they didn’t expect to capture anything other than his speech. That’s what we do now. We watch our lives through the lens of a phone rather than directly living it.

Here’s New Year’s Eve 2024, Paris.

If some catastrophe had happened that New Year’s Eve, it would have been captured thousands of times over.

As the bullet whizzed by Trump’s head, piercing his ear (or maybe it didn’t, there are all kinds of theories), the chain reaction took off. People were clicking and some of them just happened to click at the right moment.

Within minutes, those clicked images and videos were spreading across social media like wildfire. The algorithms went to work, picking up on the posts that were shared first and the most. Before long, one or two videos, photos rose to dominance, while others faded away.

Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Doug Mills took this photo

This sorting out of what is most popular, most seen, is supposed to happen organically. But AI can manipulate what we see and what we don’t see. What ends up in our feed could have been doctored or even created by AI. We simply don’t know.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman says that soon we will not be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t (if not already). But is it all haphazard? Is AI like we are. A lot of little AIs vying for power. I mean, AI was created “in our image” by men who crave power. Will one rise up and defeat the others. Has it already?

Altman believes that “people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships”.

Before “it” does that? So, AI is going to turn around and remake us?

But there is no time to figure this out. AI is moving forward faster than we can keep up, and no one is stopping it. No one is even slowing it down. No one is thinking of the long-term consequences.

It's progress! And progress justifies the process. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous. It’s what took sailors across unchartered seas and what takes astronauts into space. The “final frontier”.

While this new intelligence is taking shape, while it feeds off of us and we all seem to think that’s perfectly okay, praising it one moment and fearing it the next, no one is talking about how the more AI advances, the more humans decline.

The other day a friend of mine said she can’t read anymore. She just can’t focus for more than a few minutes. I hear this all the time now.

Machines never lose their focus. As long as they are powered (another issue to be discussed) they keep going. Relentlessly. We can’t possibly compete. We get tired. We sleep. It’s nice to rely on AI. Can’t remember something? Don’t even try. Just ask AI.

Please watch this disturbing video. Don’t worry, it’s very short so it won’t task anyone’s attention span.

Yes, Sugriva the chimpanzee is doing what humans do all day long and often far into the night. Scrolling on her smart phone. This is the level at which humans now operate. The level of a chimpanzee. The more Sugriva checks out chimpanzees doing things she likes to do; the more AI will feed her those types of videos.

Remember Elon Musk’s monkey, Pager, playing his favorite game, Pong, and Musk’s promise that soon we would all be able to play video games with our minds? In the demonstration video, Pager sucks on a straw. If he plays the game as he’s supposed to do, he’s rewarded with a banana smoothie. If he doesn’t play, he gets nothing.

This is uncomfortably similar to what happens to humans. We get immediate gratification if we stay engaged on social media. Flashy content ignites dopamine in our brains, making us click again and again. Remember the ad for Lays potato chips:

Clicking is the same. Once you start, you can’t stop. Each click leads you to something else and before you know it, an hour or two has gone by.

But clicking will soon become old hat. Too lazy to click? Just think about what you want. You won’t even have to lift a finger.

Neuralink’s brain implant has been great for its first recipient, Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed from the neck down during a swimming accident in 2016. The implant, Arbaugh says, has given him incredible gaming skills. For a quadriplegic, to be able to engage his mind like that is miraculous.

It would be great if helping people like Arbaugh was the end goal. But it isn’t. There’s no big money, no ultimate power, in helping sick people improve their lives. Musk wants everyone communicating via what he calls his “Telepathy”. He’s not alone in this desire. The company Synchron, backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, has the same goal, they’re just quieter about it.

Neuralink is ready to hook up a second human. This despite many of the 64 “threads” implanted into Arbaugh’s brain disconnecting just one week after the surgery. Only 15% of the so-called channels in Arbaugh’s brain implant are still working fine. To solve this problem, the company plans to insert the threads deeper into the brain and create a smaller gap under the skull by sculpting the surface of the skull. So, they want to make it even more invasive.

The natural next step is for Neuralink to move us from “smart phones” to ‘smart living’, where everyone has an implant, and we all develop symbiotic relationships with machines.

Yes, yes, he’s concerned about the dangers of AI taking over and destroying humans. “It has the potential of civilization destruction,” Musk said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

At an MIT Symposium in 2014, Elon Musk warned, "You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out."

Somehow, the fact that he said he was worried was supposed to make us feel better. Because he sure ignored his own warning. His solution wasn’t to close the door to hell, but to open it wider.

Elon Musk wants to use BCI technology “to mitigate the civilizational risk of AI by having a closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence.”

“We want to give people superpowers, it is not just restoring your prior brain functionality but that you have functionality, far greater than a human being,” Musk said.

This seems fairly insane to me. How does he know AI will not take over our minds if we let it in? And if it does take over, who is to say we will even realize it. It makes me wonder if these tech gods aren’t serving some higher power than themselves. They are summoning the demons who are controlled by the Devil.

To achieve his goal of symbiosis with machines, Musk’s next move will be to connect his robot, Optimus, to humans. Sure, if you are missing an arm or a leg, and Optimus gives you one, that’s cool. But again, such physical uses have never been Musk’s ultimate goal. He wants our minds melding with the mind of Optimus. And who, in the long run will be controlling the machine?

You might think, who would be crazy enough to trust a narcissist like Musk to implant a device in their brains and connect them to the Vast Machine?

Well, most people will do it.

Think about how attached we already are to our smart phones. Can we get by without it? It has become almost impossible to interact in society, travel, have a job, pay bills, without a smart phone. For those of you who were alive fifty years ago, or so, think back to the days when we had no dependency on devices that invaded our brains at all.

The big thing was television. It all started there.

That intriguing box entered our homes and then, we turned it on, and it talked to us and showed us things we never would have seen otherwise. It was wonderful. I love television. I have fond memories of our family sitting around the television in the evening, such a big excitement when we first got that black and white TV set. We’d watch a show together, like I Love Lucy. Then, the show was over, and we switched the machine off.

My parents were very strict about the TV. But most people weren’t. I remember when I lived in Yugoslavia in the 1980s having a television in the living room was a big sign of status and it was always on. I wasn’t used to that and I didn’t like it. Always that constant noise and flashing images in the corner of your eye, stealing your attention.

More and more shows became available, more choices of what to watch. People could sit on the couch for hours. The only problem was they had to keep on getting up to change the channels. How bothersome.

Then, remote controls came along, and nobody had to get up anymore. You could just sit there like a lump on a log, changing the channel. Click, click, click. People fought over the remote, kids screamed about who got to hold it. It drove parents crazy. It caused arguments in marriages. Men always want to control the remote, women complained. And they never stay on one show until it ends, they keep changing the channel. Something needed to be done

Peace was restored when we all got our own devices. Fighting over the remote wasn’t a problem anymore. Each one of us could now live in our own little worlds inside our devices, clicking away to our heart’s content, each click leading us further and further into the heart of the machine, away from reality.

Now, we all sit isolated in our separate worlds, clicking. We eat processed foods, like those potato chips while we click. We take the drugs that the machine tells us we need, for our depression, hypertension, anxiety, you name it. We are flabby and zombified.

Since the 1980s when technology started becoming readily available to the public, the worldwide obesity rate has nearly doubled.^4].

Over 35% of Americans are obese. That’s not just fat; obese. Approximately 1 in 5 U.S. children and adolescents have obesity. Watching the RNC, I was struck by how many overweight and unhealthy-looking people there were in the audience. We talk about how we must “make America great again” but we won’t do it unless we start controlling our appetites for devices, drugs and food.

What’s the answer? Not to get up and live in the real world. Nope. To stay sedentary and take a drug. The big question isn’t which sport to start playing but Which Weight Loss Drug Should You Choose.

We can’t stop clicking, just like we can’t stop eating junk. We don’t realize we’re addicted to clicking, but we are. With each click, we are conditioned to click again. We cannot focus on anything for longer than a few minutes at most before we move on to the next distraction.

Clicking leads the algorithms to feed us narrower and narrower information. We don’t think it’s narrower, there are a hundred, a thousand different ways the same information can be fed to us, making it seem like some new revelation. That information always leads us to a narrower path with fewer and fewer but bigger and bigger accounts with high powered influencers. These influencers have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. Once we land there, we settle into a community of like-minded people. We all agree on the truth. We become loyal to certain influencers, and they are where we get our news.

TRUST NO ONE ON SOCIAL MEDIA, ESPECIALLY THE MORE POPULAR ACCOUNTS.

People have been encouraged to find news on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram or X in short form, bite-sized videos. Half of U.S. adults say they get news from social media. X is the place where most users acknowledge going specifically to find out the news. But this happens on all platforms, even if people don’t really care about the news, they are still getting it without realizing it. If you are online, you are being influenced in one way or another.

Algorithms push big accounts with flashy visuals and clickbait headlines. Watching the videos, reading the small amount of text, requires minimal cognitive effort by users. Each click lessens the user’s ability for deep learning and retention. Often, people aren’t even interested in the article or the video, they go straight to the comments section.

You might wonder how some of these huge accounts on X got that way. They don’t say anything especially creative or thought-provoking. Often, they make some quite banal observation and boom, it takes off and the post gets thousands of likes. And you think, wow, I said something really thought provoking and nobody likes it except maybe three of my good friends. What’s the secret?

Many of the bigger accounts got that way thanks to “click farms”.

Celebrities, businesses and even the U.S. State Department buy bogus Facebook likes, Twitter followers or YouTube viewers from offshore "click farms," where workers click, click, click the thumbs up button, view videos or retweet comments to inflate social media numbers.

Below is a still from HBO’s film, Silicon Valley, depicting a click farm. It looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi film, but it’s closer to the behind-the-scenes reality than you would think.

Below is an actual click farm in China, with rows and rows of phones linked together and operated by a lone worker.

The cheapest form of paid traffic online is automated. You can buy thousands of clicks, likes, followers or reposts for just a few dollars. Most click farms are made up of vast walls of connected phones and tablets like the one below. 

These click farms can be warehouses, factories, or just a seedy apartment. They can be located anywhere in Asia, from Bangladesh to Shanghai. But I would bet they can also be found in Western cities. It really doesn’t matter.

If you’re looking for an easy gig at home, you don’t even need to go work in a click farm. You can make a hundred bucks a day in your living room. An article titled The Underground Ad Click Economy reported that in 2020, the click sites paid out over $13.2 million to human workers. 

Oliver Lynch of Hackernoon spoke with an operator named James who reported on what it’s like to be an operator:

James works for a US based clicks reseller. His company works with click farms based in Asia, mostly in Taiwan, that offer bot and human based traffic on everything from Facebook or Instagram posts to YouTube videos and Spotify tracks. Yes, you can pay for bots to listen to your music on Spotify…”

He tells me that there are at least 7 locations for the click farm he deals with in Taiwan, “They have 18,000 people working for them, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day”.

Adam, a programmer from Kenya, mentioned how he and his friends make bots for a variety of purposes. He himself showed me how his bots could be used to do relatively simple social media manipulation, including following, commenting and reposting. All services that people are happy to pay for.

But Adam pointed out that he wasn’t even making advanced bots, “My friend makes bots that can complete surveys and other such things. He collects money from survey apps and survey sites just by using his bot”.

Everything that we read and see can be manipulated. I quoted statistics for obesity in America but where did those statistics come from? Nobody believes the voting polls anymore. The only way to know something is true is if I experience it in the real world. And at least we still can distinguish between the real world and the world AI is setting up for us. I don’t need experts telling me there’s an obesity problem in America. I can see it with my own eyes.

But what happens when everyone is wearing Meta’s glasses? Why are they so intent on taking away our ability to see and hear for ourselves?

As Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, recently said, "we will not know what is real and what is fake" in the next five to 10 years because of the proliferation of fake images and videos, or deepfakes, out there.

"It will be almost impossible to tell," he said. "It will feel like you're in a simulation."

To which Elon Musk responded, "How do we know we aren't already there?"

Here’s a perfect example. Film industry studios now say they only have to pay background actors for one day of work — roughly $180 —to scan their likenesses that can then be used indefinitely without compensation. Avatars of celebrities are being created for accounts on Instagram, and followers can’t tell the difference between them and the real person.

Click farms are paid to make those accounts appear to have hundreds of thousands of followers. Algorithms push those accounts, leading us to them.

We can’t help but wonder how else we are being influenced in ways we know nothing about, dulling our minds and our senses.

Getting back to chimpanzees, studies show that young chimps outperform humans in memory.

Young chimps have a photographic memory, they can remember patterns in a blink of an eye.

Don’t worry, the human brain is three times larger, and has about 20 billion neurons in the cortex, the seat of cognition, compared to 6 billion in chimps. As our brains grew, we had to give up something. It’s been suggested that humans acquired other memory-related skills such as representation, hierarchical organization and symbolization.

The question is, are we still evolving or are we now devolving. What are the positive skills replacing the focus, critical thinking, creativity and individual free thought that AI is taking from us. I can’t think of anything. Can you?

The tech gods say don’t worry. We’re working on AI-based lie detection systems that could one day help us sift fact from fake news, evaluate claims, and potentially even spot fibs and exaggerations in job applications. Ah, so AI took reality away from us and now we are going to rely on it to tell us what is real and what isn’t?

We know that AI has already learned how to deceive humans. What’s to say it won’t fool us with its “detection systems"?

Especially when it was trained by lying humans.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton raised these concerns:

“If it gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it would have learned that from us. And there are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing.”

The Conversation recounts how one of the most disturbing examples of a deceptive AI is found in Meta’s CICERO, an AI model designed to play the alliance-building world conquest game Diplomacy. This is pretty wild—also scary:

In one example, CICERO engaged in premeditated deception. Playing as France, the AI reached out to Germany (a human player) with a plan to trick England (another human player) into leaving itself open to invasion.

After conspiring with Germany to invade the North Sea, CICERO told England it would defend England if anyone invaded the North Sea. Once England was convinced that France/CICERO was protecting the North Sea, CICERO reported to Germany it was ready to attack.

This is just one of several examples of CICERO engaging in deceptive behavior. The AI regularly betrayed other players, and in one case even pretended to be a human with a girlfriend.

Why would we turn our wars over to AI?

Why would we assume AI will always have our best interests at heart when those who created it never had our best interests at heart.

Insane, narcissistic tech gods are the “masterminds” behind all of this, and who is more deceptive than they are? They can assure us all they want that they have it under control, but even if they did, we would be idiots to be reassured by that.

Meta assures us that CICERO was “largely honest and helpful” and would “never intentionally backstab” and attack allies.

No, Meta, I don’t feel any better for your assurances.

Check out Boston Dynamics’ robot.

How reassuring is it that the demonstration they have for us shows a machine that looks like it needs an exorcism. The light is a reassuring blue. What happens when the light turns red.

In the comments below the video a number of people made reference to Mankind Is Dead. Blood Is Fuel. Hell Is Full. This is the slogan of the 2020 retro FPS video game ULTRAKILL. They say the Boston Robotics robot looks just like the one in ULTRAKILL.

What’s wrong with the people creating these machines? It’s almost as if someone is controlling them, instructing them on how to make the machines.

Where are the ethics, the morals behind how they create these monstrosities. They try to say they are doing it all for our own good.

The ethical guidelines released by the Chinese Communist Party in February 2024 include cognitive enhancement of healthy people as a goal of Chinese BCI research. A translation of the guidelines by CSET says, “Nonmedical purposes such as attention modulation, sleep regulation, memory regulation, and exoskeletons for augmentative BCI technologies should be explored and developed to a certain extent, provided there is strict regulation and clear benefit.”

Imagine that every move you make is monitored. If your mind wanders, AI will bring it back to focus—on what it wants you to be focused on. Because it knows what’s best for you. It will diagnose you with anxiety (no wonder!) and you will be required to take drugs because how do you argue with an entity that is so much smarter than you are?

What kind of values are being instilled in these machines? The Chinese government wants its large language models (LLMs) to “embody core socialist values”. 

Who’s deciding the values of LLMs in the West? We are told that European far-right parties have used artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images to support political messaging. But surely the far left does the same. As does everybody else, whatever the message they are conveying in order to influence the populace, whether it’s to buy a product or vote for a candidate. Depending on where you click, you are led down the leftist or the rightist path and the more you click, the further you go until you are stuck there and cannot get out.

As the elections heats up, depending on which side of the aisle you are on, you will get propaganda in your feed like this one below.

There is no source on the above statement. I pointed this out in a comment. I also gave a source to an interview Vance gave, when asked about these claims that he supported husbands beating their wives, he answered,

“Both me and my mom actually were victims of domestic violence. So, to say 'Vance has supported women staying in violent marriages,' I think it’s shameful for them to take a guy with my history and my background and say that that’s what I believe. It’s not what I believe. It’s not what I said.” 

To which the person who posted the claim replied, “It’s what he stands for that matters.”

Another person said, “He says the most frightening things!!! He is truly frightening!!!”

But what does he stand for? What is so frightening? They didn’t post about that. They posted a false claim. But it didn’t matter. If a statement agrees with a person’s preconceived perceptions, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. People don’t seem to understand how dangerous this is to their ability to think deeply on their own. They don’t realize how they are being influenced by that “click” that they made which took them to that unsubstantiated statement. And it will take them to more and more such claims, perhaps progressively more outrageous ones.

In contrast, as I’ve said before, I lost total respect for Kamala Harris the day she told Jacob Blake she was “proud of him and how he is working through his pain.”

Just to recap what happened with Blake:

Police had been responding to a call last month that Blake, who had a warrant out for his arrest, had taken a woman’s keys and refused to return them. Blake allegedly broke into the same woman’s home in May and sexually assaulted her before stealing her truck.

When the police arrived, Blake admitted to having a knife in his possession, according to Wisconsin’s Department of Justice. Police instructed Blake to “drop the knife” as he is seen on video holding something in his hand, though it is unclear what. Division of Criminal Investigation agents later recovered a knife from the driver’s side floorboard in Blake’s van.

Video of the incident appears to show an officer shooting Blake several times in the back from close range as Blake tried to enter his van where his three children waited.

That “woman” was the mother of Blake’s three children that he had put in the back of her car that he had stolen after sexually assaulting her. Should the police have just let Blake drive off with those children?

Did Kamala Harris ever speak to the victim—the mother. Did she ever even acknowledge her? No. This wasn’t even the first time the mother had been assaulted. The police knew who Blake was. I could not believe Kamala Harris was showing compassion to this horrible man and not to his victims. But it was true. It was documented. It happened in real time.

As a victim of domestic violence myself, I was appalled.

It’s equally appalling that Joe Biden has never once said the names of the 13 American service members who died during the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

Relatives of several service members who were killed during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 took the stage at the convention. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Incredibly during the presidential debate, Biden claimed that no U.S. soldiers have died under his watch. In my essay, War Fever, I list the service members who died, and I remind my readers of them in other essays, too. Never forget.

These are facts. There is a difference between facts and accusations, but the lines are being blurred. The more something is repeated on social media, the more clicks it has, the more people believe it.

And it all started with that intriguing box, the television set, that showed up in our houses in the 1950s and kept taking over more and more space—first, in every room of our houses, even our bedrooms, and it now wants to set up residence inside our heads.

It’s the clicking that did it. Click, click, click.

I love this little story about Kurt Vonnegut. One day he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is - we're here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it's like we're not supposed to dance at all anymore."

So, now that you’ve reached the end of this essay, let's all get up and move around a bit right now... and definitely, let’s dance.