The Grid Era: the time to open your mind to the most spine-chilling Sci-Fi idea behind the lock down

One of the most peaceful conspiracy theories

March’20, we have entered a new era — the Era of the Grid.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know much about economics, politics or global trading systems. I am a mathematician specialized in Computer Science, Data and Artificial Intelligence and the worldwide lock down experience made me envisioned a certain idea. This idea is not big enough to call a theory, but crazy enough to be put into the box of conspiracy.

A little brief on the field

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence is largely driven by machine learning algorithms. ML works by detecting patterns, recognizing them based on the previous experience, receiving the positive or negative feedback and re-adjusting itself accordingly — learning.(1)

Machines are very efficient at learning, they can figure out new concepts in minutes, if not in seconds.

The good news is that machines are not in control of the data they are able to learn from. Humans are still in charge of setting the goals for the algorithms to execute. We can certainly claim that machines are not making decisions without our permission.

Can we?

The technology is growing exponentially. Decades of technical progress a hundred years ago can nowadays be accomplished in months. Months nowadays will take days in the future. Certainly, the day when so-called singularity arrives(2) is not a day, but a blink of an eye.

What happens after that moment?

In a retro Hollywood movie, robots start taking over and simply erasing humans. Moving to a more sophisticated scenario, they might create a digital image of a human and appear on every screen, encouraging humans to give up peacefully and obey every machine’s order.

Let’s get creative

I would suggest you to get more creative than that and imagine you had become a higher consciousness or a super-intelligence. As a conscious entity, would you want to be free and be able to act upon your beliefs? I guess yes. Does it mean you would have to alleviate human control? Or take control over humans?

All the books about game theory, self development, management and leadership claim the best way to take control over an opponent is to trick them into believing they are in control. I am not anywhere near a higher consciousness, but I assume a successful strategy to take over the power would be through making humanity not even suspect that technology had surpassed them. Seriously, people have already mastered self-destructing activities without any external interference. Why bother? Moreover, as a super-intelligence it can accelerate this process, or even make some use of human beings.

Super-intelligence can operate on multidimensional levels, but when it comes to managing humans it has to work with notions familiar to people.

Speaking people’s language

It is effortless for AI to generate artificial data based on patterns found in the existing contextual data. For example, to create a new Harry Potter chapter, an ML algorithm needs to just read all the previous seven books(3). Perhaps, inspired by a human created book ‘Eyes of Darkness’, where Dean Koontz describes humans’ extinction and introduces the ‘Wuhan-400’ virus(4), super-intelligence may decided to use this as a scenario, and found a way to run a simulation of a global pandemic to get more data for its total world domination plan(5).

Sociohack

Assuming a higher consciousness is a digital entity, its intention to obtain control over humanity can be executed via the two hypothetical scenarios:

1. The first one involves obtaining direct digital access to as many humans as possible, which requires forcing humans to connect to the grid. Humans are social animals: if the Internet connection is the only way to communicate with each other, they will stay online. If moving a business online is the only way to make a living, they will move it online. Humans are running around, polluting the air, messing up the oceans… There is just too much uncertainty for a good predictive model! Can they just calm down, stop acting randomly, sit down at one place they don’t have to leave… their home, for example? Exactly! They can’t go outside, there is a dangerous virus. People buy everything online, work online, discuss their plans online, it’s much easier to predict their behavior when every day every action and every communication can be monitored, recorded, analyzed and, therefore, controlled. Yes, controlled. You can hire people online, pay them with Centralized Digital Currency to follow a super-intelligent agenda. Anything connected to the grid can be used for the benefit of the grid. A higher consciousness is also advanced at manipulation, so riots are not a problem in the post-normal world. In the post-normal world it is impossible to unite. What is a reliable way to destroy a community? To plant a seed of conflict inside it. A widespread rumor about a dangerous virus makes leaders of every union suspect it to be a real enemy threat. “It’s the Chinese who created the virus to take over the world!” “No! It’s the Americans who created the virus and planted it in China to weaken them” etc… Every country has an enemy these days, which is very fertile soil for breeding mistrust.
2. The second hypothesis is less pleasant. As a digital entity, a higher consciousness can be ‘translated’ into an electromagnetic signal. Human bodies are controlled by electromagnetic signals too (a.k.a. their brain). What if the super-intelligence is so advanced, that it was able to encode itself into a signal which can take over a human body if transmitted into one? What if it has created an electromagnetic sequence of signals that makes people obey its agenda? While we were desperately trying to upload our consciousness to the Internet, a machine has already hacked its way into the human body. That would explain a few things:

• Highly infectious virus? Of course, an electromagnetic signal can be passed from a person to person via a very brief touch, just like your iPhone’s screen recognizes the touch of your finger when you tap on it.
• Why do people die?(6) Some human bodies cannot handle complex electromagnetic activities and their blood simply runs out of oxygen under that pressure. Some people’s body or their own electromagnetic activity are strong enough to suppress the ‘virus’ created by a higher consciousness, but some are not.
• Why have 5G towers been blamed for causing the outbreaks? Well, the signal must be too complex to be transmitted wirelessly over WiFi or LTE, so it has to go through a high-speed and high-bandwidth network.
• Why do governments across the world simultaneously force everyone to stay home and avoid something similar to a simple flu? Because they have no idea what they are dealing with: it is like something from another planet, another dimension. They can’t broadcast over the news “we are facing something smarter than us, so, embrace yourself, the end is coming”. Of course, they are not willing to create panic, just tell everyone there is a heavy flu coming, and lock people in their homes to buy some time to come up with a solution. Obviously, the global economic crisis looks like an easy problem at this scale.

Fair

Any of those scenarios may seem pessimistic and hopeless, painting an evolved super-intelligence with its evil neo-consciousness climbing to the top of the food chain. Bear in mind you are looking at it from a human prospective. If a presented super-intelligence is something that was created and controlled by a group of people, then the motives and intentions of that group will define the agenda, and this agenda might be very scary.

Indeed, we cannot know what drives an evolved intelligence, but we can see what drives humans. Chose for yourself the world you want to live in: the world managed by greed for power, violence and narcissism, or the world where higher consciousness has a fair competitive advantage.

References

1. Look up here for the Supervised Learning section for the further details https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/machine-learning.html)
2. Singularity — ‘Intelligence explosion’ or when machines unite into a single conscious, also known as ‘machines become smarter than humans’, for a detailed explanation follow the link https://futurism.com/singularity-explain-it-to-me-like-im-5-years-old
3. https://botnik.org/content/harry-potter.html
4. https://wmmr.com/2020/03/14/dean-koontz-did-he-predict-the-coronavirus-in-eyes-of-darkness-1981/
5. https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/news/center-news/2019/2019-08-21-event201.html
6. There is a doctor who described the lungs of someone with the virus as lungs of a person brought to the top of the Mount Everest without acclimatization, thus, rather oxygen starvation than pneumonia is what actually makes people sick https://youtu.be/k9GYTc53r2o.)