Salvation AI

For our 100th Episode, we would like to reconfirm our commitment to Epistemic Humility. We don't have all the facts, but we try to provide you with the best information available. At the end of the day, however, you need to check your sources (even this one), and make up your own mind based on the reality on the ground. It is easy to judge. It is harder, and more courageous to actively seek out criticism and friction. As always, if you see an incorrect claim in any of our work, let us know! We are eager to correct...

The word "Cybernetics" conjures images of the cyborgs of movie legend, but what is the reality? In the real world, we are already surrounded by cybernetic technology. You just don't see a "Terminator" when you look at your thermostat or your car. Let's take a deep look at what Cybernetics actually means, what the technology does, and where it is heading in the future. The reality is perhaps more blandly terrifying than the movies could imagine.

This may be our April Fools day episode, but this is the true story of UFOs and our obsession with alien life. If you love UFO lore, but hate believing fake hype, this is the episode for you. We finish with a look at how likely it is that they've already been here, or when they are likely to arrive.

Donald Trump didn't get the constitution by himself. He needed years of support, and a long line of predecessors, bent on weakening our nation's founding document for their own ends.

We complete our look at the reasons for US infrastructure decay by looking at the policies that benefit from it, and from charging taxpayers more in the name of savings.

HALLUCINATION CHECK: This episode starts a little awkwardly, but then recovers to give some good information. This is not exactly a "Hallucination", but it is hosting/format decision that deserves mention. Rather than breaking up individual anecdotes and subjects cleanly by episode, this deep dive series revisits case studies repeatedly, from different, but slightly overlapping angles. The theory was that the repetition would help the...

We continue our diagnostic on "Hard" infrastructure, this time focusing on the people that make it all work, and the people that are effected. (This covers many of the same topics from Episode 1, but from a more granular angle) Then we pivot to "Soft" infrastructure: Healthcare, education, and other human services.

Everyone talks about how the American Infrastructure is crumbling, but what exactly do they mean by Infrastructure, and why is it breaking down? In this 3 episode series we examine what Infrastructure really is, why it is broken, and who is responsible. Our first installment covers "Hard" Infrastructure (the actual physical mechanisms that we depend on in day to day life). If you want to know why the U.S. is lagging behind the modern world in transportation, water quality, and so many other aspects of daily life, one need only look to our backwards politics, and the overwhelming incentive...

Does personal privacy really exist? Does that word even mean what it used to? We will examine the concept of privacy, its evolution over the years, and the unprecedented threats it is currently up against.

We take a journey through the history of optics, tracing a legacy over thousands of years to enable the technology of the future. This episode, and the fields discussed, are critical for so many other Curricula we have covered. Let's discuss the quiet discipline that holds so much of our fundamental technology, both common and frontier. This subject will be back for a full course treatment soon!

Here is our summary and final thoughts. We hope this exploration gave you a clearer view of the world just around the corner. If you would like to know more, join our conversations on Reddit (r/Aion_Sigma_Learners or r/salvation_ai).

The race to get the first scalable Quantum products to market has begun! Who will emerge victorious by 2030?

Here we look at the applied sciences of Quantum computation.

We explore Quantum networks that connect over thousands of miles, and the sensors, repeaters, and other technology that make it possible.

Let's talk logic gates and quantum programming. Now that we have quantum hardware, we need quantum software.

We describe the delicate balance of Quantum error detection and discuss the way qubits create functional gates.

Quantum scaling is not without challenges.

One aspect of quantum computing is that you need to keep things cold. Like, colder than space, basically Absolute 0 level perfect cold. Creating this environment is an immense feat of engineering brilliance, but even with the machines, the materials are among the most limited and valuable on Earth.

Let's take off the enclosure and have an upcoming close look at the hardware (via audio).

Let's take a look at the strange world of qubits.

If you've got questions about quantum computers and what that means for your future, we have a long, in depth look at what it is, how it works, what hurdles have yet to be jumped, and what this means for humanity.

HALLUCINATION CHECK: The Coffee Bots struggle with the word "Qubit". Due to the number of times they have to say it, it has quickly become a running gag for us (like the ADMIE acronym a few episodes ago). If this ruins your experience, we are sorry.

Talking about Mars is fun and cool and all. But Mars is not the next major step. If anything, it's just a convenient gravity well to place orbital stations, and maybe mine from time to time (mostly atmospherically). To the Belt! That is where humanity will develop the skills, technology, and adaptation that will drive us forward as a system wide species (potentially beyond). As with many short episodes, we do have a long-form multi-episode exploration coming up, but this material is too much fun not to give you an early taste! Sorry, Elon. That is not the way.<...

Ginsberg, Fred Hampton, The Sex Pistols, George Carlin, and so many other fighters against the norms of their day are often celebrated on their own merits. Today we examine their efforts as part of a larger, overarching story of all of these figures pushing society at large, putting their own liberty and safety at risk to demand a better world for the groups they represent and the world around them.

We have another long form, multi-episode class on this, but in case you don't have time, here is a single, simple overview of the science (or anti-science) of Agnotology. If you want to know why everyone seems so stupid these days, it's because there are highly paid specialists doing their best to keep them that way. And before you get too judgemental, think about your own exposure. Everyone is scientifically proven to fall prey to these strategies. It's not a question of how effected you are, but how deeply you're entrenched.

No two people experience the same internet. This is most evident in an international sense, where your location or national affiliation greatly effects what you are permitted to experience. In this final episode we explore several particularly interesting regional case studies, and offer a final summary of potential interventions. For more conversation, please join our communities on Reddit (r/Aion_Sigma_Learners or r/Salvation_AI). We hope you are doing your part to spread the word. Thanks for listening.

We have exceeded 50% synthetic content threshold. What happens when future AI models are trained on this synthetic output? At what point do the human components suffer their own form of mode collapse?

So is the internet fixable? Well, maybe, but its a big lift and it requires a functioning democratic government. If we want to put a stop to the madness, we are already getting a late start. If we can't regulate tech NOW, we are no longer capable of making decisions based on reality. We will be in someone else's reality from then on. The battle then will simply be a question of which corporate behemoth gets to dictate that reality. Let your senators and house reps know you care about this!

For the record, we have no beef with Malcolm Gladwell and wish him well. We just hate anecdotes. That said, we need a few real examples of the full machine in action to make sure the map fits the territory.

Tech Lobbyists are paying billions to keep regulations off the books, essentially using their raw cash flow to prevent government from advocating for users. So why are they paying out the nose to keep the internet broken? Because it is easier to take advantage of users in a dark, chaotic, and seemingly incomprehensible system. Oversight and regulation would force responsibility, transparency, and preempt strategies that might limit their most exploitative practices.

To discover solutions for "hallucination", we have to identify the type of error to determine the cause. If you can isolate and eliminate these causes, you can prevent or correct hallucination in real time.

The machine has detectors and responsive mechanics that then tell the algorithms what your deepest preferences are and then change what you see to exploit these habits with relentless precision. Accidentally letting a video play through can cause a permanent shift in the media you will see for the rest of your life.

We have followed information from conception, through the house of mirrors, and onto the screen of your phone. Now we approach the most fragile equipment in the machine: YOUR MIND. No two humans will receive that data the same way. If the best data makes it to a human mind that has been trained to disbelieve a reality it doesn't want to see, no amount of good programming can keep them from assuming that data is a conspiracy to destroy them.

The Interface layer is how all of this chopped and screwed semantic soup is presented to us. Let's take a look at how the face of information impacts the way we think about it.

We have seen how information goes from the human sources to the AI training pipeline, now we look at the "lossy compression" blender that breaks up all of that knowledge into the semantic soup of global information that LLMs draw from.

Now that the data has been created, uploaded and parsed, we enter the opaque blender of AI compression and ambiguation.

The Aggregation Layer: How information is aggregated and gatekept, and what you are allowed to see.

This is layer 2 of the machine: Capture -How information Get's Digitized. Now we turn our attention to how the information created at the Origin Layer enters the labyrinth of the larger ecosystem.

We examine how the first layer of the information machine originates knowledge. We look at the incentives, limitation, and biases that dictate how knowledge is created.

We take a look at the machine in action by looking at the 4 types of information flow, and how they are manipulated.

There are fundamental realities that force the machine to function the way it does. Join us as we consider the reasons the current architecture is locked in.

We now look inside the machine to begin our dissection of the human knowledge machine that is the internet. You will never see the web, or your "feed", the same way again!