by Silvertip, Survival Blog:
In the 1980s, a funny, popular pseudo-AI computer program “Eliza” was a college joke magnet. A few beers, and then dialed into a dialup Bulletin Board System (BBS) and ask all kinds of suggestive questions, just to see what “Eliza” said. So, as a Coder, we expanded the Data File, many times over… and Eliza’s answers got more verbose and direct, like Grandma suddenly butting into your life! That was about the start of the AI revolution, for me. It was cool, funny, and a half-life of 30 minutes over a dialup system. Querying a Data file, database of “information” wasn’t going to sit stationary, for me. This was just cracking the door open on AI.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
About 2003-04, the company I was working for in telecommunications, a Fiber Optic Carrier, was looking for ways to improve efficiency, the Databases needed something to “merge” it all together, into a simplified user interface. Libraries were doing the same thing, any multinational company was facing the same issue(s), everyone up and down the company, from Sales to the Field Technicians, NOC (Network Operations Center). It was literally the conversion from “Paper Records” to “Online”. The same thing was happening in Public Schools – you know, “we gotta put a computer on every kid’s desk”.
By 2007, after many, many documentation surveys, filling spread sheet after sheet and uploading into databases, the last of the paper records in multiple 4-drawer filing cabinets faded away. It was the “Paperless Office” mantra, that lead to Data Centralization. About the same time, circa 2005, Microsoft was building the infrastructure for a huge network of Data Centers, around the USA. If you’re resourceful, you can find every one of them. By 2010, we’d turned up gear and circuits over Long Haul (LH) Fiber to ‘everywhere’. This LH optical network has been everywhere since about that time. What was missing were the small ‘tentacles into your backyard. That extension, or explosion happened as Federal Funding, Grants, etc. (Obama / Biden era), were fueling the ever gaining in speed expansion of direct communications to the multiple Data Centers.
Have you noticed the capacity of Hard Drives, from Megabytes (1980s) to Gigabytes (1990s) to Terabytes (2000s) – and about the same time, I believe serious Data Collection was underway. The more searchable data at your disposal, the better the search results, just like the Eliza program, pump the raw Data into something, somewhere, knowing it would be useful later. Your phone calls, Internet queries, television viewing habits, and most recently, everyday appliances – are watching you.
This Database has been growing silently in the background, while you have been feeding it. And perhaps you assumed you were safe, because nobody has been knocking on your door, sending you targeted ads, reacting to your Phone calls, Amateur Radio conversations, or gathering up your buying habits. But the Big Database has been enticing you with ‘discount cards’ (grocery store cards), ease of access to entertainment, (online Movies, Sports, News) to gradually work their way into your life. The bottom line, It’s too late to stop it. You’ve already “FED the BEAST” over the last two decades. In my opinion what’s coming next is ‘massaging the data’, for what ever the end user is looking for.
One of my daughters was involved in looking for a certain International Terrorist. The government set up a sort of shell company, with no customers, to sift through the mountains of data collected and in real time, for find this individual. One of many such ‘Googler’ programs. That was over a decade ago, before similar programs they used were rolled out to the public. It’s too late to stop it, already here, Pandora’s box was opened at least two decades ago.
