Artificial Intelligence: ‘Frankenstein’ or Capitalist Money Machine

By Prof. James Petras

Global Research, February 24, 2017

Theme: Global Economy, Police State & Civil Rights

The Financial Times’ Special Report (2/16/2017) published a four-page spread on the ‘use and possible dangers of artificial intelligence (AI)’.  Unlike the usual trash journalists who serve as Washington ’s megaphones on the editorial pages and political columns, the Special Report is a thoughtful essay that raises many important issues, even as it is fundamentally flawed.
The writer, Richard Walters, cites several major problems accompanying AI from ‘public anxieties, to inequalities and job insecurity’.  Walters pleads with those he calls the ‘controllers of autonomous systems’ to heed social and ‘political frictions’ or face societal ‘disruption’.  Experts and journalists, discussing the long-term, large-scale destruction of the working class and service jobs, claim that AI can be ameliorated through management and social engineering.
This essay will proceed to raise fundamental issues, questions leading to an alternative approach to AI relying on class analysis.  We will reject the specter of AI as a ‘Frankenstein’ by identifying the social forces, which finance, design and direct AI and which benefit from its negative social impact.
Basic Questions:  Demystifying AI
The best and the worst of the experts reporting on AI assert that it is an autonomous system, devoid of any link to the class structure within which it operates.  Their version of technological determinism, above and beyond the needs and demands of capitalists, has fits neatly with the corporate ideology of the trash journalists and pundits.
The fundamental questions that must be raised include: 1) ‘AI’, for whom?; 2) How are the productivity gains of AI to be distributed between capital and labor? 3) How are work time, income and pensions distributed between the owners of technology and the labor force?; and 4) What kinds of socio-economic activity does AI serve?
‘Artificial Intelligence’ and related technological innovations are financed, designed, controlled and ultimately applied by the major corporations and financial institutions in order to reduce the cost of labor and to enhance profits and competitiveness between capitalist rivals.
AI and similar capitalist technological changes, along with the overseas relocation of information technology and manufacturing production are the principal destroyers of workers’ employment and living standards in the US .
AI technology, alongside vast spending for imperial wars and military procurement, multi-billion dollar bank-bailouts and the promotion of finance-over-productive capital represent the forces driving down wages, salaries, living standards, pensions and, lately, life expectancy for the marginalized working class and rural population.
The innovators and promoters of AI, whether individuals or small groups, seek capitalist support to finance, market and ‘acquire’ their ‘discoveries’.  In fact, the entire industry has been built upon large-scale, tax-funded public research centers and university laboratories, which have paid for the buildings as well as the scientists’ and professors’ salaries.
Most of IT and AI related profits are distributed among the military-industrial complex, the chemical agro-industrial monopolies and the transport and consumer goods manufacturing elites.  While garbage journalists and experts cite ‘AI’s contribution to health, education and social services, they forget to clarify that these ‘innovations’ are controlled by private health corporations, private ‘charter’ schools and public sector education elites intent on increasing profits, lowering teachers’ salaries, slashing programs and undermining student learning.  The dismal, fragmented and mal-distributed state of healthcare and education in the United States are never seriously discussed because they put the lie to the absurd claims made about the benefits of AI and IT for the broader population.
Far from being ‘autonomous’ and subject to abstract ‘controllers’, AI, IT and high technology serve to concentrate wealth, power and profits for multiple sectors of the ruling class who determine how such technologies will be used.
The financiers of AI and their partners direct the scientists, engineers and marketers.  The garbage journalists are paid to proclaim the arrival of  ‘history-making’ innovations.  The media describe AI as ‘machine learning, a form of advanced pattern recognition technology to make judgments by analyzing large amounts of data (which) could supplement human thought’ (FT Special Report 2/17/2017).
Contrary to the above-mentioned assumptions, the ‘judgments’ are made by the ruling class, using parameters and metrics determined by the elite, deciding on what kinds of ‘patterns are to be recognized’ in order that they can derive the kind of information they need to enhance profits, make war, maximize killing and engineering massive layoffs of workers.  In a word, class assumptions dictate AI, IT and the use of these innovations.
Conclusion: Alternatives
If class determines AI, and in present-day America that means the ruling class, then only changes in the class structure can pose different questions and answers to our originally stated problems.  Only by sharpening the class struggle, which changes who rules the banks, factories and social institutions, will new assumptions direct AI and IT and other innovations.
Only workers, professionals and scientists, who replace the prioritizing of profits with meeting social needs, can produce an AI that lowers the retirement age, increases national health care, facilitates workers’ decision making, distributes high quality education and information to the citizenry, reduces inequalities and shifts earnings from capital to labor.

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Prof. James Petras, Global Research, 2017

VACCINES: BIG PHARMA CAN’T IGNORE YALE…

https://gizadeathstar.com/2017/02/vaccines-big-pharma-cant-ignore-yale/

President Trump, as readers of this website know, has appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr to chair a panel on vaccine safety, and as readers of this website are aware, this is an issue near and dear to my heart, as the bitter experience of a personal friend with a flu vaccine - the one and only he ever received in his life - landed him in a hospital ICU on a respirator and in a coma. And as I've also blogged, not only are studies are increasingly mounting that not only show some sort of relationship between the vaccine cocktails given in infancy to serious disorders, autism and so on, but in some foreign studies, the pattern seems to be so widespread that vaccines are filled with all sorts of... well, crud, that in some cases veterinary vaccines are cleaner than those approved for humans.

Don't get your hopes up just yet. I.G. Farbensanto, which profits off of making people sick (yes, I'll say it, through their vaccines), can then turn around and harvest your wealth for generations after you child has been diagnosed autistic, by selling you even more drugs. When they figure out that they can do the same with your pets, those veterinary vaccines will be full of the same crud they want to inject your children with.

But back to Kennedy for a moment: He is not, as I am not, "anti-vaccine." He simply wants the vaccines to be safe. And who can argue with that? Well, as we all know, Big Pharma can. As readers of this website are aware, a recent study of hundreds of stories that were prepared and accepted for publication in a medical journal was pulled at the last moment because of Big Pharma's pressure. After all, the paper was pointing out a pattern, and patterns lead to lawsuits and horrible things like juries.

Things just heated up on the vaccine front with this article shared by a regular reader here, Mr. S.D.:

http://anonhq.com/not-just-austism-major-yale-study-shows-vaccines-tied-multiple-brain-disorders/ (Copy and paste in your browser)

This article intrigues because it starts out with a review of what most people who have followed the issue already know:

For the last 50 years, the world has taken a front row seat to the phenomenological occurrences of the rise of brain disorders such as Autism, ADHD, and major depressive disorders. Anecdotally speaking, parents all over the globe have reported that one day their children were normal and growing healthily, and the next, after having gotten their vaccinations, they get Autism, or ADHD, for example.

While science and the government continue to maintain there’s no causal relation between the vaccines and the disorders, parents, multiple studies, and other countries have reported otherwise. Now, it seems, some very brave and unabashed scientists have been able to show a correlation of what many have known for quite some time.

It has also been proven that CDC scientists destroyed data that showed a correlation between vaccines and autism in children.

In other words, not only does the pattern exist, but "official science" continues to be an ostrich, and data which supports the existence of the pattern has been actively destroyed, and hence, any claim to objective science has been destroyed with it. And I'll come right out and say it: this is criminal, and those engaged in the activity should be prosecuted for it. And that includes all the way to the top of the organizations and foundations engaged in the activity.

But there's something else in this article:

Researchers at Pennsylvania State and Yale University sought to examine, “whether antecedent vaccinations are associated with increased incidence of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), anorexia nervosa (AN), anxiety disorder, chronic tic disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder in a national sample of privately insured children.”

Controlling for broken bones and open wounds (control means to use commonly occurring instances as a contrast method), the researchers concluded that someone who’d received the Flu vaccine within the last year “were also associated with incident diagnoses of AN, OCD, and an anxiety disorder.” These findings greatly expand the common understandings that vaccines are related to Autism and now include the other three brain-based illnesses.

The findings of these studies are worded in classical "doublespeak":

As with most research studies, the researchers stop short of claiming the vaccinations cause the all too common brain disorders. “This pilot epidemiologic analysis implies that the onset of some neuropsychiatric disorders may be temporally related to prior vaccinations in a subset of individuals,” they write adding the, “findings warrant further investigation, but do not prove a causal role of antecedent infections or vaccinations in the pathoetiology of these conditions.”

That is, there both is, and is not, a causal relationship between a whole host of neurological and psychiatric disorders, and vaccines. But the fact that this study comes from Pennsylvania State and Yale will be very difficult to ignore.

The real problem faced by big pharma now is: how would a jury react to this statement if it were presented in a vaccine lawsuit? Well, I don't know about you, but I know how I would. And I know what sort of settlement I'd insist upon: Big pharma gets to pay all medical bills for the affected plaintiffs, for life.

Call it "Farrellcare."

And yes, the reader read this correctly: I did post this blog under the heading of "mind control," because it's easy to control a population suffering from autism, OCD, ADHD, and so on.