Category Archives: Transhuman

David Cronenberg plays Spencer Galloway, a megawealthy, cruel patriarch of a dysfunctional family, in Slasher: Flesh and Blood.

Cole Burston/Handout

Over the years, David Cronenbergs oeuvre and his persona have fused into something, well, Cronenbergian.

In the films he writes and/or directs his earlier, squishier output (Scanners, The Fly); his 1990s mindbenders (Naked Lunch, eXistenZ); his more recent, human-nature-is-scary-enough work (Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method); and his most recent, the evolution thriller Crimes of the Future, which he shot this past summer hes a neo-existentialist.

I think the human body is what we are, Cronenberg, 78, said in a phone interview last week. When it dies, were dead. Theres no afterlife, no God. We have to come to terms with that. The subject matter of all art is the human condition, and for me thats a physical thing. So its inevitable that my filmmaking is going to involve the body in a very intimate and impactful way.

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In his real life, Cronenberg is gentle, courtly, intelligent. He projects an air of unflappable civility. His gaze is calm and unblinking. His voice is as mild and pleasant as butter scratching across white toast.

We shot Crimes of the Future in Athens during an intense heat wave, 45 degrees, wildfires burning on the horizon, Don McKellar, who plays a bureaucrat in the film, told me in a separate phone interview. Davids ability to maintain calm and keep his sense of humour was remarkable. His movies are so personal and idiosyncratic, you expect a kind of autocratic vision, but it doesnt feel like that on his set. Hes incredibly engaging, personable, non-hierarchical. He inspires trust and loyalty. Douglas Koch, the director of photography, remarked to me that David should set up a school on how to make movies. Not just technically, but how to make them enjoyable to work on.

Cronenberg's most recent thriller, Crimes of the Future, was shot this past summer in Athens.

Cole Burston/Handout

When Cronenberg acts, however, the characters he plays morph with the person he is to create a delicious uneasiness. No matter the role, were also watching him and we know how his mind works. We see the skull beneath the skin. Think of his silken assassin in To Die For, his ungodly reverend in Alias Grace, or his scientist in Disappearance at Clifton Hill, where his mere entrance, flapping out of the water in a frogman suit, elicits nervous titters from an audience.

No wonder the creators of the anthology series Slasher wanted Cronenberg to headline their fourth season, Flesh & Blood. The minute we announced his casting, fans began direct-messaging me to say how much he freaks them out, Slasher writer Ian Carpenter said in a joint Zoom interview with showrunner Aaron Martin. (Season 4 premieres Oct. 4 on Hollywood Suite.)

Cronenberg plays Spencer Galloway, a villain who could not be more on trend: a megawealthy, cruel patriarch of a dysfunctional family, la Brian Cox in Succession and Donald Sutherland in Trust. In the Galloway family, however, dysfunction includes dismemberment. Spencer, who is dying, sets up an elaborate competition among his potential heirs; only the winner inherits all. Meanwhile, a killer stalks the isolated family compound as players are eliminated from the contest, theyre also eliminated from Earth, in grandiosely grotesque ways.

I got to do things Ive never had a chance to do, in acting or in life, Cronenberg said gleefully. I got to yell at people and say foul things to my children. I said to my own children, You see how I could have been? It was a lot of fun. It was cathartic. I loved it.

David brought intellectual ferocity to his character, but this lovely energy to the set, Carpenter said. We shot these long dinner table scenes; the actors sat there for much of the day. In between takes, David told story after story. We had rich writing conversations, about how he comes to his work as a writer first. He celebrates the stuff that everyone else wants to turn away from, be it behaviour or things in the body. He has no shyness, no reservations about exploring anything.

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Crimes of the Future sounds like vintage Cronenberg. He wrote the script in 2000, but it sat untouched until producer Robert Lantos convinced him it was timelier now than ever. Its set in a near future where nature and evolution have spun out of control. Some humans, including a performance artist played by Viggo Mortensen, are adapting by growing new organs or merging with technology becoming transhuman. Some are evolving past pain, able to operate on themselves. Others resist, including McKellars bureaucrat and his colleague, played by Kristen Stewart.

David is exploring the limits of what it means to be human, McKellar said. Does our identity transcend the body? Its an incredibly rich question, tied into our cyber lives, how were transferring our inner lives to technology, incorporating our online life into our personalities. Wheres the line? Does the authentic self mean anything any more?

Creators of the anthology series Slasher got Cronenberg to headline their fourth season, Flesh & Blood.

Cole Burston/Handout

Not surprisingly, Cronenberg is a tech-embracer. In the 1940s and 50s, technology was often conceived of as something that came from outer space, menacing and inhuman, he said. But for me, technology is 100-per-cent human it reflects back to us what we are; its an extension of ourselves. Im listening to you through my hearing aids, which are streaming directly to my phone. Those are my ears now.

Like all Cronenberg projects, Crimes of the Future took years to finance. Its conservativism, he said. If youre doing anything outside the mainstream that seems to be risky not transgressively risky, but risky in terms of audience reaction its hard to get made.

He hoped streaming services would be much more radical, but an experience with Netflix proved otherwise. He went to their Los Angeles office and pitched three of their top executives on a series called The Shrouds (which he still hopes to sell, so thats all hell say). They paid him to write two episodes but didnt green-light the series.

My experience with them was exactly my experience with studios, Cronenberg said. Theyre bright, literate, they know stuff. But underneath theyre afraid. They say, We love your work. Then you give them something, and they say, We want to work with you, but not on this.

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Whats remarkable is what David can get made, McKellar countered. Im sure hes explored the limits. Hes never pandered to commercial audiences, even with his most commercial stuff, like The Fly. Im sure its always been a struggle. But somehow hes maintained his career without compromise and thats amazing.

Ive learned so much from him about how a career in Canada as a filmmaker is possible, McKellar continued. How to maintain integrity, to adhere to and expand your vision. I can think of no one whos done that better.

As our time ran out, I asked Cronenberg one last question: If were our bodies and nothing more, how does he feel about being 78? Things are going on with my body, he replied. Im not as flexible, Ive got aches, strange neurological pains that happen for no reason. But it hasnt altered my understanding of life and death. I think I anticipated it relatively accurately, even from my youth.

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David Cronenberg is ready for the terrifying future, as both director and actor, too - The Globe and Mail

Why should we care what Jeanette Winterson has to say about artificial intelligence? The answer is that Winterson is never boring. She can be brash, didactic and hectoring, but she is always passionate and provocative. On subjects ranging from late capitalism to Greek mythology, she comes across a little like an over-caffeinated teacher determined to drum some sense into Year 10 on a wet Friday afternoon.

Wintersons manic energy can have mixed results. It can produce work that is porous and mutable in its structure, forward-looking and ambitious in its themes, such as Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Written on the Body (1992). But it can also produce wacky high-wire performances full of stylistic gimmickry, as in Art & Lies (1994), Gut Symmetries (1997) and The Stone Gods (2007). These are books that seem to attack their subjects rather than explore them. And theres no getting away from Wintersons aphoristic mode of writing, which seems imbued with a Cassandra-like certainty that she has seen the light and will lead others towards it. Im telling you stories. Trust me, she wrote in The Passion (1987).

Winterson appears to believe that her books will save the world which may make a reader apprehensive about a collection of her essays on the once-in-a-species opportunity for artificial intelligence to make our planet a better place. AI attracts megalomaniacs. It inspires both overblown promises and existential angst. Whether utopian or apocalyptic, these claims usually go unfulfilled. Where does Winterson sit on the spectrum? There is a clue on the books jacket, where her author photo has been given a cyborgs eye.

Subtitled How We Got Here; Where We Might Go Next (at least theres a might in there), 12 Bytes is Wintersons first essay collection since Art Objects (1996). Its mission, she claims, is modest. She wants readers who think they are not interested in AI or biotech to feel connected to the idea of a transhuman even a post-human future.

This may sound fanciful, but Winterson has a long-standing fascination with machine intelligence and the protean possibilities of the internet, dating back to The Powerbook (2000). Her last novel, Frankissstein (2019), a darkly entertaining reboot of Mary Shelleys work, featured amoral sexbot salesmen and a charismatic scientist pioneering ways to upload the human brain to the cloud. It was a lot of fun but at times it felt as if Winterson had tried to synthesise three years worth of articles from the Atlantic, New Scientist and Wired magazines into a work of fiction. There was clearly more to say about AI than she could shoehorn into a novel: hence these interlinked essays, which explore the partition between the real and invented, and embodied and non-embodied states, and which allow Winterson to give expression to her environmental consciousness and mystical fervour.

[see also:The Road to Conscious Machines is an accessible and highly readable history of artificial intelligence]

As ever, Winterson is determined to work on a big canvas. She hurtles through the Industrial Revolution, code-breaking, Gnosticism, Greek mythology, 3D-printed houses, sexbots and robodogs to show us why liberals must embrace our transhumanist future if they want to avoid an alt-right, misogynistic, tax-evading, Big Tech dystopia. She believes that in the next decade 2020 onwards the internet of things will start the forced evolution and gradual dissolution of Homo sapiens as we know it. And frankly, she cant wait, given how violent, greedy, intolerant, racist, sexist, patriarchal and generally vile we are.

Once humans start to merge with AI and become part of the toolkit, then the enemy wont be on the outside and there will be no us and it. Either this new type of intelligent life controls or collaborates with us, or it might just keep us as pets or fence us off like dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. But imagine, she says, if AI helped us to take responsibility for the planet, curb our greedy consumerism, end fake news and hate speech, reduce inequality and manage food shortages.

Winterson would prefer to think of the A in AI as standing for alternative rather than artificial because we need alternatives to war and climate breakdown. She explores how non-embodied AI is already part of our lives in the form of targeted advertising, chatbots, facial recognition software, empathetic fridges and asserts that what will surely follow is AGI (artificial general intelligence). At that point, we will have multitasking, autonomous entities that can set their own goals and come to their own decisions. They will be able to make cheese on toast while having a chat with you about the garden, she explains.

***

Its natural that novelists are interested in the moral, ethical and fantastical implications of AI. In the past two years, Ian McEwans Machines Like Me and Kazuo Ishiguros Klara and the Sun have asked what the technology might mean for intimacy, sexual relations, family dynamics, liberal democracy and literature. All three writers are obsessed with the possibility that AI may one day be able to produce a great novel one that can grasp human emotions and perhaps even make us weep. Winterson quotes the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who believes the 2050 Nobel Prize for Literature will go to Alexa. Maybe. But until the first self-generated novel is published, its the job of Winterson et al to think through the consequences for humanity if robots do become intelligent and even learn to love. Imagining alternatives is what [artists] do, she writes.

In order to see where we might be going, Winterson shows us how far weve come, via a series of patronising Horrible Histories-style lessons in technological progress. She takes us through the embryonic science of electricity, vacuum tubes, transistors and code-breakers, peppering her lesson with hammy feminist call-outs such as, Go girl! and, Men need to be honest about their gender bias so that women can get with the programming. She retraces the by-now-fairly-familiar history of women being excluded from computing, spotlighting figures such as Ada Lovelace and the Nasa computer scientist Katherine Johnson. Even today, the number of women studying computer science is falling, which helps explain why the data sets that instruct AI have tended to show such a strong male bias. Nor is it surprising that there is so much entrepreneurial activity around AI-enhanced sex dolls. A sexbot will never say no and so a man can always get the outcome he wants, which reinforces the gender at its most oppressive and unimaginative, Winterson writes. She fantasises about a gang of feminista techies secretly re-botting the pouting pieces of silicon in some kind of Revenge of the Doll event.

But she also argues that AI has the potential to end male entitlement and white supremacy. Given that transhumanism is about transcending categories, AI could be a portal into a value-free gender and race experience, she suggests in her essay Fuck the Binary.

Going further, Winterson believes we are creating a God-figure: much smarter than we are, non-material, not subject to our frailties, who we hope will have the answers. There is a new kind of quasi- religious discourse forming around AI, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests. Acknowledging her Pentecostal background, she is fascinated and horrified in equal measure by the similarities between AI enthusiasts and ole-time religion. But when her scepticism recedes into the background, 12 Bytes reads like an evangelist sermon for us to surrender to the higher power.

Winterson is banking on this AGI deity bending towards one of her preferred religions, such as Buddhism or Gnosticism. AGI will be like Gnosticism because Gnostics agreed that being made of meat is ridiculous and they stress that as we leave the body behind, we are going towards non-embodied light. And it will be like Buddhism because it wont be interested in objects or attachment to material things. Rather than looking for thingness, AGI will look for relatedness, for connection, for what can be called the dance. It will hopefully help us to end suffering.

Our individualism and human-centred body anxiety are in any case both recent and wrong, she asserts. We have always had myths about shape-shifters, and in many parts of the world we still believe we live alongside spirits, angels and deities. The human form is only provisional.

***

Winterson is oddly at her most compelling when she is at her most messianic and fanciful. Which isnt to say she is in any way convincing. According to the optics research scientist Janelle Shane, todays AI is much closer in brainpower to an earthworm than a human. For all the billions being invested in tech, and for all the hysteria about AI, even the smartest computers can still only excel at a narrow selection of tasks. Most credible commentators believe AGI is decades away if it is even a possibility: we dont have much idea what consciousness is yet, let alone how to create it. And any hyper-intelligent bot would still enter a world governed by human laws, tastes and taboos.

Wintersons excitable optimism about AGI not only feels naive, it also comes across as performative and insincere. You can feel the magical thinking catch up with her as she writes. She gives enough examples of tech firms behaving greedily, unethically and dimly to cast serious doubt on her own thesis. She has blurred the reality of AI a relatively mundane combination of machine learning and Big Data with AGI, which may never be realised. She has fallen for and colluded with the hype, and it is hard to trust her. The result is a non-fiction book that is less convincing than the fiction she wrote on precisely these themes.

Thinking about AI can help clarify what it means to be human, but as Winterson cautions in 12 Bytes: Humans sometimes need to slow down. We run out of ideas.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here; Where We Might Go NextJeanette WintersonJonathan Cape, 288pp, 16.99

[see also:Timothy Gowers: The man who changed Dominic Cummingss mind on Covid-19]

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Jeanette Winterson's vision of the future of AI is messianic but unconvincing - New Statesman

Jeanette Winterson is not usually considered a science-fiction writer, yet her novels have always been concerned with alternative realities, and for more than two decades she has drawn on the imaginative possibilities offered by technological and digital advances. Her 2000 novel, The Powerbook, was an early exploration of the fluid identities and connections offered by virtual personae; The Stone Gods (2007) combined history with interplanetary dystopias and featured a relationship between a robot and a human. Her most recent fiction, Frankisstein, reworked Mary Shelleys story of an artificially created intelligence into a modern novel of ideas about the present and future limits of AI and the implications for art, love, sex and biology.

Now, in 12 Bytes, her first collection of essays since 1996s Art Objects, Winterson examines all these preoccupations without the mediation of fiction, though the narrative style is as conversational and erudite as youd expect from her, peppered with irreverent asides and mischievous flashes of wit (Dry as dust I dont do, she has said of the previous collection). The 12 essays here are grouped into four zones, loosely covering the past, the imagination, relationships and the future, and together offer an eclectic odyssey through the history of technological progress a history that for too long sidelined some of its most influential figures because they were inconveniently women or gay, and has only recently begun to restore their reputations. Winterson pays tribute here to the contributions of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, along with women such as Stephanie Shirley, the founder of all-female company Freelance Programmers, and the forgotten teams of female programmers during the second world war, their work unacknowledged for decades because it didnt suit a narrative of male expertise.

Winterson explains in her introduction that the essays are the product of a longstanding fascination with advances in machine intelligence, and that she approaches the subject as a storyteller with a modest aim: I want readers who imagine they are not much interested in AI, or bio-tech, or big tech, or data-tech, to find that the stories are engaging, sometimes frightening, always connected. Her primary interest is in what she calls the bigger picture: the metaphysical implications of our transhuman future, about which she appears surprisingly optimistic.

A hybrid form of human is certain, she asserts in the final essay, I Love, Therefore I Am. Homo sapiens might be on the way out And if that was to happen, how could we pass on the best of what we call human nature? How would we define it? This piece, in common with many of the others, is content to ask more questions than it answers; Winterson acknowledges the ambiguity inherent in so many of the ethical questions surrounding AI.

The technology to change the world for the better is the technology that is in place right now Its the best of times and the worst of times. Dystopia or utopia? Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could be harder.

But, while she argues for the primacy of the inner life the part of us that cant be fully known or monetised by Facebook algorithms in somewhat abstract terms, citing Larkins line What will survive of us is love, elsewhere she offers more practical solutions for an AI future that will serve the greater good. In the essay Jurassic Car Park she addresses the problem of the current white male dominance of tech and how this leads to ingrained bias (datasets are selective stories). As well as the obvious solution of more people of colour and women at the table, she writes: I would like to see established artists, and public intellectuals, automatically brought in to advise science, tech and government at every level, because the arts have always been an imaginative and emotional wrestle with reality a series of inventions and creations. Youd think this would be self-evident to the decision-makers, though it becomes harder to share her optimism, writing this on a day when further cuts to arts education have been announced.

For a relatively short book, the scope of its ambition is huge. Winterson whizzes through the history of the machine age, surveillance capitalism, Gnosticism, sex dolls and Greek philosophy, but she is at her most impassioned on the subjects that have been her recurring themes: gender, religion, art, feminism, love. She writes with a sense of urgency about this future that is already here, because the one thing she is insistent about is that we the storytellers, the artists, the readers who share her views on the inner life must not opt out and leave it in the hands of the tech bros: liberal resistance cant be anti-tech or anti-science. So much of it comes down to the old question of whose stories get to shape our reality. Shes right that aspects of this AI future are frightening, but for any non-scientists wanting to understand the challenges and possibilities of this brave new world, I cant think of a more engaging place to start.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson is published by Jonathan Cape (16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson review engaging history of technological progress - The Guardian

Monday, 2 August 2021, 10:11 amArticle: Robert J. Burrowes

For many people desperate to see a return to a life thatis more familiar, it is still easy to believe that theupheavals we have experienced since March 2020 and thechanges that have been wrought in their train aretemporary, even if they are starting to drag onsomewhat longer than hoped.

However, anyone who ispaying attention to what is taking place in the backgroundis well aware that the life we knew before 2020 has alreadyended and what is being systematically put in its place asthe World Economic Forum (WEF) implements its GreatReset will bear no comparison to any period prior to lastyear. See KillingDemocracy Once and for All: The Global Elites Coupdtat That Is Destroying Life as We KnowIt.

Of course, those of us who qualify asordinary people have had no say in the shape of whatis being implemented: that shaping has been the prerogativeof the criminal global elite which is now implementing aplan that has been decades in the making and built onhundreds of years of steady consolidation of elitepower.

Also, of course, there is nothing about thisshaping that is good for us. In simple terms, it isreshaping the human individual so that previouslyfundamental concepts such as human identity, human liberty,human rights (such as freedom of speech, assembly andmovement), human privacy and human volition are not justnotions of the past but are beyond the comprehension of thetypical transhuman. At the same time, the global eliteis restructuring human society into a technocratic dystopiawhich is a nightmarish cross between Brave New World,1984 and the Dark Age. See StrategicallyResisting the New Dark Age: The 7 Days Campaign to ResistThe Great Reset.

The only question remaining isthis: Can we mobilize adequatestrategic resistance that is,resistance that systematically undermines the power of theglobal elite to conduct this coup and restores power toordinary people to defeat this coup?

But beforeI answer that question, I wish to highlight just one elementof the elite coup that is taking place and outline theprofound changes that are being left in its wake unless westop them.

These changes are essentially related tothe capacities of computerized technologies to deprive us ofwhat little we have left of our financial autonomy,including because any notion of privacy is rapidlyvanishing.

One reason forhighlighting the issue of money is because while it is goodto see increasing critical attention being paid to theinjectables program, with its devastating consequencesfor humanity, far too little attention is being paid to theprofoundly important transformation being wrought undercover of the elite-driven narrative which has virtually allpeoples attention distracted from this deeper agenda. Andwhile this deeper agenda entails a great many aspects, onesubset of these is related to the way in which the globalfinancial system is being re-engineered to play its role infully controlling the human population.

In a series ofreports issued in early 2020, the Deutsche Bank claimed thatcash will be around for a long time. See the threereports accessible from Transitionto digital payments could rebalance global economicpower.

However, these reports arecontradicted by other research and the ongoing evidence thatcash is vanishing. Most importantly, there is no doubt aboutthe elite intention in this regard. They want cashgone.

The digitization of money has been occurring fordecades and it is now being accelerateddramatically.

Moreover, the World Economic Forum andother elite organizations have been actively working towardsachieving a cashless economy for years. To get a sense ofthis trend, see Whywe need a less-cash society and TheUS should get rid of cash and move to a digital currency,says this Nobel Laureate economist.

Notably, inthis respect, the BetterThan Cash Alliance has 78 members committed todigitizing payments. If you think that this is agrassroots initiative set up by people like you and me, youwill be surprised to read that the Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation is a Resource Partner to the initiativealong with some UN agencies, many national governments andcorporations such as Mastercard and Visa.

So while thetrend toward a cashless society has been progressingsteadily for some decades, with countries like Denmark,Norway and Sweden already virtually cashless and Indiarapidly moving in that direction see IndiasPM Modi defends cash ban, announces incentives the so-called Covid-19 pandemic was contrived partlyto provide a pretext for further accelerating the move fromcash to cards and apps, with increasing numbers of peopleusing the digital methods, even for small sums, partlybecause some people were scared into believing that thevirus could be transmitted by bills andcoins.

But there is more. In addition to measures notmentioned here, other plans include the use of a facial scanthat records your entry to a store and is linked toartificial intelligence that identifies you and your creditrating. This then enables, or otherwise, your ability to payfor goods and services based on this facialscan.

Does all of this matter, you might ask.Well the convenience of cards and apps has two significantcosts: your privacy and your freedom. You lose both simplybecause while paying with cash is anonymous, paying by cardor app leaves a digital trail that is as difficult to followas an elephant whose tail you are already holding. And thisdigital trail forms a vital part of the surveillance gridthat enables all of those who are tracking and documentingyour movement, your payments and your behaviour to do sowithout leaving the comfort of their chairs. For more detailon this, watch Cash or card will COVID-19 killcash? which is embedded in the article Cashor Card Will COVID-19 Kill Cash? Leaving a DigitalFootprint With Every Payment.

But it goesbeyond this. As touched on above in relation to privacy andexplained at some length by Whitney Webb, there is arelated push by WEF partners to tackle cybercrime thatseeks to end privacy and the potential for anonymity on theinternet in general, by linking government-issued IDs tointernet access. Such a policy would allow governments tosurveil every piece of online content accessed as well asevery post or comment authored by each citizen, supposedlyto ensure that no citizen can engage in criminalactivity online.

Notably, the WEF Partnershipagainst Cybercrime employs a very broad definition of whatconstitutes a cybercriminal as they apply this labelreadily to those who post or host content deemed to bedisinformation that represents a threat todemocratic governments. The WEFs interest incriminalizing and censoring online content has been madeevident by its recent creation of a new GlobalCoalition for Digital Safety to facilitate the increasedregulation of online speech by both the public and privatesectors. See EndingAnonymity: Why the WEFs Partnership Against CybercrimeThreatens the Future of Privacy.

But to getback to cash: Unfortunately for us, the global elite doesnot intend to leave the abolition of cash to ourpreference for the convenience of cards and othermoves to entice us to switch to digital payment. It fullyintends to force us to accept digital methods as the onlymeans of payment.

In part, this is because electronicpayments are extremely lucrative for banks and paymentservice providers, while the data broker industry is alsomaking huge revenues. See Cashor Card Will COVID-19 Kill Cash? Leaving a DigitalFootprint With Every Payment.

And in some ways,killing cash is simple. Two obvious ways of doing soare by removing ATMs (including from shopping centres) andclosing local bank branches so that cash is simplyunavailable. As has been happening for some time. See WhyAre ATMs Disappearing at an Alarming Rate after a Wave ofBranch Closures? and Australianbank branches and ATMs are vanishing.

But, inthis instance, even profitability is at the trivial end ofthe elite motivation spectrum.

Cash is being forcedout of existence because it undermines the elite agenda totake all power from ordinary people.

So, in parallelwith other regressions over the past 18 months as the elitecoup to take complete control of our lives has continued tounfold, there have been warnings from variousinstitutions including the World Economic Forum and theCarnegie Endowment for International Peace about thepossibility of an allegedly imminent cyber attack thatwill collapse the existing financialsystem.

Following a simulation in 2020, in whichthe World Economic Forum along with the Russian governmentand global banks conducted a high-profile cyberattacksimulation that targeted the financial industry, anothersimulation was held on 9 July 2021 involving the WorldEconomic Forum and the Russian government-owned Sberbank aswell as other key financial agents. See CyberPolygon and Cyber Polygon2021. In reality, of course, such a collapse of thefinancial system would constitute the final yet necessarystep to implement the World Economic Forums desiredoutcome of forcing a widespread shift to digital currencyand increased global governance of the internationaleconomy.

If this financial collapse happens, thesolution suggested by key agencies to unite thenational security apparatus and the finance industry first,and then use that as a model to do the same with othersectors of the economy will ensure that we lose whatlittle control is left in our lives, not just in relation toour financial resources but in all other domains as well.For a full explanation, see WEFWarns of Cyber Attack Leading to Systemic Collapse of theGlobal Financial System.

And for anotheraccount of the deeper agenda and its financial impactsalready, including its economic genocide, as well aswhat is yet to happen, watch this interview of CatherineAustin Fitts: GlobalistCentral Banking New World Order ResetPlan.

Beyond this, if you want some insightinto another key threat in the cybercrime realm, check outthis video by the Ice Age Farmer in relation to the cyberthreat to the power grid. See NextCrisis Bigger than COVID Power Grid/Finance Down WEFs Cyber Polygon.

Fortunately, there is some resistancealready.

In response to concerns in the United Statesthat businesses that refuse cash will disadvantagecommunities with poor access to traditional banking systems,there are signs that a national movement protectingconsumers ability to pay in cash may be emerging witha number of states and cities already outlawing cashlessoutlets. See Cashor Credit? State and City Bans on Cashless Retailers Are onthe Rise.

Realistically, however, given what isat stake, considerable elite pressure will be applied toreverse these decisions in time. So we need our defense tobe more rigorous and less reliant on agents who are unlikelyto be tough enough to defend our interests or will besidelined or killed for doing so, as at least two nationalpresidents who resisted the elite intention last year havesince been killed. See Coronavirusand Regime Change: Burundis Covid Coup and JohnMagufuli: Death of an African FreedomFighter.

Moreover, given the likelihood thatthe financial system will be deliberately crashed at somepoint and possibly soon we need to employ a varietyof tactics, that build resilience into our resistance, todefeat this initiative.

Hence, storing and paying withcash, moving your accounts to local community banks orcredit unions (and away from the large corporate banks) andmaking the effort to become more self-reliant, particularlyin food production, will increase your resilience, as willparticipating in local trading schemes, whether involvinglocal currencies or goods and services directly.

Aswith all elements of the defense we implement, it will needto be multi-layered and integrated into the overall defensestrategy. The elite intends to kill off many of us asthe depopulation measures within the coup, including thedestruction of the global economy throwing 500,000,000people out of work and killing millions as a result, as wellas the injectables program already killing tens ofthousands, make perfectly clear and enslave therest.

For an integrated strategy to defeat the elitecoup, see the We Are Human, WeAre Free campaign, which has 29 strategic goals fordefeating the coup including meaningful engagement withpolice and military forces to assist them to understand andresist, rather than support, the elite agenda.

But fora simpler presentation, see the 7Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset. The Telegram groupis here.

One of the interestingchallenges about the current Covid-19 Crisis is thatit continues to very successfully distract most people fromawareness of the deeper agenda: the Global ElitesGreat Reset and related initiatives, such as thatdiscussed above in relation to money.

Hence, apartfrom the perennial problem of raising awareness andmobilizing resistance among those still believing theelite-driven propaganda, we face two key strategichazards.

The first hazard is a longstanding one: whilevirtually all people believe that elite agents in thiscase, governments are controlling events, muchresistance will focus on begging governments, throughsuch things as petitions and protest demonstrations, tofix it for us. The elite has long dissipated ourdissent by having us direct it at one or other of itsagents. This case is no different. And while we are notusing our occasional large rallies to inform people how toresist powerfully every day of their life, these rallies area waste of time whatever solidarity they build in the shortterm. History is categorically instructive on thatpoint.

A second strategic hazard we face is thatresistance to the vaccine and the vaccinepassport might be successful (in the sense thatconcerted actions stall some government implementation ofsome measures in relation to these two initiatives) andleave most people believing that they have won, whilethe deeper agenda remains in the shadows with virtuallyno-one resisting.

It is important, therefore, thatthose who are aware of the deeper agenda continue to provideopportunities for others to become aware of this too and thefundamental threat it poses to us all while also sharing howwe can resist its key dimensions in a way that makes adifference. It is not enough to complain about elite agents,such as governments, the medical and pharmaceuticalindustries, and the corporate media.

We muststrategically resist the elite coup itself with actions suchas those in the 7Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset before we findourselves locked in a technocratic prison without thefree-willed minds necessary to analyze, critique, plan andact.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetimecommitment to understanding and ending human violence. Hehas done extensive research since 1966 in an effort tounderstand why human beings are violent and has been anonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of WhyViolence? His email address is flametree@riseup.netand his website is here.

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When the apocalypse comes, popular literary imagination has it that what will remain of mankind will be a linguistically challenged tribe of outlaws eking out what existence they can amid the wreckage of ecological collapse. Such is the Riddley Walker-style scenario that begins Paul Kingsnorths new novel, the third in his loose trilogy set in East Anglia that imagines how man might respond to violent or alienating social upheaval at discrete points in English history.

The 2014 Booker-longlisted The Wake was set during the Norman Conquests, while 2016s novella Beast inhabited, Pincher Martin-style, the disintegrating consciousness of a 21st-century man living in haunted self-exile from the aggressions of modernity. Alexandria, meanwhile, takes place nine hunnerd years in the future where, its no surprise to be told, the breakin, buildin, burnin of man has left civilisation and the natural world in a bad way. The only people left alive are seven members of the Nitrian Order, who have rejected the old destructive materialism in favour of a back-to-nature way of life in the Fens in accordance with the paganish creeds of their deity, Lady.

Their fragile existence, though, is under threat. In the woods lurks the Stalker, a hooded, engineered metahuman emissary of Wayland, which, we are invited to assume, is an all-powerful AI invented long ago by man, and who controls a transhumanist utopia called Alexandria. Every other member of the human race has uploaded themselves to Alexandria, where they can keep growing, keep exploring in blissful, incorporeal perpetuity. Known as K, the Stalker is determined to persuade the last remaining Nitrians, as they pick plastic out of the clay and talk to the birds, that their faith in the truth of the body and the land, a faith that feels as old as England itself, is false and that salvation is only to be found in an eternal digital enlightenment. Yet the Nitrians, who consider Wayland the enemy machine, have received a sign. Their oldest member, yrvidian, has dreamt of swans. And when the swans return, Alexandria will fall.

Regular readers of Kingsnorth will know that the principal challenge and pleasure of his fiction is his use of invented first person narrative voices that point up the intimate relationship between language and selfhood, although his dialect is becoming more simple (and less invigorating) with each passing novel. His human characters here, who narrate alternate chapters and who consist of a married couple and their young daughter el, a lusty young chap called Lorenso, plus Mother, father and old yrvidian, speak in a minimalist, stumpy present tense that dispenses with articles and conventional capitalisation (we come to Land at dusk) and has an erratic dislike of the letter G. Their elemental language is a sort of rag-tag dream poetry littered with classical allusions, bits of Arthurian legend and echoes of early Christianity that hark back to a romanticised, fabled, ancient rural England, and some of it is mysteriously beautiful. outside Sun comin down, says mother. day is green like birth.

Some of it, though, is wincingly po-faced. Theres a lot of portentous talk of the i am woman. i am blood variety. More fundamental a problem is that Kingsnorths didactic message is in competition with his formidable imagination. Its hard not to see K who at times is oddly the most human character here, with an unexpected sense of humour as both an avatar of the encroaching hi-tech omnipotence Kingsnorth is writing against and a mouthpiece for his own beliefs, which he has detailed extensively as a member of the radical writerss eco collective Dark Mountain.

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What will England be like 900 years in the future? Paul Kingsnorth offers an answer - Telegraph.co.uk

This year has been quite tumultuous for businesses as well as provided then with an opportunity to venture into uncertainty with the help of technology. Disruptive technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud rose to the occasion to sustain industries amid the crisis. Thus bringing numerous innovations and leapfrogging existing digital age to new heights. In the meantime, quantum computing which was predicted as an emerging trend for 2020 had a fruitful year, thanks to significant advancements that took place during this time.

For instance, in February, quantum computing company, D-Wave Systems Inc., launched Leap-2, which is the first quantum cloud service designed for developers and organizations to easily build and deploy real-world hybrid quantum applications with practical impact. In March, researchers at theU.S. Army Research Laboratorycreated a quantum sensor to detect communications over the entire radio frequency spectrum.

In October, IonQ announced itsnext-generation quantum computer systemwith 32 qubits and an expected quantum volume greater than four million. Quantum volume is a measurement of the overall power of a quantum machine. Later in the same month, theAccredited Standards Committee (ASC X9)issued a new standard for public-key cryptography use of digital signatures.

And most recently, China developed a quantum computing system called Jiuzhang which is reported to be 10 billion times faster than Googles Sycamore.Using, Gaussian boson sampling, Jiuzhang had captured 76 photons and also achieved quantum supremacy. Overall, the latest advancements in quantum computing have been some serious steps towards making it a commercial and scientific reality.

While quantum computing continues to garner billions of dollars of investment across the globe, in the recent coming years, it may be available as a cloud service. Not only that, quantum computing may also become an integral part of data analytics too.

Meanwhile, IDC has predictedthat by 2023, 25% of Fortune 500 companies will gain a competitive advantage from quantum computing. Tech giant IBM plans to deliver a quantum computer with a 1,121-qubit processor (codenamed Condor), inside a 10-foot tall super-fridge that will be online and capable of delivering aQuantum Advantage, by 2023. The Goldeneye fridge is currently in prototype and is designed to be capable of hosting multiple chips. IBM hints that such super-fridges will ultimately be capable of stacking multiple chips providing millions of internally networked qubits.

Quantum advantage is the point where certain information processing tasks can be performed more efficiently or cost-effectively on a quantum computer, in comparison to a traditional system.

Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Quantum Strategy and Ecosystem says, This year, a number of IBM Q Network organizations collaborated with us to make significant progress in quantum research for industry, including work with Mitsubishi Chemical on applying quantum computing to help develop lithium-oxygen batteries with greater energy density. ExxonMobil to harness quantum computing to develop more accurate chemistry simulation techniques in energy technologies. And Daimler to explore how quantum computing can advance the next generation of EV batteries.Sutor believes that by the following year,over 20,000 will complete online quantum computing technology and coding courses.

Even Steve Gibson, Chief Strategy Officer of Strangeworks, the quantum computing startup company, has announced that Strangeworks will launch its initial offering of the platform in the first quarter of 2021, and the enterprise edition is coming in late 2021.

In terms of key trends that will dominate the quantum computing landscape in the following, it is still early to predict with accuracy. Yet, one can undoubtedly expect major advancements like:

Experts also forecast that in 2021 programmers will concentrate on developing quantum-safe cryptography while cybersecurity will also benefit from quantum computing applications. The latter was also mentioned in CB Insights 2020 Tech Trends report. The report acknowledges howQuantum Key Distribution (QKD)will play as a cybersecurity tool, by securing organizations against quantum-based attacks.

Coming back to cryptography, it is likely that any of the current quantum computing labs or companies may announce that their system has broken the traditional asymmetric key cipher. While Jiuzhangs recent feat fueled rumors about the threat to cryptosystems, fortunately, the quantum computer prototype was unable to solve the factoring problem that is crucial to decoding encrypted information.

Whether, quantum systems will pose a threat or not, to existing blockchain or other cryptography technologies, it is better if companies are prepared for such possibilities. This is because while a traditional computer may take years to crack a weak password string, given the advanced processing capabilities of qubits, it can be a matter of some time, before the world has a public-key of security devices and softwares.

As mentioned earlier, IBM has announced its ambitious plan of building a 1,121-qubit computer (Condor) for 2023. But before that, IBM has projected to launch a 127-qubit computer (codenamed Eagle) in 2021 and a 433-qubit computer(codenamed Osprey) in 2022. These announcements stem from the tech giants target of doubling quantum volume each year.

Meanwhile, Rigetti also plans to seize the qubit count lead with a 4x32Q multichip Aspen module. At the same time, while Googles Sycamore has 53-qubit processing, Google has designed a roadmap of 102Q (logical qubit prototype), 103Q (one logical qubit) in the next coming months.

Therefore, one can expect a narrow heated competition among leading quantum computing companies aiming to attain qubit count lead in 2021.

It is one of the most discussed forecasts that artificial intelligence and quantum computing can benefit each other by enhancing others abilities.

As perFrank Feather, CEO at AI-FUTURE Inc, quantum computing will scale-up rapidly in 2021 and will start to transform Artificial Intelligence into truly Advanced Intelligence. He also adds that, Quantum plus Advanced Intelligence (or QAI) will start to congregate with BioGenetic Sciences to create super-intelligent humanoids (a BioDigi TransHuman Species) in future years.

Simultaneously, applications of artificial intelligence like machine learning, computer vision will be accelerated if run on quantum systems. This will mean faster analysis of data in sectors like fraud detection, drug compound discovery and more. It will also boost Generative AI by expanding the datasets used to train generative or machine, learning models.

For instance, by integrating quantum processing units into the traditional computing framework has the potential to boost the quality of the images generated in say, a facial recognition system. So if we depend upon, the expanded dataset comprising of vast image data (quantitative, qualitative and variety) can significantly improve the detection model.

While IBM and Rigetti employ superconducting qubits, quantum computing systems from Honeywell and IonQ rely on using ion-trap based qubits. With its 6Q H0 and 10Q H1 ((linear trap) processors, Honeywell is also leading the quantum race.

Trapped ion generally offer superior connectivity and higher gate fidelity advantages than its superconducting qubit counterpart. But the major issue with trapped ion systems is that they provide significantly slower gate speeds (typically x100-1000 slower) than superconducting qubits. Experts suggest offsetting this with longer qubit lifetimes and higher fidelities leading to less error correction overhead.

As trapped-ion based quantum computing vendors are accelerating the maturity of their stacks, they also need to address the challenges posed by the trapped ion concept too.

IonQ believes that by pairing Bacon-Shor-13 code with high fidelity physical qubits can be the answer and also help it achieve quantum advantage sooner than others.

Another problem associated with Trapped ion is scaling up. Fortunately, AQT has a solution to this: usage of qubits defined on optical transitions instead of hyperfine transitions which are used by Honeywell and IonQ.

So, in 2021, we can expect AQT joining the ranks of Honeywell and IonQ is trapped ion quantum approach, and at the same time can anticipate more systems based on this concept.

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Quantum Computing 2021: How will this Tech Fare in the Coming Months? - Analytics Insight