MARCH 4TH, 2015
I am currently on assignment with the Atlas Foundation to coordinate their research with the disbursement of Federal funding and resources. This project is still in its infancy, but the implications of its success are becoming increasingly clear.
Per our meeting of March 1, following is a bullet summary of the threat models that might emerge from the successful development of this technology.
Economic Dangers
Predictive technology on even a minimal scale could disrupt global markets and render securities exchanges obsolete or entirely chaotic. Right now, stock brokers that use automatic trading algorithm are advantaged or disadvantaged by proximity to the NYSE. Businesses with identical fiberoptic connections can operate faster or slower because of the speed of light; the speed at which data reaches them.
The Atlas Foundation’s system proposes to make predictions substantially further into the future. Even a fifteen-minute advantage, however, would be enough knowledge to amass an incomprehensibly large fortune in a very short time frame: days, or even hours. Insider trading is a felony, but there is no legal framework in place to address this risk.
Propaganda
If one can successfully predict an individual’s and a population’s actions as they will be, then it logically follows that one can predict what will occur in the presence of any given stimulus. That means propaganda and psyops can be tested for proof of concept and iterated to achieve exactly the desired outcome.
Media manipulation and propaganda can be difficult to counter, short of conducting explicit counter-operations. And military personnel are definitely not immune to the effects of such psyops. The possibility that any entity is capable of altering behaviors on a population-wide scale is deeply concerning.
Military Domination
Our top strategic minds have developed decades of war plans, running through disparate scenarios and developing the approaches most likely to result in a positive outcome. The Atlas Foundation’s technology could render all of this moot, because the system deals with a caliber of prediction far above and beyond simple speculation.
This is an advantage to our nation — provided the technology stays in American hands. But the genie always escapes the bottle eventually. War and peace could become matters decided by nonhuman minds, and it’s anyone’s guess what the outcome would be if two of those minds chose to make war with each other.
Existential Grief
This would seem like a minor threat, but the effects are very real, even among the Atlas Foundation team already.
The team set out to test simulation theory, and are increasingly convinced that they have proven we do, in fact, live inside of a simulation. This has caused high rates of anxiety and depression for the researchers, who are in crisis over whether they have free will, what their life’s purpose is and should be, and more.
Once it’s operational, the simulation could probably tell us exactly how this would play out over months and decades. By the time we know, though, it may already be too late.
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