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News & Comment
Devoid of True Intelligence, the UK begs for Machine Intelligence to Safeguard Democracy
News
The BBC reported on the 13th of February 2018 that: “the UK government has unveiled a tool it says can accurately detect jihadist content and block it from being viewed,” which the government paid £600,000, to a London-based company, to develop. Furthermore, the Home Secretary Amber Rudd is visiting the US to share the idea, and Rudd told the BBC that she “would not rule out forcing technology companies to use it by law”. The technology is based on a heuristic algorithm that ‘learns’ to identify feature sets based on training sets of known content.
Comment
This type of predictive algorithm is employed in many areas of life, and while not one hundred percent accurate it can be effective. This development is part of the UK government’s ongoing effort to implement Muslim thought control in all aspects of life. The so-called ‘Prevent’ strategy targets Muslim school children and assigns those in contact with them the task of spying on them for any sign of religious convictions or straying away from the creedal tenets of democracy. The government also pushes to have cameras installed inside mosques, and prosecutes Muslims for heretical Facebook entries if these demonstrate strong emotions or views towards Western colonial policies and hegemony. Now the home secretary is promoting the idea behind a simple form of artificial intelligence technology that could screen-out any form of ‘extremist’ content. The anti-terror hysteria is a cover for the daily erosion of civil liberties, which aims to thwart Muslims from becoming self-aware in case they should mount an effective ideological challenge to the corrupt and dying Western culture of secularism.
As an aside, there is a lot of debate about artificial intelligence posing a potential danger to mankind if machines ‘themselves’ should ever become self-aware. That possibility seems unlikely as artificial intelligence is a totally different sort of intelligence to human intelligence and a paradigm shift would have to occur first, but if machines ever became self-aware, and if Amber Rudd’s logic was the training set for judging human intelligence, what conclusion would they draw? Human intelligence would appear to them flawed if it could not be trusted to distinguish truth from falsehood without the assistance of dumb machines to filter out so-called extremist inputs.
While technologies change, humans don’t change much, and the Home Secretary’s proposal to block internet content with computer algorithms is a cruder version of the censorship that Quraysh employed against the Prophet Mohammad (peace and blessings be upon him) when the leaders of Jahiliyah implored visitors to Mecca not to listen to the Prophet as his words were claimed to have a power of bewitchment! At least Quraish did not take away the choice of whether to listen or not. The UK government wants to make the internet a closed place and take-away that choice.
The intellectual decay of the West is truly highlighted this century by its inability to handle wisely the challenges posed by technology. With computer assisted distortion of public opinions in the last US election, and the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s admission last week that even the forthcoming mid-term elections are suffering from Russian meddling, it seems that the democracy machine is spinning out of sane human control.
It is essential for humans to regain control of their future by opening up to vigorous intellectual debate rather than having machines control what they hear.
Censorship will never help, and will only stupefy people and make them more susceptible to ‘fake news’ and manipulation. In the end, those who are relying upon machines for salvation will fall victim to what their hands have made.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Abdullah Robin