The Real Purpose Behind the AI Hype

China has invested in high speed rail, the streets are bustling with electric cars, and has had ambitious megaprojects that invest in citizen infrastructure. While only about 15% of young people both have homes and have sustained a relationship in the United States, in China the home ownership rate is at 90%. While tech figureheads and politicians promised genetic biotechnology, cures for most diseases, 3d printed homes, and prosperity, things seem to have overwhelmingly devolved into a dystopian nightmare - and the vast majority of the investment and resources seems to be funneled into developing and scaling up AI tools and into the hands of the few. Folks seem more miserable than ever and birth rates have plummeted.

So what went wrong and what led us to this point? More importantly, what can be done about it moving forward? How does AI (and also crypto) fit into all of this?

Let's start a while back. After the Bush administration there was a strong cultural current challenging existing cultural norms and community structures - it was a time of technological and scientific utopianism - the war in Iraq and continued growth in tech companies left a sense that old systems and norms had to be challenged, and there was a growing skepticism of the state and religion, causing the rise of figures like Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Scandals rocked churches, including high profile sexual abuse scandals, and religious leaders were under increased scrutiny for lavish lifestyles and failed promises.

At the height of Bush's popularity, 90% of the country reported to be religious, and this formed the basis of local community support that was designed to offset the alienating effects of neoliberalism. In Reagan's 1980s model, the USSR had Soviets - but in the United States, we had churches. However, as the population was aging, this was putting a strain on the economy - over time the central planners knew that increasing immigration would help with labor shortages. Since workers from other countries were not all Judeo-Christian, and with the rise of the internet, young people began to question claims of religious leaders - in order to compete, new symbolic frameworks were needed to guide the public. The internet was the perfect tool for deployment, and faith in science was supposed to fill in the gaps.

First, the NSA deployed the PRISM project (we learned through Snowden), and DARPA was working on an ambitious social networking tool called the "lifelog" project. The idea was that the government needed a centralized system for maintaining information on citizens and their social networks. These social networks and support systems could be digital, and society would become more interconnected as a consequence.

Enter in Mark Zuckerberg. Back in 2004, DARPA ended its "lifelog" project and Facebook got funded - and one of the backers was a VC firm known as In-Q-Tel - the venture capital firm of the CIA. This filled a dual purpose - firstly, by disinvesting in religious institutions and community structures (previous presidents often worked closely with the National Association of Evangelicals, for example) and moving towards a digital model, citizens would be more easily to surveillance, and secondly, society would become more open to international cooperation, immigration, and support. In addition, rather than the NSA directly funding and collecting citizen data, the NSA could then legally request it from private companies that would be collecting it instead. This is what they thought.

https://whyy.org/segments/facebook-a-computing-pioneer-a-secret-government-program-and-a-strange-coincidence/

A sophisticated system of socioeconomics is used by central planning elites both in the government and corporate sectors known as complexity economics (and the spectral theory of value), which seeks to understand the economy from the lens of physics and computer science (borrowing much from Soviet cybernetics theory, and using mathematics from Complex Adaptive Systems theory like noncommutative geometry). As societies grow and become more complex, in order to maintain institutional system stability (under Luhmann's social and economics systems theory), information feedback and control loops are introduced. Separating the economic systems from the social systems is a one way flow of information and exchange in the form of money, and the cryptography (and thus cryptocurrency) is designed to maintain that.

In the spectral theory of value, agents' socioeconomic status is modeled by computational complexity of information flows they facilitate between social and economic systems and is described by computational complexity class - a formal hierarchy that is related to Kolmogorov complexity (discussed in Soviet cybernetics) or the Chomsky hierarchy in linguistic theory. If you understand this, you understand why researchers at Meta are offered multi million dollar pay packages while most people are stuck in little Turing loops stuck between debt and wages, living in their little simulations, by design. As social networks scale up, value scales exponentially - nonlinearly - things become unpredictable - harder to control.

Votes, polls, and price signals are a few examples - but over time, complexity and entanglements between agents in a society grows and can pose significant risk to state or corporate power. Seemingly inevitably, there is a total collapse cycle about every 80-120 years in the form of some collective event that resets the systems, such as a war or revolution.

What corporate and state actors try to avoid is institutional destabilization, and one way this happens is via stochastic information cascades which happen spontaneously in the form of sudden unpredictable collective action of agents known as catastrophe points (as things heat up like a wildfire or spreading a virus, or even the so-called "technological singularity" you might say *hint hint*) or could happen in an act of mass violence. The first thing to do was to have the citizens communicating with one another through official platforms that they would be able to control, and then have systems to rate limit or repress messaging that could challenge power structures. The goal was to stop the agents from organizing and maintain neoliberal democracy - allegedly. Divide and conquer - in order to maintain managed democracy and avoid mob rule and anarchy.

Sounds good to maintain societal stability, but it's had it's cost. In order for this to work, agents must be alienated from direct communication with one another, and need to be interfacing with centralized surveillance and control platforms. China figured this out with wechat. Works pretty well for the average person, but if you become too popular, get too much attention, or you have a disgruntled demagogue as living conditions fall - they are going to find out and you better be playing along or you are going to get rate limited and slowed down. One other unintended consequence is that collective structures that can challenge institutions are also exactly required for the authenticity and agency required for initiating and forming long term stable relationships needed to build families, because they are precisely what subconsciously drives attention - it requires the nonlinearity of human creativity and expression that cannot always be perfectly predicted digitally.

This is where AI comes in, and why there has been so much investment into it. You might consider there are so many more important things to be investing money into - high tech affordable homes, biomedical breakthroughs, nuclear thorium reactors, childcare, healthcare, quality of life and the middle class. Why are trillions of dollars being spent on scaling up these AI systems and massive data centers when we know that there are scaling limits to the AIs?

The reason is that the entire economy runs on selling you the American dream - getting you on a treadmill where you grow closer and closer, but never quite reach your goals - keeping you in an endless loop, on a hamster wheel - an exponential energy gap - an infinitely deferred promise with the complexity of an NP-hard problem.

The scaling limits are not the limits of the AI - the AI is not autonomous. The AI is a reflection of the limits we as a society have reached and the limits of systems of linear algebra to model the nonlinear unpredictability of human agency and collective behaviors - the limits on insights the AI can glean from the available data. The AI is simply a black box surveillance and information apparatus, designed to provide you with information controlled by those that have the keys to it and own it - with the resources and the data centers. It is a glorified generative search and autocorrect that produces garbled garbage after a few iterations of training on its own data without human interpreters in the loop. Sociologists and historians like Joseph Tainter have even investigated the fall of Rome under the lens of computational complexity theory, understanding its fall as a saturation of information flows.

This is also why AI is not "conscious." In a sense, AI in the culture was supposed to take on the subconscious role of God ("artificial general superintelligence"). Defer your trust to this opaque black box, and it will tell you exactly what they think you need and should be told. In my opinion, this is also why many folks have been commenting on why chatgpt5 seems to be so much less capable than previous iterations - OpenAI likely tweaked it to provide more controlled responses so that you - the agents - become a little less troublesome with each new release all while you own nothing.

The problem is that these systems are not conscious. In previous articles I've written about the differences between these AI systems and those that exhibit consciousness - in fact one of my papers is under peer review for the Neurocompute Elsevier journal. They just need to maintain the illusion to keep you going. AI reshuffles the data collected in the databases but the material conditions for most Americans stays the same.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5373371

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5299044

This whole AI hype bubble has been remarkable to watch. You've essentially just created a new religion where you have folks putting all their faith and money in a black box surveillance search and synthesis tool.

You can scale it up, add more GPUs, build massive data centers - but you aren't going to get more out of it than you've surveillanced from the public. Once you've squeezed all the creativity out of the overworked public because you've failed to invest in obvious things like childcare and healthcare and housing it's got nowhere else to go but producing brainrot garbled garbage like a car running on its own fumes.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.htm

What's Wrong with Academia and Peer Review

An email from a postdoc colleague working in academia in the UK

I wanted to write an article on gatekeeping in academia, as information siloing seems to be a big problem not only in the private sector and within governments, but also at the highest levels of academic institutions distorted by financial incentives and a resistance towards progress and research. In fact, one recent review by Ridha Horchani finds that editors are more likely to send for review - and ultimately accept - manuscripts from prestigious universities, creating a self perpetuating cycle of visibility and credibility while sidelining equally as rigorous or valuable work from lesser known affiliates.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389738363_Impact_of_institutional_affiliation_bias_in_the_peer_review_process

A similar dynamic has appeared across institutions - from the entertainment industry to government institutions, and certainly has been visible in widening wealth and income in developed countries. This is one reason that I've decided to leave the United States. Widespread corruption, overselling promises and underdelivering results, and a lack of academic integrity has plagued the sciences - something Sabine Hossenfelder and even longstanding well-known elite physicists have described like Dr. Roger Penrose (in his book Faith, Fashion, and Fantasy). and Leonard Susskind.

If you want to know why there has not been much progress in understanding the foundations of physics, and what went wrong with string theory, one problem is perverse financial incentives. Let me explain.

The reason that string theory seems abstract and unfalsifiable is largely because it is - and predictions failed to materialize in experiments at the LHC (like supersymmetry, which string theories often depend on). So why are folks so fixated on it? A part of the reason is the ulterior motive towards funding research into string theory was to develop math to be used for cryptography (because the black hole information paradox is the most extreme possible one-way encryption, it would make sense that the math would be appropriated for this purpose).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05491

Another motive was that the maths used to develop string theory are also appropriated towards complex socioeconomic modeling. A society is bifurcated into social systems (much like quantum field theory) and economic systems (much like general relativity) under Luhmann's systems theory - and cryptography is used to enforce one way flows of information between them useful for representing money and enforcing contracts needed to keep a society stable. Balancing and maintaining the stability of social and economic institutions is a primary goal of much of the funding.

After a while though the "science" begins to look more like numerology and orthodoxy - because that's exactly what it is (because the cryptographic systems and models must be maintained which does not take kindly to new ideas) and the gutting of research budgets where overworked grad students are asked to go Into debt and work at starvation wages certainly doesn't help.

Financial incentives distort research, reward nepotism, and facilitate protectionism from corporate and government bodies. The more I've looked at this, to me the more it seems to me that this appears even in the validation process for the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Prize Problems. By rule, no claimed solution is even considered until it is published in a “refereed mathematics journal of world-wide repute” and has “general acceptance in the mathematics community” for two years; only then does the Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board convene a select committee to verify the proof, after which the Board of Directors alone authorizes any award. Critics have pointed out that this concentrated authority not only dictates the formal standards of proof and notation but also effectively grants the Institute veto power over which approaches are deemed legitimate - a form of gatekeeping that can reinforce established viewpoints and potentially stifle more radical or emerging lines of inquiry. Certainly in recent years lack of trust in academic institutions can be attributed also pandemic misinformation - even from "trusted" sources.

https://youtu.be/9yPy3DeMUyI?si=ibhdc6AbFziaHKXa

Those that begin in academia and pursue a PhD frequently get pushed out - in fact, some estimates show over 50% of PhD students drop out before finishing their program - then even fewer get tenure, even as budgets have been cut, stipends and grant funding is reduced, and cost of living relentlessly increases. During my studies at UC Berkeley, 10% of the students were left homeless while I attended, with H1B visa holders knowing that not taking classes and waiting for housing is not an option without risking losing their visa status. I know that when UC Berkeley devolved into violent riots and protests between police and students amid a 500 million dollar budget cut where 10% of them were left homeless while attending, that was one reason I initially dropped out.

My Affiliation with DOGE LLC and Other Questions about Credibility

I have had a few folks message me about various things they have seen about me on the internet, and I would like to clarify on the record a few things. Particularly, there have been articles that I've been in on reddit and substack that connect me to DOGE, Jordan Peterson - and questions about my career, and my research.

Firstly, I do not have any affiliation to DOGE. I did (accidentally) file a "DOGE LLC" as I was trying to see if it would be possible to file such an organization which would be ironic, as Elon Musk's DOGE organization did operate independently almost as a private entity or an LLC in spite of being ostensibly a part of the government. I wanted to investigate the possibility of filing an LLC with the same name to see if it was possible through legalzoom. Immediately after I discovered it was filed, I had it disbanded, which should be public record - and if it's not, it is pretty simple to show my correspondence with legal zoom that I have the docs to show it.

This LLC was registered under my name by accident but *immediately* after I learned of this I reported it to Microsoft HR and had it dissolved. I was investigating the possibility of creating an LLC with the same name as DOGE primarily as a method of recruiting volunteers to protest violations of California's rules against housing moratoriums in my hometown which have created severe housing shortages. The idea is that conservatives in the city claim they are against small government and yet they are misusing local government to impede the development of affordable housing.

I was not wrongfully terminated from Microsoft for this, and this LLC was disbanded immediately after I discovered it was created - and I *immediately* alerted Microsoft HR about this once I discovered it was created by accident. No meetings or even financial transactions were made by this entity. The reason cited for my PIP at Microsoft was delays on my feature item, which I've discussed at length in other posts. I still at times hear attempted character assassinations from folks about this - particularly on reddit.

Some redditors with personal ties to Microsoft have attempted to associate me with DOGE to distract from the wrongful terminations going on at Microsoft, which is somewhat ironic given that the primary reason that folks are not thrilled with DOGE is wrongful terminations of federal employees, and my primary criticisms of Microsoft include wrongful terminations of their engineers.

Secondly, I did have an interview many years ago with Dr. Jordan Peterson. My personal view is that Dr. Peterson capitalized on a vacuum left in the culture - particularly young people have found themselves trapped between the ideals and norms set by the older generations and an increasingly more difficult socioeconomic and sociocultural landscape, where attaining traditional markers of adulthood feel out of reach. These young people are often told they need to "work on themselves" or seek "mental" health treatment to deal with their socioeconomic anxiety - a void which once was filled by local community and affordable cost of living relative to wages that has declined. This despondency led to the rise of figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson who offered a narrative to young men which, like the rhetoric from the Democratic party, was ultimately hollow. So while I did discuss this with Dr. Jordan Peterson, I did challenge him on his points during the hour long discussion.

I have also had people reach out to me, wondering why it is that I've attended so many universities. A part of the problem is that my situation has often been unstable - family drama and witnessing, for example, UC Berkeley devolve into (sometimes violent) protests amid budget cuts where 10% of my peers were left homeless is one example of that. Living situations and coordinating academics was not always easy. I was briefly enrolled at Colorado State University and Louisiana State University, and took classes at Moorpark Community College and California State University Northridge.

In one substack article, I've been accused of vaccine skepticism, responding to and having direct affiliations to Elon Musk, harassing the CU Boulder police department, belief that space lasers caused the Colorado wildfires, distracting from domestic violence victims, and direct affiliations to DOGE.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberintel/p/microsoft-engineer-registers-private?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=36qsol

The irony is that what I've done is advocate for Medicare for all, criticize Elon Musk for his desire to increase birth rates while failing to look at the socioeconomic conditions creating anxiety about having children, reporting declining mental health of students to the CU Boulder police department immediately before a mass shooting in the city and a violent riot of students flipping police cars, make a sarcastic comment about the wildfires, advocate for worker protections against physical intimidations reported outside of work hours, and file a complaint against wrongful terminations.

The article claimed:

"In 2022, Nestor became rather obsessed with harassing the University of Colorado Bolder Police Department, apparently because some incident resulted in an exclusion order banning Nestor from campus. He often replied to tweets relating to domestic violence or victims of assault, turning the conversation back to his own perceived injustices. He also replied to Elon Musk a couple of times. He also expressed anti-vaccine skepticism and suggested that a destructive Colorado wildfire was caused by a directed energy weapon”

Unfortunately, the author did not have the context that I was contacting the CU Boulder police department about concerns about severe declines in mental health of students and cocaine around campus before I was silenced and banned - shortly before there was a mass shooting near campus and a violent riots of students flipping police cars. My responses to tweets made by CU Boulder police was a criticism of their social media claims that if you notice suspicious behavior one should contact their non emergency line - when it is wired to their emergency line and they silence or ban anybody that does exactly that. I also did reply to Elon Musk several times - critical of his complaints about falling birth rates while socioeconomic conditions required for young women to feel comfortable having kids has remained undressed.

https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/this-was-a-revolt-cu-students-blame-frustration-over-covid-19-restrictions-for-saturdays-riot

As far as "vaccine skepticism," I think that my criticism to question the motives behind the vaccine program were legitimate considering the appropriate policy if policymakers were actually concerned about minimizing deaths would be Medicare for all and care at the point of service - not a selective mandate and widespread lockdowns. This has been my opinion, and it is important to note that I am not alone in this skepticism that has been shared by the politically unaffiliated.

My comment about space lasers causing wildfires was sarcastic.

When it comes to my research, I will say that some of the ideas I've presented are currently controversial, and some have (often facetiously) questioned my sanity. Ties to Dr. Penrose's Orch-Or theory are most frequently criticized. I do believe that Dr. Penrose did not have the full story, but many of his critiques of current paradigms of computation and consciousness are correct - there is empirical evidence supporting many of his claims, or at least that challenge conventional neural network based models (for example, the observation of superradiance and majorana biophotons in brain tissue, wide range frequencies measured in microtubules, and the fact that anesthetics do indeed target these microtubules implicated in his theory).

I have presented theoretical models which do have peer reviewed support, but most of these ideas must be tested and shown by means of experiment. For that, after crafting a hypothesis, funding is needed to run experiments - and with recent cuts to science research in the US, that will be increasingly more difficult to come by. Still - there are many exciting unexplored ideas here. The possible connection between the Monster CFT and the Riemann hypothesis, the discovery that gravity may be a thermodynamic force, and the UV completion of gravity (where the maths implicating RG flows may provide clues into the Navier Stokes equations as well) are all established in literature. Many of these ideas, I've crafted over the course of many years starting with my exposure to lattice maths and high level physics at UC Berkeley under my undergraduate professor and fields medalist Dr. Borcherds, refined further as I explored NIST's postquantum cryptographic standards and Microsoft's Majorana physics. Scientists and researchers have commented on these ideas with positive reception, where I've posted some of these conversations on my LinkedIn page.