""It was allowed to put breath into the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak; and it was allowed to cause anyone who would not worship the image of the beast to be put to death." " Revelation 13:15

Implications of the growth of Technology

Technology against Israel and God - and us

We are becoming used to ever-increasing sophistication in what we consume through the technical marvels that now fill our homes and offices. But we are not good at understanding the malign influences being fed into our lives and those of our children and young people?

Elsewhere on wildolive I have briefly considered a huge range of things being weaponized against Israel, but many of the (non explosive) weapons are being used against all who would live a godly life.

Technology is advancing so rapidly today that very few really understand it. Indeed, Artificial Intelligence experts hold widely differing views on the subject, including whether AI (thinking machines) will continue to develop themselves beyond the point where anybody understands them and one day decides that humankind is the problem and should be eliminated.

The technically savvy public keenly embraces each new development, some manage enough while the rest struggle to come to terms with it and avoid being left behind and excluded. But almost nobody considers how communication technology can be (and is) used to control us and our opinions.

"The man who defines the terms controls the debate" Mike Evans

To start from way back, the printing press gave us easy access to a Bible of our own, but it also allowed the propagation of every kind of evil and perversion. Even earlier, when everything was written by hand, we read (Acts 19:19)

and a considerable number of those who had engaged in occult practices threw their scrolls in a pile and burned them in public. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, it came to fifty thousand drachmas.

Television, and to a lesser extent radio, allows us to take in material containing the opinions of people whose motives and worldview we do now know or even attempt to understand. In programmes such as political or current affairs debates it is relatively easy to identify where speakers are coming from; but what about the producer's choice of guest? Possibly the worst examples are debates on Israel achieving balance with an Arab and an Israeli speaker; but the Israeli turns out to hold the same views as the Arab.

Consider how every Nature programme with wonderful visuals and high production values all seems to end up terrifying our children with unproven ecological disaster theories and the extinction of furry animals. This climate alarmism has taken over broadcasting and the scientists who do not accept the theories that climate events result from man-made factors, mainly CO2 emission. Scientists and experts who dispute this orthodoxy have just been excluded from the media.

In September 2023, sixteen hundred prominent scientists in the USA published a document declaring that, The 'Climate Emergency' Is a Hoax.

reported by by Robert Williams of Gatestone Institute

More than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have signed a declaration saying that "There is no climate emergency." The declaration is unlikely to get any attention from the mainstream media, unfortunately, but it is important for people to know about: the mass climate hysteria and the destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change need to stop. "Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific," states the declaration.

How many other issues, like abortion, LGBT and other hot issues are being slanted by the broadcast corporations that recruit staff of a preferred "progressive" position? We should not switch off our critical faculties when relaxing with light entertainment as people with a viewpoint to push are writing the scripts and storylines. I would suggest that it is not an occasional glimpse of a breast that is corrupting society so much as the steady, uncritical normalising of immoral practices and lifestyles by including them in storylines. Even DIY programmes and advertisements seem to feature a quota of "gay" couples. This could be said to be a function of democracy; so should God-fearing people even accept the desirability of democracy?

I remember the sixties and while the swingers swung ordinary people generally believed in marriage and girls who became pregnant outside it were still looked down upon. But since that time entertainment has normalised what used to be outrageous immorality to the point where casual sex and sex on a first date are normal in almost all stories and in many people's lives. Living together without being married or getting married after the children come along is commonplace, and getting pregnant as the prelude to a single-parent life is going the same way. Few seem concerned about all the social problems of non-existent fathers and the absence of male role models. I would classify all this as Life imitating Art - in the form of drama, comedy, music and advertising which is a condensed form of all these with the addition of envy and covetousness.

That covers what "they" are feeding into you. But present-day technology has added the whole world population to the people who have an input into our minds. Social media platforms like facebook provide a very nice way of keeping in touch with family and friends, but they are powered by algorithms that analyse what we look at and take every opportunity to feed us more of the same and draw us in deeper. Facebook's income comes from the volume of traffic and by encouraging us to spend (waste) ever more time on their site. The same is true of YouTube. Advertising and influencing are also revenue earners. But like every medium, it can be used for good or bad, and the anti-Israel organisations, for instance, seem to have a much larger presence than pro-Israel and Christian activists.

As an aside, whilst considering influences channeled into our lives and particularly into our children by technolgy, access to social media poses other threats. Sexting, sharing sexually explicit images might sound fun but could have devastating consequences later in life when these images are still floating around the internet for malicious journalists to publish should one become famous. Sexually explicit images can be shared by ex pertners with similar damage ensuing. The WikiHow web site even has a page about how to take erotic selfies. Many parents have stopped sharing pictures of their children on social media because they have no control of their spread and some paedophiles/pornographers use these pictures for their purposes. (Think - Artificial Intellegence image creation)

Twitter (or X as Elon Musk is trying to rebrand it) is a very immediate text-based chat system that many people seem to have constantly available for reading opinions and responding. But again, anybody with a smartphone can spread his ideas and get them shared among their friends in an exponential spread - no matter if the opinions are true or false, good or evil. It is the users' responsibility to evaluate what they read but how many do? Thus you are bombarded with the opinions of every ignorant but opinionated person on the system. This is evidenced by the culture that seems to accept the views of somebody who is famous (possibly just for being famous) and entertainment stars getting their opinion on subjects on which they know nothing apart from what they get from the media like Twitter. This effect has been well labelled as the echo chamber effect because the algorithms feed you content that matches your opinions and prejudices. Some might ask if Twitter is anti-Semitic but this misses the point as these things start as a blank slate and are driven by what users put into them. But when anti-Semites, for instance, start uploading their hatred and find willing recipients the whole system becomes poisonous.

There are worse dangers lurking behind social media, as much material is not even from genuine human beings but generated by internet trolls and "bots" (robots that read postings and generate responses) Russia operates large troll farms to influence public opinion - for instance during US Presidential campaign - to subvert national interests for their own political ends. I would strongly recommend "LikeWar: THE WEAPONISATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA" by Emerson Brooking.

I would sadly suggest that few Christians or Israel supporters engage in attempting to resist the enemies of Christianity, Israel and Western liberal values, and if they discern this bad material will just log off without attempting to push back against the malevolent actors. I suppose it could be claimed that these platforms are democratic and offer freedom of speech to bad and good alike, but since God-fearing folks are a minority it is just as Jesus told us it would be, John 15:8

"If the world hates you, understand that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would have loved its own. But because you do not belong to the world - on the contrary, I have picked you out of the world - therefore the world hates you.

The same is true of accepting the billions of years Old Earth and Evolution narrative in place of the Bible just because it is relentlessly pushed into our living rooms and into our children's minds by people and organisations that are evangelically atheist. (see Romans 12:2)

The application of Artificial Intelligence

The phrase "Artificial Intelligence" must be familiar to everybody these days but can we distinguish the truth from science fiction like, for instance, the Terminator movies in which a defence system named "Skynet" has become independent of human beings and is seeking to destroy humanity? Like all science fiction, it is simple enough to follow an assumption such as the ever-increasing ability of computers eventually overtaking human understanding. Maybe this is inevitable unless mankind says, "Enough!" and stops developing AI. This is not an ability that mankind has yet demonstrated. AI experts are divided on the level of threat posed.

Chat GPT is a new application of AI and its amazing achievements are causing many to speculate that disaster looms but experts point out that Chat GPT is only one use of AI; it is a LLM, a Large Language Model, that builds its knowledge base as it is used and it is now able to respond to input requests or questions with good quality, human sounding language or good quality documents. This obviously has huge implications for plagiarism and cheating in essay writing for study assignments. But, like social media, its language model will acquire bad material from bad people. As AI started attracting attention, one commentator asked if Chat GPT is anti-Semitic, and clearly, on day one it was not, but because the majority of input from the public is likely to be anti-Semitic, Chat GPT will become anti-Semitic.

Other AI systems place equally amazing tools in the hands of anybody who is savvy enough to use them. A user can input a text request for a painting of himself or some famous person, in any situation, in the style of Van Gogh or whatever and receive an amazing image. This sounds fun but is threatening the livelihoods of living artists. But more dangerous is the threat this capability poses with the production of Deep Fake photographic images of anybody in any situation, meaning that no image we see can be taken at face value. Israel's enemies have been using staging and image manipulation for years now but they will surely embrace this technology as soon as they can.

The story is told of Google creating a teenage girl avatar on social media who would interact with others like a real girl and did it very well. But after a few days they had to shut her down as her dialogue had become totally evil.

TikTok

TikTok started out as a young people's app for sharing fun videos of dancing, singing and so on, live and spread around the world.

But time has revealed a much darker face, as explained in a documentary on UK's BBC3 "Inside Tiktok's real-life frenzies - from riots to false murder accusations - BBC News" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66719572)

This documentary focussed mainly on the way TikTok motivates users to post content on serious subjects in the hope of gathering worldwide "Likes", becoming a recognised contributor - and being rewarded with money. This has led young people to pick up on significant news stories and share their ignorant opinions around the world. One immaculately turned-out young lady interviewee has taken to attending crime scenes and believing herself to be a TV investigative journalist although she has no experience or qualifications. Her posts then attracted a host of other people to join with their ignorant opinions and false accusations creating anguish for those involved and seriously hampering the police investigation.

Another type of TikTok frenzy examined was causing copycat violent and illegal behaviours among other TiKTok users who are able to see a happening as it develops and join in or organise their own nearer home. School protests, turning into riots, were encouraged live on TikTok and spread in days from one school to schools all over England.

TikTok also provided the live build-up to looting events in London's Oxford Street in which multitudes of people entered shops and took away goods, completely overwhelming security staff.

The documentary focussed on the problem of frenzies but there are plenty more problems. Being the BBC, they did not ponder how TikTok could (maybe it already is ) revolutionise the already appalling Israel hatred and anti-Semitism that is so evident in our nations. There is little hope that the young and impressionable can be kept from buying into lies and blood libels when they spread so fast and so widely.

Malevolent intent

Material extracted from an essay by Gordon G. Chang - a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow

TikTok is China's first truly global internet success story and is wildly popular, especially among teenagers and tweens. It is addictive because it was designed to be, powered by perhaps the world's most sophisticated artificial intelligence to deliver customized content, perhaps better than any other app. TikTok has been accused of surveilling users, censoring content, and mishandling information of minors but the most important allegation involves manipulation of users. Artificial intelligence enables TikTok to populate your newsfeed before you add a single friend to the platform and creates a profile of who you are, including your fears and vulnerabilities. This is different from facebook. Artificial intelligence permits Beijing to use your profile to figure out what will motivate you, and send content that will influence you to act in certain ways. This is thought to be especially easy to do with the impressionable young.

TikTok can be used to trigger desired responses and behaviours. that could trigger wars, economic collapse, riots, and protests of all kinds. Some believe Beijing tweaked TikTok's algorithm to inflame the George Floyd protests, which flared across the USA in hours and spilled out around the world. Many teens used TikTok to reserve seats at a President Trump rally they had no intention of going to, so the TV news was able to show many empty seats.

From a Bloomberg Businessweek article

TikTok can serve up a stream of anxiety and despair to teens and now faces a flood of lawsuits after multiple deaths.

Two weeks after one boy's death, his mother searched his social media accounts and found his TikTok account had more than 3,000 videos he had bookmarked, liked, saved or tagged. While he had searched for Batman, basketball, weightlifting, and motivational speeches, the algorithm had served him many videos about depression, hopelessness and death.

TikTok's original recommendation algorithm was designed by a team of engineers in China, working for ByteDance. But while the app was made in China and used almost worldwide, it can't even be downloaded in its homeland.

Summarising media influence on public perception

Do all these possibilities for disruption fomented by shady malicious figures sound to you melodramatic or apocalyptic?

Can you see anything that will change the present trajectory of violent confrontation in place of disagreement, attributable to the echo chamber effect of social media, that we have witnessed recently in the USA over presidential elections and in Israel over the issue of democracy reform. Is it leading to the collapse of Western civilisation? (along with other factors like demographics)

Has the genie been let out of the bottle leaving us powerless stop it?

Obviously, We should do our best to protect our children and young people, but peer pressure to own and use a smartphone is not easily overcome. But we should at least keep alert to what is happening and talk about the problems.

But there are worse plans for interference with our heads - particularly Transhumanism

Klaus Schwab - leader of the World Economic Forum and its The Great Reset) , wants to see it "Lead To Fusion Of Our Physical, Digital, & Biological Identity."

He made it clear that transhumanism is an integral part of “ The Great Reset” when he said that the fourth industrial revolution would “ lead to a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” which in his book he clarifies is implantable microchips that can read your thoughts.

Internet search for Transhumanism for further discussion - for example Whos afraid of Transhumanism - we all should be.

It is difficult to define, but it's a growing movement. Transhumanism has its own central organization (Humanity+), its own demographic base (Silicon Valley), even its own political formation (the Longevity Party).

On one level the movement's goals appear benign. One of its key documents, "Principles of Extropy,"" sums up the basic values of transhumanism: "perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society, self-direction, and rational thinking." The local Rotary Club would not object.

But the fundamental ambition of transhumanism is more problematic. Its architects champion a use of technology to accelerate the evolution of humanity so radically that at the end of the process humanity as such would disappear. A superior posthuman being would emerge. According to Wikipedia, "Transhumanism is the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available knowledge to eliminate ageing and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities." From its inception, the abolition of human death and ageing has been one of the goals of transhumanism as it engineers a new being freed from the biological constraints of the current human condition.

( See also the relationship to Eugenics from Darwinism )

To conclude

I write this page not in the belief that I can stop such global phenomena, but to cause people to compare these events with what the Bible tells us to expect at the end of this age.

How will these signs influence our worldview and our priorities?

How much longer will mankind be allowed to carry on along this road?

Posted 03/10/23

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