It was hard enough to form a clear perception of reality when all we had to deal with was the propaganda of plutocrat-owned media corporations and the indoctrination of our power-serving education systems. Now on top of those still-persisting obfuscations we’ve got things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and an exponentially growing field of AI perception management to work through.

I remember watching Julian Assange give a talk way back in 2017 where he described a future in which artificial intelligence is able to harvest the data of individual internet users and then manipulate the information they see online in a custom-built perceptual prism designed to manipulate their thinking at a level far too subtle to be noticed. He compared it to the way a computer program can play chess with strategies looking 20 to 30 moves ahead at a level the human brain just can’t keep up with, saying that we’ll one day have artificial intelligence that can manipulate public perception with a similar degree of sophistication.

Our rulers see AI as an opportunity to recapture the degree of social control that was shaken by the arrival of widespread internet access — a loss of information hegemony we’ve seen oligarchs and empire managers openly complaining about with regard to how social media has spread public dissent on issues like Israel and Palestine.

Journalist Whitney Webb has flagged the fact that Google plutocrat Eric Schmidt co-authored a book with war criminal Henry Kissinger which envisions a future where the public becomes increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to do our thinking and creative expression for us, allowing our consciousness to become further and further intertwined with these oligarch-owned technologies.

“The Kissinger/Eric Schmidt book on AI basically states that the real promise of AI, from their perspective, is as a tool of perception manipulation — that eventually people will not be able to interpret or perceive reality without the help of an AI via cognitive diminishment and learned helplessness,” Webb warns.

Once we’ve outsourced our cognitive sovereignty to AI, our minds have been captured by the owners of the machines.