Ep 326 - AI in the Sky: Modern Warfare with Peter Byrne

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:43

: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. It's been a bit, but we have been talking about AI [artificial intelligence] nonstop.We've looked at it in schools. We have looked at it in terms of education and students using it and plagiarizing. We've looked at it in marketing. We've looked at it in all different facets. But today we're going to go down a darker lane.Today we're going to look at AI in the military space, in the surveillance space. And we're going to talk about some things that maybe are pretty uncomfortable for people, things you need to really get your mind wrapped around.And one of the things that jumped out at me right up front was you got to have an expert that understands these things. You got to have people that are really digging into it because otherwise it just flies right past you. And I'll introduce my guest momentarily.But what I'm hoping is that people understand that our government is doing a lot of things in our name. They're working with private industrythat's got a very different goal in mind than what we maybe would as citizens, as people who supposedly vote for things which, you know where I stand on that? Placebo 101.And so with us going into this, I have asked my guest Peter Byrne, who is a Northern California based journalist who combines investigative reporting with science writing.And in 2017, Peter's 11-part series and the Point Raise Light Busted Breast Cancer, Money and the Media won the top science writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.He's received national, regional and local recognition for investigative work, writing style and in-depth profiles of politicians, grifters, grafters and artists. And more to the point, he's a part of our friends at Project Censored.And what he has done is he has started to create a 10-part series, I believe it is, on the military use of AI and what I'm going to do is bring up Military AI Watch here, the dangerous militarization of AI and the profiteering behind it with my guest, Peter Byrne. Peter, welcome to the show, sir.

Peter Byrne: 00:02:51

: Oh, thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:53

: Absolutely. I really appreciate you doing this. This is a very serious subject.I triple guarantee most people are unaware of and if they are aware of it, somehow or another they filed it under don't think about or I'll lose my lunch. Tell me a little bit about your 10-part series Military AI Watch.

Peter Byrne: 00:03:12

: Most people think about artificial intelligence, think about ChatGPT, how they can do their homework and how they can use it in their business to parse consumer patterns and things like that.Most people don't realize that artificial intelligence is a huge movement in the US military these days, primarily led by the US but also in China and other militaries around the world. But the thing about it is that artificial intelligence, it is not actually intelligence.The computerization of warfare, the automation of warfare actually before computers were invented, has been around since before the catapult. People engaged in battle have always hired scientists like Archimedes to invent weapons of war that had automatic capacities.But what we have in World War II particularly is the advent of the use of analog computers such as were embedded in bomb sites for the B17s that were dropping bombs on Europe and Japan.Those were basically analog computers, and they had an automatic capacity to drop the bombs when they assessed that the cloud conditions were right, et cetera, et cetera.During that time, MIT and other universities were putting a lot of effort using federal funds to create automatic weapons systems that after the war really took off. And one of the people that was involved in that was this polymath, Norbert Wiener, who was a child genius. He did quantum mechanics.He was a revolutionary in pioneering computation. He could do biology.And he wrote a book in the 1950s called Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which basically laid out the information type of science that informs computation and how computers talk to one another today. I was just looking at this this morning, preparing for our talk and he wrote in Cybernetics, "We've decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name of cybernetics, which we form from the Greek word for steersman."When we think of cyberspace and cybernetics today, we pretty much, I think, believe that it just relates to computer programs and apps and the ability to use the Internet. But it's actually much more than that. It's about control, it's about social control. Norbert Wiener wrote this immensely popular book back in the 50s.In those days people didn't read on screens, they read newspapers and books in print. Arguably, they were more intelligent because they were less stupefied by social media at the time. It brought to the forefront a lot of moral questions that Wiener later addressed in a book called God & Golem, Inc.,in which he likened the advent of automated warfare, which is the early form of what we call artificial intelligence, to the mythological golem figure in the Jewish tradition, which the golem is a creature created in the form of a human from mud and clay.And when you insert a piece of paper with the Word of God called a "shem" into the mouth of the golem, you can control the golem and it's very strong, and you can send it into battle, you can get it to do your homework, whatever, but if the piece of paper falls out, it goes berserk and it starts destroying everything.And he used that as a metaphor for how he saw the use of computation and artificial intelligence in warfare, in that it's not the Word of God that has been inserted into the military apparatus and it has gone berserk.And so my research, which has been going on for several years, has dealt a lot with primary research into government and military technical papers and all sorts of writings, including philosophical writings.I just got this new great book called the Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone by Antoine Bousquet, a European scholar who's done a great dive into these issues. But in the beginning of his book, he's got this little preface that says, "You see, control can never be a means to any practical end.It can never be a means to anything, but more control, like junk." And the quote is from William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch. So that drew me right into the book. It's very well written.So a lot of scholars and academics have been dealing with the issues of artificial intelligence and warfare by remote control very strongly since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, when the United States started to use drones and Hellfire missiles from the Predator drones that were billed as precision type of warfare, when in fact it wasn't. They were able to target individuals, but the individuals were often children or people on their way to work or whatever. We know the story.So what I wanted to do was to look into the science of military AI in the context of money. And my first piece, which came out three weeks ago, is called One Ring to Rule Them All.And the reason it was called that was because one of the first Silicon Valley startups to go into the military AI realm is Palantir, which is named after the seeing stone in the Lord of the Rings, where the dark evil lord Sauron could look into this lens, like stone crystal, and see where his enemies were and then locate them and slay them.And interestingly enough, Peter Thiel, who funded and operates Palantir, seems to identify with the dark lord Sauron, not with the hobbits that were trying to overthrow the evil orcs in the East. Now let's remember that Lord of the Rings was written by [J. R. R.] Tolkien basically as a hysterical response to the rise of Bolsheviks in Russia, right?And so the orcs were completely evil proletarian slaves.And so actually you could turn that around and look at the orcs as being the good guys and the hobbits as being the middle-class burghers who just wanted to promote capitalism.But in the case of Peter Thiel, we have to acknowledge that he's identifying with the Dark Lord ability to cast what Antoine Bousquet and others call the "martial gaze".And the martial gaze is a terrifying basilisk-type of laser-like gaze at the world that threatens destruction upon all objects, including living objects that come within its field of vision. So what we have within advent of Palantir is the cyberization of the martial gaze. Palantir is a program that sits on top of vast troves of data.It was founded by Thiel with a $30 billion investment. Thiel, by the way, was one of the founders of PayPal, along with Elon Musk. My friend calls him Ellen.He doesn't know that his other people call him Elon. Right? I like Ellen. And they're not programmers, they're not scientists, they're not cybernetics experts, they're salespeople and venture capitalists.Right? They're predators. So he starts Palantir and the program that was invented by other people that he hired, they're called Gotham and Foundryand they have other names, they're good programs. They are able to sit on top of vast amounts of data and see patterns in a user-friendly type of way.So the first contracts that Palantir had were with the CIA, which was one of its major funders, and with Homeland Securities, now known as ICE.It was instrumental in taking data that was streaming from surveillance towers on the border and from all the other electronic ways that Homeland Security and the CIA monitor people in the world and detect patterns. Are there useful patterns? Well, if you want to control people by terrifying them or by arresting them in secret or in public? Yes.Palantir was originally a private company, and it remained so until 2020 when it went public, which meant that for the first time, it had to file annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are public, and they are bound to reveal elements of their financial dealings and their operations. And you can also find out a lot about their mechanisms by looking at patent databases, which is a trove of wonderful information.And along the way, Thiel, who, by the way, to digress for a second, was the mentor for James David [JD] Vance. He basically created him as a political force, and he was one of the first funders of Trump, and he has immense influence in the current regime.Thiel hired this weirdo philosopher named Alexander Karp to be the front the CEO of Palantir.He apparently studied with [philosopher, Jurgen] Habermas in Frankfurt School, calls himself a progressive, and he's actually one of the most reactionary figures that's ever walked on the earth.He recently came out with a book about technology that has gotten all sorts of glowing reviews in the Washington Post and elsewhere, in which he says that, as I say in my article, he says basically that "China is our enemy. We have to destroy China, and anybody that is expressing un-American sentiments is going to find themselves in the crosshairs."So you've got this whole faux philosophical background invented by Thiel and Karp, who have this concept called the "network state", where they're going to eventually do away with democracy, do away with the vote for women and inferior biological entities, and create these fortresses on islands out at sea or in the desert in the southwest, in which there will be no laws and regulations about how to operate corporations. It's this fascist libertarian evolution of a seed that was planted in the actual origin of the Internet and of artificial intelligence itself.Because, as Yasha Levine wrote in his great 2008 book Surveillance Valley: [The Secret Military History of the Internet], Google was not born from a couple of students that wanted to do good in their world. It was funded from the very beginning by the National Security State. And it's claimed to be doing no evil was actually revelatory of that.It's doing the opposite.This whole little ethos in the beginning around the Internet and Cybernetics a la 70s versions, was emanating from Sausalito in the Bay Area, where Stuart Brandon and a few other people invented this cyber entity called The Well, which was basically just a chat where you could go and talk to your friends online. I used to use it. It was fun. And they had this whole quasi-hippie libertarian philosophy that was backing it.But the powers that be were looking at it from a completely different point of view, and they were weaponizing it from the very beginning and have been doing so.So you have these kind of hippie libertarians given philosophical cover to the Imperial War Machine, adopting Artificial Intelligence and the Internet and the command-and-control systems, events by social media and other communicatory devices, including the New York Times, you have them glomming onto this as a way to extend the martial gaze to the whole planet.And these ruthless, amoral venture capitalists like Thiel and Karp and Musk and Reid Hoffman and others were able to incorporate these startups and attract vast amounts of venture capital that was basically catalyzed by investments from the CIA and the Department of War. Some people call it the Department of Defense. I call it by its real name, which it used to have.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:14

: Uh huh.

Peter Byrne: 00:15:15

: And by the time Palantir went public in 2020, it had billions of dollars in contracts with military and intelligence agencies in the United States, in Europe and in some places in Southeast Asia. It had contracts with corporations such as Coca-Cola.But most of its applications were put to military intelligence migration patterns, spotting martial gaze type of activities. So Thiel goes public with Palantir in 2020. And when you look at the SEC reports, a very interesting pattern actually reveals itself.You don't need software to see it. They've never paid any federal income taxes.And their business model, which is being replicated by other Thiel companies and other startups in the military AI spectrum, their business model is to over promise, to attract vast amounts of venture capital, to go into the hole so they don't have to pay taxes because they can say they're operating at a loss and then go back to the venture capitalists and say, "You have all these sunk costs. We have these government contracts, give us some more money." They give them some more money. So it's this kind of Ponzi scheme in reverse. Right?

Steve Grumbine: 00:16:28

: Right.

Peter Byrne: 00:16:29

: By the time Thiel goes public, he's gotten a little bad press because some investigative reporters got the contract that he had with the Los Angeles Police Department to do predictive policing, which wasn't working out very well, as you may imagine. And so he hired people to be at his board, like a former Wall Street Journal reporter and military people, people from the NSA.And then he created ethics committees full of sellouts that would lend their name to do such a thing, and attempted to sway public opinion into the notion that Palantir was engaged in protecting the public good, when actually it's engaged in the opposite. So what you have happen is Palantir has these very competent pattern-recognition programs to put on top of huge data sets.Because when the National Security Agency is scooping up probably every telephone call and tweet in the world, they've got vast amounts of data stored. They can't parse it in real time, but you can use the Palantir software to sit on top of a database and go through and find what you want.If you want to find. Steve and Peter are tweeting to each other or DM-ing to each other about say overthrowing capitalist system, they'll come up with that.But they needed what they call kinetic delivery vehicles, which is they needed drones, missiles, submarines, and surface ships, and airplanes that can act autonomously, that don't require humans to man them or to woman them.So Thiel funded this new corporation called Anduril, which is named after the sword that is called the Flame of the West in the Lord of the Rings, another Lord of the Rings thing.It's also got an entity called Mithril Capital, named after a Lord of the Rings saying, and then JD Vance has Narya Capital, which is another thing from the Lord of the Rings. These guys are just like soaring all over the place.But Anduril, which is run by another young Sauron-type figure called Palmer Luckey, who made his first billion selling virtual goggles to Facebook. Meta. [Wow.] Anduril hired a lot of scientists based in Southern California to create relatively cheap weapons that can operate autonomously in warfare.And that's exactly what they have been doing.So the mantra that's being put out there by the Silicon Valley AI militarists is that they can do it cheaper and quicker and more efficiently, "it" being war, which means killing masses of people because war is not against troops anymore, it's against populations, [Gaza] that they can do it more efficiently than the traditional military-industrial "so called" complex, which went from being 55 corporations in 1960 to five corporations today. The so called "primes": Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, et cetera.If you want to look at who gets like the most funding of any company in the United States, it's Lockheed Martin. It's something like $160 billion a year, it's just an amazing amount of money.And with that they buy politicians, and they basically make the foreign policy of the United States. They're huge. Compared to Palantir, Lockheed Martin is completely global. It's got hundreds of thousands of employees.Palantir's got just a few thousand.And yet Palantir's market value in the Wall Street arena is greater than Lockheed Martin's because people are speculating that this is the future of warfare.And that means that the wet dream of the militarists and the venture capitalists is they can sit behind their computers in Palo Alto or in Arlington, Virginia, and conduct warfare remotely all over the globe, that they will be able to have what they call a Joint Awareness All Domain Command and Control system, or a JDAC, that is connected to hundreds of thousands of sensors in the land and the air and the seas, in space, and can take all this streaming electrons and photons and collocate them into a battlespace picture that can be visualized on a screen and user friendly enough so that whether the commanders are a human or possibly AIs, because that's the direction it's going in, they can order weapons of destruction to be initiated against tanks or buildings or children tens of thousands of miles away.

Steve Grumbine: 00:20:56

: Skynet, huh?

Peter Byrne: 00:20:58

: This is like where Palantir and Anduril, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and the rest of them, they've been out-flexed technologically by these younger startups, but they have their own venture capital arms.And so they're investing in Palantir and Anduril and hundreds of other startups that are salivating on getting into this market, you know, internationally.And the way venture capital works, of course, is that they'll throw tens of millions of dollars at a hundred companies, and if one of them sticks and goes public and advances their initial investment by a factor of ten or a hundred, then they're happy. They're gamblers.So you've got venture capitalists united with governmental entities and with the big primes that are attempting to cheapen and transform the machinery of war into a completely automated JDAC. And the problem is that it can't work. And it can't work for a number of reasons.First of all, it's supposed to be run by machine learning, which is basically chat. Machine learning isn't intelligent.The neural nets are predictive machines that they're trained on, the common crawl, on Reddit, on Wikipedia, on the digital garbage of the Internet.OpenAI's bots cannot scrape data from government or corporations or scientific institutions if those institutions don't want their data scraped, and most of them don't these days. They're just full of a lot of memes and opinions, misnomers and garbage. That's why they hallucinate. They basically are trained to come up with an answer.But if the data doesn't give them sufficient information to make a rational, cogent, coherent statement, they'll just say anything that has some predictive value in terms of how they operate.And the way that they operate is that they break words and concepts and images into small pieces and then try to reconstruct the images and words and objects by putting together the small pieces and predicting their proximity in phase space, which is this kind of multidimensional place that computers and physics operates, right? And those are called tokens, the bits are called tokens. So they're just predicting the proximity of one token to another set of tokens.It's not working. OpenAI, which is hugely invested in military intelligence these days, has a real problem because it's reached the limits.There's tons of papers that will reveal, including by industry itself, that the chats have reached the limit of efficacy of the knowledge bases and their ability to parse them and to come up with meaningful statements. Now, large language models can be very good if they're trained on small, narrow data sets.They've done some good work in feeding millions of mammograms to large language models.And then the models can predict anomalies in the X-rays that may have pathological significance, although they actually really don't do it better than the humans at this point, although they're trying to make it do that. But we have a phenomenon in computer science called "Garbage in, garbage out."If you put in bad data, you're going to get an incorrect incoherent answer. So with the mammograms, it's pretty limited type of thing. You can put in lots of data and so you'll have something you can work with.Or if you're a target consultant trying to figure out consumer patterns, you can probably pretty easily figure out who's going to buy what at what hour of the day and then arrange your displays accordingly. But that's narrow. That's a very targeted algorithmic process.It is not even remotely what is called "artificial general intelligence" or beyond that, "super-intelligence." Artificial general intelligence is supposed to be able to answer any question about anything at any time. And that will never happenbecause I want to go back to cybernetics for a second with in the 50s there was a British cybernetician computer scientist, early one, his name was Ross Ashby. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety, which is kind of cool sounding, and what it means is very simple.If you want to control a system that has a number of degrees of freedom, which just means that it can move from point A to point B to point D to point 2005 or it can only move to point 2, it can only go from A to B, then it has two points, two degrees of freedom. If you can go to A to 2000, it has 2000 degrees of freedom.So if you want to control it though your mechanism, like your bomb site or your digital computer, as it turns out now has to have as many degrees of freedom as the system is trying to control, because otherwise it can't predict anything. And that's impossible. You cannot create a control mechanism that can predict the real world.You can take little slices of it and you can make predictions that have some degree of probability that X will happen at time Y. But you're not going to be able to predict what people are going to do in the long run.You're not going to be able to predict how markets are going to behave because you can't mirror it.Unfortunately, the military venture capitalist establishment is selling this notion that you can mirror it, and they've been selling that notion for a long time. It's gone through a lot of iterations. They were trying to do the same thing in Vietnam, and along the way they do a lot of damage.For example, right now, Palantir and Anduril and other military AI startups and larger companies are deeply invested with Elbit Systems, which is the Israeli kind of Lockheed version of Lockheed, in using AI weapons in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Intermission: 00:26:31

: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Peter Byrne: 00:26:54

: The programs which were uncovered and publicized by those wonderfully brave Israeli and Palestinian journalists, they uncovered the existence of these AI programs called Lavender and Gospel and Where's Daddy? Where's Daddy? is like the most evil one of all.It basically tries to figure out when a suspect, you know, Hamas suspect, which could be anybody, goes home and is welcomed home by his children, and then they bomb the house and they kill the entire family. They do this repeatedly.

Steve Grumbine: 00:27:23

: Jesus Christ.

Peter Byrne: 00:27:24

: Now, these programs are based on Palantir, Anduril, and other types of classified programs that claim to be able to successfully figure out who's going to be an enemy in the future or who's been an enemy or who is an enemy right now and then annihilate them by blowing up entire city blocks. It doesn't workwell. I mean, the people in Palestine who are bravely resisting, despite their leadership being a bit out to lunch, they're not going anywhere short of extermination, which certainly seems to be one of the primary directives of the Israeli state at this point, of the Zionist entity, which is to ethically cleanse and exterminate and commit a genocide in the entire population of Palestine and create a Riviera-type situation in the Greater Israel, which can take over control of the Middle Eastern economy from Iran and from the United States, Europe, Japan and China. It's a pipe dream that they have of universal command and control.We were talking earlier about, you know, in the 60s and 70s, students in America were admiring the Chinese Communist revolution and Mao's Little Red Book and all that sort of thing. One of the things about this aim of imperialism, I think Mao encapsulated it very well. He said, "Imperialists make trouble and fail.They make trouble again, they fail again. They make trouble and then they fail."And it's true. They engage in these wars, either proxy wars, like what we're doing right now [with Ukraine], the war with Russia and the Ukraine, or subsidizing the expansion of Greater Israel and US investment throughout the Middle East.Now, with the complicity of the Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates monarchies, who incidentally are also heavily invested in military AI in the United States, this pipe dream of control comes up against a form of resistance which is flesh.Now, will the US-Israeli entity successfully exterminate the Palestinians and go on to exterminate the Iranians and keep turning its martial gaze inward in America to arrest and exterminate people that it doesn't like, which it's already starting to do? At what point will people throw a spoke into the wheel and say, "We've had enough?"At what point will people say, "I'm not going to watch these screens anymore. I'm not going to let social media tell me what to do.I'm going to get out into the street and flip the bird to your cameras and then rip them off the telephone poles." It's going to take that. I don't think we'll be able to sit around and wait for Bernie Sanders and AOC to do it. Bless their hearts.You know, they don't have what it takes. They don't have the gumption. They don't have the ideological background.

Steve Grumbine: 00:29:57

: They're controlled opposition.

Peter Byrne: 00:29:59

: They're the controlled opposition, you know?  [Absolutely.]And I mean, I'm sure they're sincere and, you know, fine, but we're facing a situation right now where the martial gaze is staring outward from the bedroom of the White House with this blonde golem that was activated by this nasty father who's trying to get revenge on his dad by destroying the world and has been able to surround himself by sycophants and fascists who have absolutely no moral bearing whatsoever. This martial gaze is now staring outwards and inwards and the American public, not to mention the whole world, is confused by this.I mean, we keep talking about Nazi Germany and those correlations are certainly accurate, but that was a while ago. And as Aime Cesaire said, "You know, fascism doesn't just come overnight. It seeps into us from the very walls and from the fabric of our societies."It's been going on for a long time. America is a settler colonial entity, as is Israel.So fascism is basically built in and legitimized by our very constitution which considered women and people of color not to be human enough to vote, et cetera, et cetera. So where do we take a stand against the martial gaze that is now being automated in such a way that it acts at light speed?Because one of the biggest dangers of this whole development of the JDAC is that it also includes the Nuclear Command and Control System, the so called NC3 [NC2].Now we already know that Nuclear Command and Control Systems, which have been automated since the 1950s, since the very beginning, and there's been any number of closed calls caused by computer glitches. We should be thankful that we're still here. Those were relatively simple analog type of systems.They weren't these JDAC type of systems which are trying to connect tens of thousands of sensors using satellite images drawn, transmitted from outer space using sonar types of patterns transmitted from autonomous submarines and these Saildrone artificially intelligent solar powered surfboards that are all over the oceans now, transmitting military and intelligence information back to Alameda and elsewhere. The more complex the JDAC becomes, the less able its inventors, Dr. Frankensteins, are able to be able to control it or even to program it to do what they want it to do.And the more complex it becomes, the more fragile it is, the more easily it can tip over.Because as a complex adaptive system, all those systems famously have tipping points. It's like a pile of sand. At a certain point, if you keep adding to the top, it's going to start deconstructing and flattening out.I think that's what's happening here.Because in the next version of Military AI Watch that I'll be reporting on, which is about the Stargate fiasco, how World War III will be fought inside data centers, which is an interesting concept to think about.We see how the whole thing is unraveling to the extent that the General Accounting Office and various federal auditors that examined the efficacy of Department of War spending are coming out now. In April, the GAO came out and said basically, "The JDAC doesn't work. It won't work. It's not helpful." Now that's kind of the small print, right?There's no headlines in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal saying "Oh, the General Accounting Office says that automated warfare won't work." That's why you have to go to Project Censored I guess to find out. But that's truth.I mean the government itself knows that it won't work and they don't care because it's all about money. And that's something that Military AI Watch is focused on. We try to combine a scientific and technical analysis with the flow of money.When you get to the money, it's not hard to figure that the only way that it's going to stop flowing into the system is if it doesn't have any wars to fight.So its avatars like JD Vance and God knows who else in the fascist regime today united with characters like Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google who along with Henry Kissinger wrote a book called the Age of AI a few years ago, the late war criminal Henry Kissinger in which they said, "If we don't take over China, invade China and destroy its industrial base, we're all going to be speaking Chinese", that sort of thing. Eric Schmidt is one of the most tendentious war hounds in America today and he's a Democrat, right?He supported Biden and Kamala and all the rest of them because there's no difference between the two sides of the war coin, you know, so you've got this system that has an agency of its own, it's a golem and it doesn't have the shem in its mouth anymore with the word of God. It's gone berserk. But it's got a lot of power and it has a built-in complex adaptive system, self-organizing agenda that humans are not a part of.I mean we're a part of it, but we're not in control of it.In fact, the illusion that humans have any control over the military industrialization and the martial gaze of the globe would be amusing if it wasn't so pathetic and horrible. We're not in control.  It's in control of us.It funds our politicians. It casts its gaze in Gaza and sends Hellfire missiles where it wants and each one of those missiles cost $4 million. So, without hot wars, the military industrial complex as we know it disintegrates.And the newcomers on the block, these startups run by the PayPal mafia which would not exist without government subsidies.

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:29

: Amen.

Peter Byrne: 00:35:30

: I mean certainly SpaceX wouldn't certainly.

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:33

: It's all public money they're getting, just slurping it up for their own, you know, oligarchic intent.

Peter Byrne: 00:35:39

: Look at Bezos. I mean, Bezos has this space program which is also competing for military contracts.But what most people don't understand is the depth to which Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services, is embedded in military AI activities. It had a $9 billion contract to create the cloud system for the intelligence agencies, mostly the CIA, back in 2019.And it was killed by Trump because he didn't like the Washington Post, which is also owned by Bezos, who owns Amazon.But things evolved and now Microsoft and Oracle and Amazon are sharing a $10 billion plus contract to create a series of cloud systems for the military intelligence complex. And where this actually is quite interesting is as I described before, you've got this wet dream of having a JDAC which is all seeing martial gaze.This basilisk can see everything in the world and that can automatically destroy enemies that is programmed to perceive as bad without humans having to even be a part of the decision matrix.Because humans made the decision when they invented it. They're not necessarily needed to be in the loop when the trigger is pulled, you know. That's the dream, but the reality is capitalism.

Steve Grumbine: 00:36:54

: Amen.

Peter Byrne: 00:36:55

: Under capitalism you have a concept called vendor lock[-in].And that means that the various armed services, the Army, the Air Force, the Navy and then the intelligence agencies, they all have their favorite vendors. The Air Force has Lockheed, Navy has Northrop Grumman, et cetera.These are huge companies and also smaller companies with whom they've been working for years.And of course, the person that gives them the contract one year, retires from the Pentagon the next year and then is on the board of directors or is an executive of the same company they were giving contracts to the following year. It's a big revolving door. I call it a "cluster of bucks", if you know what I mean.So what you've got under development right now is each one of those services is contracted to different sets of corporations to make their own proprietary battlespace manipulation, AI-driven, all-encompassing, all-controlling programs. But they don't speak to each other, they're stove piped. The program that Lockheed is making doesn't talk to the program that Raytheon is making.And you can go to their websites and they'll have these fantastic little marketing videos about these JDAC related all-domain programs that they're making to control military activities all over the world.And you've got women and men of color sitting in front of computer banks watching so-called terrorists 10,000 miles away be blown up automatically by programs that are looking to see if they're wearing hijabs or carrying buckets that might be full of water. It could also be full of gunpowder or whatever. You know, it's crazy. The good news is they don't talk to each other.So their wet dream of having a universal eye isn't going to work. The bad news is that each of them is going to be thinking that theirs is better and fine and they're going to be acting on it.And then you've got a Nuclear Command and Control System in it that's going to pick up on glitches and on mistakes and on real time activities and say, 'Oh, we need to launch a tactical nuke to destroy this AI chip factory in Shanghai." And part of the horror of this developing situation is that under Biden, but also starting with Obama, two things happened.One, they decided to revitalize the entire nuclear triad, which means that the B-52 bombers and the Minuteman missiles and the nuclear submarines were getting old. B-52 bombers are like 70 years old and they're still targeting, you know, Moscow and the rest for potential nuclear annihilation.But they're big lumbering monsters. By the time they got anywhere near there, they would be shot down by hyperglide missiles [hypersonic glide missiles]. I mean they're not actually very efficacious anymore.So the idea that the Democrats have been promoting even more than the Republicans over the years is to spend I think upwards now $6 trillion on revitalizing and revamping and modernizing the nuclear triad.  To that extent, they're now wanting to put Sentinel missiles to replace all the Minuteman missiles in Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho area.They had to do an environmental impact statement about doing it. It's 6,000 pages long. I read a lot of it. God help me.And the funny thing about it is they go on and on and on about how they're going to save like the red-legged frog from the construction activities.But there's not a single word about the actual use of the arsenal that they're putting there, which is to destroy millions of people by launching missiles.But also it acts as an attraction in that if we were in a tense situation with China or Russia who do have nuclear missiles, they might want to do a first strike on the nuclear missiles in the United States, which is going to damage the environment to say the least, right?

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:44

: Oh yeah.

Peter Byrne: 00:40:45

: That's not anywhere near a subject that's talked about in the environmental impact statement, which I think actually means that it would be good for a lawsuit because it's breaking the law by not talking about that. But that's another story.So anyway, they're modernizing that and at the same time, and this happened under Biden, who is an evil warmonger, they basically are saying they're reversing themselves because of the advent of nuclear winter.You know, when it was determined scientifically that even a small nuclear war would affect climate of the United States by shading sunlight due to the carbonization soot in the atmosphere from fires caused by nuclear weapons, it would then cause the temperature to go down below zero for like two years and destroy agriculture and most life forms on Earth. And it's still a real thing and hasn't gone away.If anything, the science has gotten more predictive and accurate about it, although it's being ignored by the mainstream media and the Pentagon for the most part, which is a whole story I could talk about in a related issue.However, they decided that, "Well, if we have a huge all-out total nuclear war, not only will it blow us all up, but it will actually freeze us to death."So we need to revitalize the concept of limited nuclear war, which is something that Kissinger actually was talking about in the 1950s when he was a scholar at Harvard University working for the Department of War. He was a big advocate of limited nuclear warfare.Then it went away because they thought the powers that be decided it was too destabilizing and frankly there wasn't enough money into it. There's much more money to prepare for total war than limited nuclear war.But now it's back because there's all sorts of methods of delivery, hyperglide missiles, satellites and whatever, that the possibility of blowing up central Tehran with a nuclear bomb roughly the size of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is definitely on the table. I mean, the B-52s are still there. The cruise missiles can deliver them very efficiently and a freak like Trump would certainly do it.I mean, one of the first things he ever said when he was running for office was, "We have these nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?" And so I'm definitely afraid of that. But if they use limited nuclear weapons, who will object?I don't think Russia or China are going to object to this point unless they're used against them. You know, this whole concept of deterrence is total BS.I mean, deterrence is actually basically just an excuse to figure out how to strike your enemy first.

Steve Grumbine: 00:43:04

: Capital accumulation too, let's not forget that. I mean, that Is, you had it right.The capitalist mode is to accumulate as much capital, and the only way they can do that is what? To continue having reasons to create war machines [You] said it well...

Peter Byrne: 00:43:16

: I think it was Stalin that said, "Every once in a while, they take a sword to the Gordian Knot caused by all the intricacies of capitalism."And you see that now because wars generally emerge out of trade wars. And years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States military turned towards terrorist enemies.They created terrorist enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq that then they could finance the war machine to go and wreak havoc on those populations.But after they were defeated, in order to cause so much damage that it was no longer profitable, they decided that the newest enemy is China. Especially emanating from Silicon Valley, this huge war chorus going on about ruining the industrial base of China.And that is something that has caused the Chinese great concern because, yeah, they have some nuclear weapons and they have some nuclear missiles, and some of those missiles can reach to the United States and elsewhere. But they had a policy of no first use, which meant that they kept the warheads separate from the missile delivery vehicles.And that meant that it would take days actually to insert the warheads on the missiles and then fire them, thereby diffusing the kind of emotional and political turmoil that goes around flashpoints. The United States has never had that. The United States is like, "Launch on warning."You get, like, literally, like, it can be launched within 15 minutes of a decision, and you can't recall them, you know?China is so freaked out by the US posturing around Taiwan, which is all about controlling the world's best chip factory, which is Taiwan Semiconductor. It makes the most advanced AI chips in the world. And everybody wants to control that economy.But the military posturing the United States has been doing around Taiwanese ocean areas and, in the public, you know, sending Nancy Pelosi there and antagonizing them, et cetera, has caused the Chinese now to abandon apparently the strategy they had of no first use. They're apparently putting the warheads onto the missiles now. So diplomacy is out of the question these days.I mean, ever since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, you know, and going back in history with the advent of nuclear winter and the huge publicity that that got, Ronald Reagan, who was a genocidal monster of his own right, actually did the right thing. I mean, he entered into a series of nuclear disarmament treaties that are actually efficacious.They worked to a degree, you know, and now they've been abandoned. Ever since Obama, the United States government has made any effort to negotiate meaningful arms control treaties for nuclear weapons with countries that have them. There's nine that have them. Right? Including Israel.And so now the defenestration of the nuclear disarmament treaties, which are just not even a matter for consideration by the current United States government, whether it's Democrat or Republican, combined with the ability to use small nuclear weapons guided by artificially intelligent programs inserted into delivery vehicles that can operate on their own, which means they don't have to be connected to the electromagnetic spectrum, which can be jammed and throw them off. That means that war is imminent and the military AI is causal of that. Anyway, I've been talking a lot.

Steve Grumbine: 00:46:34

: You have. And I wanted to let you go because the story is just more important than me trying to interject there. I really wanted to let you go.Everything that you've said so far kind of touches a nerve in my body because first of all, I didn't realize the tie into Tolkien and all that stuff with the anti-Soviet stuff, the freak out. I mean, I know the whole world shook in 1917, right? Everybody overreacted when they saw the Bolsheviks.And I'm spending all my time reading about how they did it, because I'd like to figure it out.Because at this point in time, to your point, until we stop, you know, playing games and we start realizing those cameras are not there for our protection, we're going to sit here and valorize police forces that are there to protect capital and more in particular, protect these kinds of endeavors.

Peter Byrne: 00:47:20

: You know, traditionally in the American body, politics has worshiped our troops. Bring the troops home and all that. Yep, soldiers are valiant.Well, actually, in the world today, the troops of the imperialist countries pretty much sit behind vast arrays of machinery, killing innocent people or people they just don't like from afar. They're cowards.

Steve Grumbine: 00:47:40

: Yes.

Peter Byrne: 00:47:41

: And the people that have courage actually are the insurgents. I mean, you don't necessarily have to agree with their objectives, but they're the ones that are showing us the way of fighting back.They're learning how to hide. They're learning how to spoof these algorithms.They're learning how to put their lives on the line to defeat the most monstrous Moloch that has ever existed, and which is dooming us all if we do not put the Word of God, as it were. And I'm an atheist, but let's put the Word of God back into its mouth.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:09

: Yeah. You know what? You nailed it. Every time we talk about AI obviously, you know, AI in and of itself consumes so much energy.

Peter Byrne: 00:48:18

: Oh.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:19

: I mean, somebody jokingly said, "Every time you do a search on AI, you kill a pond somewhere."

Peter Byrne: 00:48:23

: Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:24

: Um, but you do, right? And reality is that wherever you go, there's AI.And even in your workplace, for those people that work in jobs that are at a desk, a lot of the stuff you're being asked to do involves some sort of Copilot or some sort of other AI application. You're looking around, these things are burning up the environment like crazy.And we're getting to a point where the opportunity to not use AI is passing us by. It's almost too late in some ways, that work is being redefined by what AI can do in the workplace.And if we don't think for a minute that that will serve long term to replace workers, and it's class war, okay? It is not an endeavor that will benefit the working class. It is there to replace the working class, to eliminate the working class.Everything you're seeing with the military industrial complex is about large capital accumulation. And, you know, the people dying and stuff like that are just a cost to make money at this point. I don't even think they give a shit.I mean, some of them may have that ideological proclivity that says, "We just need to annihilate all these people."It sounds like Peter Thiel is the kind of sick son of a bitch that, you know, given the people he keeps company with, probably relishes the opportunity to kill a few people that he sees as undeserving of life. But that said, this is happening in the name of democracy, which, I mean, let's be fair.If you believe right now that you can go out and vote your way out of this, what we just talked about, you are dealing in fairy tale. You're literally dealing in tooth fairy nonsense. I can't be more emphatic about this.

Peter Byrne: 00:49:53

: This is the point, Steve, that I'm trying to, as you, is trying to get across here for people to see for themselves, is that we live in a plutocracy. We do not live in a democracy. A real democracy would be socialist.You know, where you have grassroots bodies making political decisions that percolated up instead of the reverse. We live in a rule of plutocratic militarists. I mean, Rome Burning had nothing on what's going on here.And as far as the environment goes, my next story on Stargate Fiasco details almost 6,000 data centers in the world right now, most of them owned by big American corporations that even have them in China.And these are using up so much electricity and water for cooling because they have to have massive amounts of water, that they're exacerbating global heating by a huge factor.And so you've got Trump announcing this Stargate thing the day after his inauguration, standing in there with Zuckerberg, Ellison and the guy from SoftBank, Mr. Son, talking about how they're going to supercharge building data centers.Trump's family has all these investments in data center venture capitalist organizations and entities in the Middle East that are investing in this.I mean, this whole notion that Stargate is going to re-industrialize America and bring us back into a working-class paradise where everybody can go into a factory is being promoted, but it's complete nonsense. For one thing, the Secretary of Commerce quoted the other day saying, "Oh yeah, we're going to re-industrialize America. We'll have millions and millions of people sitting around putting tiny little screws into iPhones." Like that's work that we want to do?I mean, a lot of the people that lost their industrial jobs in the United States went on and got jobs in finance and services. I mean, they're actually have already moved on. So what kind of industry do you want here? There's still plenty of industry here.Most of it's war industry. But we have a disappointment here because the working class here is not stepping up, in my opinion. You look at the automotive workers, you know.

Steve Grumbine: 00:51:57

: Yeah, yeah, no, 100%. Listen, I want to put an exclamation point on everything you said and get us closed out here, because this is super important.Number one, I hope I can have you back for future installments because this is just an unfolding story that you've done so much work on, number one.But number two, for the people out there who follow our podcast that know that we focus on the intersection of modern monetary theory and class struggle, just know this. The public funding that is going to these industries is not coming from your tax dollar.You're lied into this false belief that you are funding these things. Just know that they know that.And they are purposely financing these major, major corporations, creating new billionaires from public money that they simultaneously tell you, the government which creates all money is telling you, "We don't have any money for health care. We don't have any money for education. We don't have any money to provide for the needy, much less provide citizens benefits for all."In fact, we just demonize immigrants and we do all the fascist, bootlicking kind of things that they did in Nazi Germany by creating scapegoats and all the while we're under the belief that we can't afford to do nice things. While we're privatizing NASA and we're privatizing the public space, we are literally giving away the keys to the kingdom.Any semblance of democracy that you ever held in your head, you should literally just take some Listerine or whatever, gargle and spit that lie out of your mouth. No matter how many "source the votes." No matter how many of these things. You need to understand that we've evolved to a new point.A point where you slept through the other two. We all slept through, let's be fair. We would be in a different place.But we are at a point now where it is no longer your mom and dad's apple pie and baseball and whatever. That's the lie they're trying to sell you. That's the Pleasantville they're trying to sell you.The reality is what my guest Peter Byrne and his entire 10-part series on AI in the military is uncovering. And this is just but one element of the evil that is being done in the name of democracy, in the name of the red, white and blue.I'm telling you folks, stop with the child's stories to each other. Grow up, Peter Pan. Count Chocula.It is time to look the devil in the eye and stop acting like people are just going to somehow or another vote this away. It's not going to be voted away. You must organize, you must become militant, and you must get into the streets.It is not something, we have to build parallel structures, parallel power somehow or another that doesn't rise and fall every election cycle. Because these things what we're talking about right here, it's being designed to keep us in line at home too.

Peter Byrne: 00:54:44

: Huey Long said, you know that one of the first American populists in the 1930s, he said when as fascism was arising in Europe, he said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the American flag."

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:55

: You got it. Patriotism, baby. All right, listen, Peter, I want to thank you for this. We can go on for hours. I love everything. I mean, I don't love it, I hate it.

Peter Byrne: 00:55:03

: Actually.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:04

: I hate everything you said just now. I literally hate this podcast. No, but it is so important, right? Everything you just said is a wakeup call if people choose to hear it.Instead of, namby-pamby "Well you know we just got to give a few more progressives to" stop. Just stop. It's like stop.

Peter Byrne: 00:55:22

: Cancer doesn't cure itself.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:25

: No, no, it does not.

Peter Byrne: 00:55:28

:

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:30

: All right. With that Peter, where can we find more of your work? Obviously, it's at projectsensored.org under the Military AI and I think it's.We can put the link in the show notes so if you're interested, look for it there. But it's projectcensored.org/military-AI-watch/. And of course you can go to Peter's own website. And Peter, where can we find that website?

Peter Byrne: 00:55:55

: I hate to say, Google search engine my name Peter Byrne reporter. My website will come up is peterbyrne.info and another story you might like there.It's a lot of environmental reporting and stuff. But there's one I did recently on how the United States used sarin gas and Laos in 1970, which I think people might find interesting.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:13

: Wow, that's more evil to pile on the pile of evil, huh?

Peter Byrne: 00:56:17

: Well, I'm really looking, I was really looking for some optimism here and I do have a lot of optimism, I really do. Because human beings have been around for millions of years and life has been around for billions of years and this is just a transitory phase.So obviously full of a lot of pain and angst and horror. But you know, I believe that life will survive. It may not be human life, but life will survive.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:39

: Well, I'm going to try and find a positive in that, my friend. It's tough to find that way as a father of children, man.

Peter Byrne: 00:56:46

: Well, look at it from the point of view of cyanobacteria or roaches.

Steve Grumbine: 00:56:49

: Isn't that how it all began? Are we going back to the primitive? I mean, that's what it feels like. Don't let my laughter fool you.I'm very dismayed by this discussion, but in a way that hopefully will motivate even myself to do more. Peter, thank you so much for your time. My name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese.Macaron Cheese is a part of Real Progressives which is a 501c3 not for profit organization. We literally live and die by your donations. Please consider becoming a member of our Patreon. It is patreon.com/real progressives.And you can go to our website realprogressives.org in the dropdown menu. There is a donate there and you can also go to our Substack which is substack.com/realprogressives. Please go there. Consider becoming a monthly donor.No amount is too small. I see a lot of folks that put out a lot of content, have a lot of people following them. We need your love too.We do an awful lot of work beyond just the podcast and it only happens because of our donors. So we love you. We thank you. We ask you to become more involved with that. Peter, thank you so much for your time.And on behalf of Macro N Cheese and Real Progressives, we are out of here.00:58:12 Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.