Internet-wide surveillance and censorship, enabled by the unimaginably vast computational power of artificial intelligence (AI), is here.

This is not a futuristic dystopia. It's happening now.

Government agencies are working with universities and nonprofits to use AI tools to surveil and censor content on the Internet.

This is not political or partisan. This is not about any particular opinion or idea.

What's happening is that a tool powerful enough to surveil everything that's said and done on the Internet (or large portions of it) is becoming available to the government to monitor all of us, all the time. And, based on that monitoring, the government – and any organization or company the government partners with – can then use the same tool to suppress, silence, and shut down whatever speech it doesn't like.

But that's not all. Using the same tool, the government and its public-private, "non-governmental" partners (think, for example: the World Health Organization, or Monsanto) can also shut down any activity that is linked to the Internet. Banking, buying, selling, teaching, learning, entertaining, connecting to each other – if the government-controlled AI does not like what you (or your kids!) say in a tweet or an email, it can shut down all of that for you.

Yes, we've seen this on a very local and politicized scale with, for example, the Canadian truckers.

But if we thought this type of activity could not, or would not, happen on a national (or even scarier – global) scale, we need to wake up right now and realize it's happening, and it might not be stoppable.

New Documents Show Government-Funded AI Intended for Online Censorship
The US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government was formed in January 2023 "to investigate matters related to the collection, analysis, dissemination, and use of information on US citizens by executive branch agencies, including whether such efforts are illegal, unconstitutional, or otherwise unethical."

Unfortunately, the work of the committee is viewed, even by its own members, as largely political: Conservative lawmakers are investigating what they perceive to be the silencing of conservative voices by liberal-leaning government agencies.