AI, Surveillance & The Post-Human Era
Definition: Analyzing the intrusion of core technologies (AI, big data, cybernetics) into daily life, the risks of a post-human age, and humanity's destiny under algorithmic rule.
Around the first century, in Alexandria in Roman Egypt, Hero described a metal sphere that turned when water inside it was heated. Steam escaped through two bent tubes and the thrust made the sphere spin. The device was called an aeolipile. It is the first recorded steam engine, although it was not strong or durable enough to drive machinery.
In the late 1880s, the United States faced a technical choice that would decide how cities received electricity. Thomas Edison sold direct current, while George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla developed alternating current. Direct current worked for small stations but lost voltage quickly over distance. Alternating current could change voltage through transformers, travel long distances and then be reduced for homes.
On October 28, 2021, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta. Mark Zuckerberg said the company would move from 2D screens toward the “metaverse”, a 3D space where people could work, learn, shop, play, and meet through avatars. He did not present it as a side project. In his founder’s letter, he wrote that all of the company’s products would point toward the metaverse and that Meta would be “metaverse-first”, not
On 29 October 1969, a computer at UCLA sent the first characters to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute. The network had only four nodes. It was built so research centres could communicate even if one node was destroyed. That network was ARPANET. It became the foundation of the Internet.
A 27-kilometer machine and the story that the world moved to another version.
A long white trail in the sky connects real atmospheric science to the rumor of a hidden climate program.
An antenna field in Alaska led people to ask whether the upper atmosphere could be switched like a control.
Wardenclyffe had a tower, a patent and real experiments, but disappeared when its technology could not yet be measured, restricted and charged for.
On the morning of 30 June 1908, the ground near Siberia’s Podkamennaya Tunguska River shook as if a train were running beneath the forest. Evenk reindeer herders were thrown down. Windows broke in towns hundreds of kilometres away. Across Europe, people reported nights bright enough to read by. When survey teams finally reached the region, more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest had been flattened. Tens of millio
Bots can create social signals, algorithms can amplify them, and AI can learn from the products of machines. The Internet can retain traffic while losing the trace of real people.
BCI research has turned neural signals into speech and meaning. As the technology enters marketing, data that appears before speech could become a new surveillance tool.
Facial recognition puts one bodily feature into more systems, where errors can become identity records and long-term tracking.
Patrol data can turn crime forecasts into self-confirming loops, making heavily watched places appear permanently more dangerous.
Section 702 and PRISM show how concentrated cloud data can connect commercial infrastructure to intelligence collection at scale.