I know what you had for lunch as well.
Anything I want to find out about you, I can. Anything. Bank balance? No problem. Shoe size? Piece of cake. Preferred style of underwear? Sexual preference? Last time you got laid? It'd take me maybe ten seconds to find out.
What's more, under the current legislation in Parliament, I can have you arrested for it if you're in the UK. If you're in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand or Mexico, it's no problem. Doesn't have to be a crime. Anything I decide is suspicious behaviour can get you banged up without trial for as long as I like
But that's just a perk of the job. That's just fun stuff to do in a lunchbreak, it's not my actual job. My job's much scarier than that.
It's a good thing I've masked my IP address and stolen this user-account but hey, I know where that guy is right now. CCTV on Portsmouth shows that he's asleep in his car. They'll probably arrest him when this gets out. They'll think he knows too much. He doesn't, but you will once you've finished reading.
Here's how it is. You already know about ECHELON, right? It's up, it works, we use it all the time. We tie that data into CCTV records and the Credit Card companies and banks, we cross-reference against tax and utility bills and of course, we triangulate via your mobile phone.
We have grunts to do that shit. I work on the clever stuff. Here's the clever stuff.
We could replace you tomorrow and no-one would know. We could call you in sick at work, get your kids out of school, keep your bills paid and your house clean. Any regular correspondants would continue to get letters (or even better, emails) from you, but really from us. They'd get phone-calls from you, but really from us. We'd never make a wrong move, because we've got copies of you right here on terabyte hard-drives.
Not all of you, of course. That'll take a while longer, but it's so easy to collect the good data. You train our systems how you think and how you react, your preferences and your morals and your politics. You teach us about them every day.
You do it voluntarily.
We gather data from game companies. It used to be kind of primitive, but it gets better all the time as games get more addictive. More and more lovely data. Blizzard did great with World of Warcraft, that shit is evilly addictive but the AI is primitive, we can only learn a few things from it about you.
But the Elder Scrolls game? Oblivion? Got to love the irony in that name. That teaches us so much about you, you'd wet yourself if you knew. You think you're battling an Artificial Intelligence?
You damn' fools. You're training an AI. You're training it to be you.
I've got you right here at my fingertips and you're too stupid to know what you've done.
You probably already guessed why we want AIs of you - all of you. We can run simulations against them. We can genuinely predict the future. So guess what?
I know what you'll have for breakfast tomorrow, too.
Sleep tight.
Addendum. This is not all true. I was not asleep in my car, and i wrote the above article as a part of RumourQuest 2006. However, approximately 90% is true. ECHELON is very real. The other data sources i listed are available to me at work and are extremely straightforward to cross-reference. I do indeed work at a classified location and i do work on nodal dynamic Artifial Intelligences.
The bit about the games companies is false, for now. The bit about having you arrested indefinitely without trial is horrifyingly real. Take notice. I wrote this as a warning.
We do indeed train AIs by competing against them.