A distributed conscience system

It’s ages since my last post so I thought I’d better write something.

It seems some of the things I designed in the early 1990s when I worked in Cybernetics and my early 2000s inventions: active skin, digital air, ground-up intelligence and ultra-simple computing are now exactly what we need to ensure people behave. What with COVID vaccines, gender ideology, critical race theory, controlling hate speech climate alarmism and its inevitable consequential restrictions, our chiefs are going to need every tool they can get to ensure compliance on an increasing range of issues by a population comprised of the obedient and the difficult.

Starting with the first of these, it is clear that in areas such as getting vaccinated against COVID, some people are refusing, and many of those who have had it would like to see them forced to take it. The vaccine passports in various stages of introduction around the world were initially intended (officially) to show whether people are safe or likely plague carriers, but we know for certain that even double vaccinated people can still get the virus and still infect others with it, so they don’t achieve that goal, and really just show that you have had your jabs. The slightly more cynical of us would argue that vaccine passports are essentially nothing more than obedience certificates, and more cynical people again would argue that they are just another foundation stone for The Great Reset. I’ll get back to that later.

So where does conscience come in?

Taking your jabs is what the system is loudly telling us is the right thing to do – government, the media and those nutters who yell at you in the supermarket if you walk closer than 2m. The system with its rules is the ‘conscience’ and the vaccine passport is just a simple tool that helps police it, certifying that you have done as you are told and had your jabs. Getting the passport provides a nice clear conscience, while not having it will soon label you clearly as unclean, a trouble-maker, an outcast, a sinner if you like. The technology platform can easily be extended to cover other aspects of health, or compliance with pretty much any other directive – the NHS app is designed that way in fact, at least in the UK. Linked via your mobile phone to your biometrics, your health records, worn health-monitoring devices and their knowledge of your body (with their insights into your weight, activity, blood chemistry, nerve activity, heart rate, some emotions), your payments, banking, social media, where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing and what you and your companions are saying, it becomes very rapidly clear that your behavior and compliance with the rules across a very wide range of areas can be monitored and policed in great detail. It would be as if we have a conscience that tells us the official right and wrong across a wide range of areas, backed up with a system that responds with privileges, permits, restrictions or punishments accordingly. The Chinese Social Credit System implemented much of this in China years ago. Our Western governments have now discovered just how useful it could be.

There are two ways this could happen (it’s possible in principle to get both). If states implements this, as many seem determined to, we’d rightly call them authoritarian, but it could also arise from pressure groups, building on their successes forcing people and companies to comply with critical race theory and gender ideology, or declare support for BLM, or to strictly limit their carbon footprint. It is not unimaginable that pressure groups could start to issue electronic certificates to those who ‘take the knee’ or sign a pledge, or pass a CRT course, or buy a heat pump. Taking a religious Judeo-Christian model as inspiration, and bearing in mind the pseudo-religious nature of some of these things, they could have the sinners, the ordinary people, the priests and high priests, the scribes and pharisees, all with their assorted certifications, passes and privileges all embedded electronically in their passports. Interestingly, also taking that religious model, God is typically assumed to know everything everyone does, says and thinks, i.e a total surveillance system, and God is the source of our conscience, so that fits too. Unlike Judeo-Christianity, the exposure, the deplatforming, the cancelling, the reporting for hate crimes and general mob rule oppression associated with this new kind of conscience, it is clear they forgot to implement any kind of repentance, forgiveness or mercy.

The state implementation is clearly centralised, or at least would be if all states were acting independently, in their own time-frames, with their own systems and rules and ‘conscience’. If there was some sort of world government or treaty or even powerful enough group-think that could make a system that is truly global, then a decentralised solution could be implemented.

The activist/pressure group route already permeates most countries sufficiently to start implementation of the technological foundations for a truly distributed conscience system.

I’ve never been any kind of activist so I have to make a few guesses as to likely objectives and approaches, but looking at the technology solutions and capability I know are feasible (not least because I have designed some of them), it seems possible or even likely that one day we will have a distributed conscience system (DCS) that:

produces an agreed secular moral framework. A reference of rights and wrongs that morally upstanding people should adhere too (and presumably some well thought out commandments);

integrates rules from allied or approved ideologies into a broad scope conscience and therefore could raise members and funding from contributors across their domains;

rewards members with continuous moral affirmation, praising them for doing the right thing, and warning them when there is a likelihood of stepping over a line;

rewards members with social belonging to a group of similarly ‘good people’;

offers levels of status within the membership, hence potential self-actualisation, certificated moral superiority;

offers financial inducements such as special offers and discounts to a rapidly growing number of participating enterprises;

provides mechanisms to implement guilt, shame and punishment and to clearly label and expose the guilty so that morally upright members can avoid or look down upon them;

provides mechanisms for members to highlight and expose other members who might be deviate from the moral path;

provides mechanisms for trials and justice for the accused and mechanism for recompense if innocent;

intermediates in access to pretty much any kind of activities, services, places and facilities. The number of these would grow gradually as penalties for non-participation increase. At first, participation in the system could be entirely voluntary with small or even no required financial contributions, but enterprises would gain privileged access to members of the DCS or be able to offer exclusive services to them. As it grows, the value of being a member and gaining access to this closed market grows, while penalties for not participating would also grow, being eventually excluded from doing business with DCS members. Eventually it could become near impossible to run a profitable enterprise without participation and certification. It is a one-way membrane. The same applies of course to individuals , as the benefits attract people until critical mass, and thereafter, penalties for not belonging increase until it becomes impossible to have any kind of life without being a member.

continuously records degree of compliance or disobedience to every part of the conscience;

is capable of linking to technology embedded within the skin i.e. active skin technology, to monitor and record various aspects of the blood passing in capillaries that might indicate ailments, disease, consumption of immoral substances, or presence of antibodies, viruses, technical indicators of vaccines (such a quantum dots, chemical signatures, electronic particles) or any other introduced artifacts for whatever future purposes may arise;

using its location within the skin and proximity to the peripheral nervous system, the system could monitor and record nerve impulses. It could also reproduce these same impulses into the same nerve fibres by recreating the same voltages, thus recreating the same sensation as was recorded. This offers the potential to provide extra benefits such as enhancing the degree of multi-sensory immersion for AR, VR, computer games or distance communication;

as work from home and distance socializing become more important to achieve low carbon living for example, such ability to recreate the feeling of a handshake or remote physical interaction with objects would prove a major benefit – for those wise enough to become members of the DCS;

once critical mass of the DCS has been achieved it will become possible to activate the second purpose of this technology, which is to create discomfort or pain. Having already accepted the implants as part of initial compliance, people would not then be able to remove it. The benefits of joining after critical mass together with the high penalties for not being a member would make it entirely possibly to still demand the implants for new members;

consequently, every member of the DCS, eventually almost everyone, would have the inbuilt means for the DCS to warn them via discomfort any time they may be approaching the line between right and wrong. This might be an activity, their language, their words, social media engagement, approaching a forbidden geographic location, straying too far from their proper location, or obviously associating with a non-member. The degree of discomfort could vary appropriately between mild vibration or sensation of hot or cold for simple warning purposes, through to extreme pain if someone violated the moral code, or tried to go somewhere they shouldn’t be, or questioned or criticised the DCS or a favoured affiliate, or worst of all, refused to accept a new implant or force their new baby to have one. It could also easily detect if someone tried to shield their active skin from the system by means of a Faraday cage or just a foil armband, that would be easily detectable and immediately punishable. Avoidance of pain would mean continuous reception of the system signal, obvious appropriately timestamped, signed and encrypted to avoid counterfeiting;

the DCS hardware resident within the body would be powered using the body’s own energy supply, either directly using glucose or indirectly using thermal gradients. Even if external hardware were somehow deactivated everywhere at once, this would be able to carry on the core working of the system, inducing severe pain until the external kits is returned to normal function.

is tamper-proof. Once the moral framework, moral principles and commandments are agreed by the moral elite, and are ascertained to represent the pinnacle of human moral development, there should be no need to change that, and indeed the system should be implemented in such a way that those morals cannot be changed by people in the future who may drift astray. Obviously we are very quickly approaching that point thanks the dedication of our younger generations. Thankfully, approaches such as the Autonomous Network Telepher System (ANTS) designed in the early 1990s based on natural immune systems provide a potential basis to implement a robust, totally decentralized system that prevents any modification of the system components once initiated, barring any rogue codes from being executed, and continuously seeking out and removing any attempted infiltration. It managed to address quite complex system management and AI capability using the most simple of mechanisms, often using basic physics in place of megabytes of code. It ought to be possible to design updated version of this system given 30 years of technology progress since invention;

in alignment with the moral principle of being environmentally low impact, the system should also use an ultra-simple, low cost, tamper-proof operating system based on read-only memory, with no use of ‘firmware that can be edited or rewritten. Sensor and processing electronics would be forever restrained in instruction sets by the ANTS-style vocabulary and functionality determined by the elite prior to DCS initiation, preventing any bypass of the moral foundations. Any appearance of ‘higher layer’ code or language that could potentially be attempting to bypass or subvert that layer would result in the system automatically identifying and isolating it using immune system principles, immediately preventing it from functioning or in any way influencing the upright morality of the rest of the system. Similarly, embedded electronics must be specified to the same principles, unchangeable and guaranteed to continue upholding moral compliance. As a sound, fixed foundation layer for the DCS, the entire system instruction set, operating system and its moral framework and content again should thus be fully agreed prior to initiation. Since morals cannot change in future, there is simply no reason to allow for the hardware and OS needing to be changed;

with no central point or points to attack, the entire ANTS-based system would stand as one single globally distributed entity, hopefully eventually reaching every individual and enterprise. Every part of it would defend the whole against any attempt to modify, bypass or deactivate it. It could never be switched off, never modified, and any attempt to try could be met by prolonged extreme pain for all those involved, their friends, families and neighbours;

The ANTS system and ultra-simple OS provide for ground-up intelligence from sensor arrays, which could be spread everywhere. Some sensors would be in smart homes and appliances, some would be built in to infrastructure, some on mobile devices such as drones, some could even be so light that they stay in the air, monitoring everywhere in great detail. These sensors and processors, data stores and communications devices could self-organize into highly efficient ground-up intelligence systems, seeing what is going on locally and extracting knowledge from that, passing on anything relevant to others. Of course everyone’s active skin implants could also have some sensory capability embedded to monitor local activity such as voice, temperature, radio traffic etc. This gives the system broad capability to pick up larger scale patterns of activity that might indicate moral non-compliance. Immoral demonstrations, gatherings, celebrations or leisure activities could be easily detected and participants punished.

I think that’s enough; I’ve made my point. We could make a very capable, very resilient distributed conscience system. It could start off with all the best motivation, just a simple electronic passport ensuring compliance with vaccines mask wearing or low-carbon living. As people got used to it, and expected or even welcomed additional functionality, extra system components and hence greater scope and capability could gradually be introduced over time for seemingly innocent purposes, but designed to be part of the full DCS system. Once fully agreed and implemented, and the DCS initiated, it could not be switched off. A DCS such as I described is technologically feasible and could really be implemented in the next 15 years. It would be the very worst kind of oppressor, forcing everyone under threat of extreme pain to live lives to a strict, extensive and unchangeable moral code, with no appeal, no forgiveness, no mercy, an unfeeling god-like all-aware, all-knowing presence with the capability to punish, perhaps realising the old adage that god is simply ourselves. It could be Hell of our own creation, and we would not be able to escape it or switch it off.

At the moment, we do already have a global tribe that considers itself morally superior and there is a good deal of agreement on morality across many large areas. There could already be the critical mass of people needed to start off such a system, and the technology is feasible, already or over the next 10-15 years. The other route of course was via government, and here we get back to that terrifying phrase ‘The Great Reset’. I’ve never really been drawn to conspiracy theories. They need far too much faith in the ability of our leaders to design and coordinate execution of something complex, globally that would be far more demanding than anything they ever actually manage to do in other fields. We’ve just seen another spectacular failure of a climate summit. I simply don’t believe our politicians are capable of deliberately implementing a common DCS or anything like it. In explaining things, given the choice between conspiracy, group-think or incompetence, I’d always go for incompetence or group-think, or a mixture. However, governments everywhere are being lobbied very successfully by the pressure groups and activists and the successes are mounting. We saw a common system design emerging for test and trace apps, initial competition quickly weeding out weaker solutions and converging on a single approach. In the UK, we’re seeing deliberate design of the NHS app to allow its extension to other health purposes and beyond. It would be fairly easy for our government to extend it include any other certificates and access to records. They might argue that is needed to reduce crime, police access to benefits, control large sports events etc. Whether the intent is there or not I can’t say. The capability is. If we add in the very frequent use of the phrases ‘Build Back Better’ or the Great Reset, which originated from the WEF, it is certainly a possibility that that group-think has become globally pervasive and even without deliberate coordination or conspiring, our governments are therefore all heading down the same road to the same destination. They will also have access at the same times to the same technologies.

They won’t call it a Distribute Conscience System, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.