What is a zettabyte, what is exascale supercomputing, and what could be achieved with that massive amount of computing and storage resources--by entities that the public doesn't even know about?
Good article however I do not believe exascale computing will ever grant "crystal ball" abilities to any organization.
Human behavior cannot be so simply quantified and modeled. Yes you can make reasonable 'predictions' about the behavior of any given person based on observed data. You can with reasonable probability predict their schedules and their routines. However this doesn't mean you can predict their actions to "non-standard" stimuli or situations.
How a given person reacts under pressure or in an emergency is not truly predictable, sometimes the calmest, more logical people will do irrational things under pressure.
Ironically, it's easier to model the behavior of large groups of people because of ensemble averaging(more later).
A good analogy comes from the field of physics, specifically mechanics as applied to a gas or liquid, with Newton's laws of motion and basic laws of thermodynamics you can model the behavior of very small groups of particles fairly accurately. It's possible to predict the positions and motions of these particles based on these simple laws, however over a certain number of particles it becomes increasingly more difficult because of the always present randomness in systems.
For instance there is something called an N-body simulation used to model the time evolution of systems with many particles, such as stars in a galaxy. These simulations are fairly accurate for ensembles(groups) of stars up to maybe a few million particles. However as anyone who has modeled such systems, even if you had the exact same initial conditions and ran the simulation multiple times forward for thousands of time steps, you won't get the exact same final configuration after the run is over.
The simulation diverges the larger number of time steps. The reason is there isn't infinite precision in the numerical values of the data for each particle at each time step. Even small rounding errors grow over time and lead to increasingly more divergent behavior of the particles between model runs.
N-body simulations of a galaxies may go up to several tens of millions of particles but a real galaxy(like the Milky Way) has 400 billion stars.
Now Newton's classical laws of motion are mathematically extremely simple compared to the "laws" which come from observing human behavior and which are empirical and not established invariant laws found in physics.
There is another field of physics called Statistical Mechanics which can be used in a fashion to help predict short term behavior of large numbers of people.
Stat mech does make the ability to generally quantify the behavior of systems with large numbers of particles possible but only in a very general, statistical and probabilistic way (similar to some economic models).
But these models will still be very general and very crude in terms of it's accuracy and would not be very useful in predicting exact outcomes very far out in time for large groups of people.
Look at the computing power today available to NOAA and the Weather services, they try to predict future weather based on known laws of physics of how the atmosphere and oceans behave on a large scale. Yet they don't have much accuracy beyond 7-10 days at most.
Even structures as massive as hurricanes and their tracks can't be predicted accurately more than 5 days into the future.
My point is Exascale computing, as large as it is relative to the average person's experience, isn't anywhere near being able to predict the general outcomes of events in the long term.
The fundamental limitations of data accuracy and computational precision along with the inherent unpredictability of humans will negate the advantages of large scale data collection.
If such computational abilities were available to the Deep State they wouldn't be in trouble now.
I won't talk about Quantum Computing which still remains a very undefined and controversial area.
However there is one danger of Exascale computing that isn't mentioned or even thought much about, the training of Artificial Intelligence models and the development of autonomous agents.
The recent progress with natural language AI models like OpenAI's GPT-3 and ChatGPT is astounding but these models are relatively small still. In the case of GPT-3 it's officially at 175 billion parameters and took around 4 months to train at the cost of 3.14x10^23 flop(floating point operations) as estimated by some researchers.
National security and intel organizations might use Exascale computing to pick out social behavior patterns developing much like meteorologists pick up on potential storms forming but they won't be able to predict accurately where it will go too far in the future.
I can see the government trying to develop AI using Exascale computing as a form of permanent watchman over every single citizen on the planet. An AI "buddy" which would be more like a permanent jailer watching every move you make.
This was the dream of organizations like the old East German Stazi and the modern day CCP.
But Exascale won't be used to predict what will happen on August 31, 2027 at 4 pm EST...
I was doing some casual research on quantum computing pre-Covid, and one of the first references that popped up was the WEF. It was the first time I recall being on their website (2019ish?). The page was extensive with details and I remember one capability they bragged about (or was it already happening?) was weather control. I also remember looking through the site and remember thinking, "dang, these people have active imaginations around becoming gods". After the WEF became more prominent post-Covid, I went back and the web page had a far more vague list of capabilities. It wouldn't be the first time they've updated their site with less specific info about what they are doing.
that's an example of why it necessary to screenclip and save things in your own notes for later reference. I use Evernote daily for that...defense against memory holing
Thanks, that was pre-Covid, I do screen shots a lot now, Start+Shift+S is my best friend. I used to depend on bookmarks - who knew that they'd rewrite history? Oh wait, Orwell did.
Don't you think that it is some kind of Newtonian universe. Newton thought that the future and the past are totally predictable basing on the knowledge of 6 physical coordinates and mass for each particle. Quant mechanic has destroyed it. The same here.
The inaccuracies of each individual prediction would accumulate over a few billion people causing a macro scale error exponentially growing with the time.
To say the truth, I suspect that what we observe now is the interaction of a few such competitive supercomputer artificial-intelligence-based scenarios. It is a new form of a world war.
That's why a vaccine/digital passport is really moot. "They" already have access to everything about everyone.
The amazing thing is that with all that data and AI, they are unable to detect and prevent the illegal immigrants, mass shootings, pedophiles, cannibals, etc. The only logical conclusion is that they don't want to.
Thanks for a great and informative article, CC and God Bless!
You're exactly right: "they" could detect and stop these things, and they *choose* not to. Some of it can be explained by incompetence; the people who choose careers in government are not always the sharpest tools in the box. But some of it seems like purposeful neglect. Nelsonian neglect, to borrow a phrase from EthicalSkeptic.
If you consider the dystopian WEF predictions with one world government and we're all serfs or slaves, the path to acceptance of one govt is through removal of national identity. Thus, open borders.
All of these problems are actually strategically planned outcomes.
it's certainly plausible to expect that several entities who have the resources to do so would do this sort of massive "social engineering" statistical modelling (in combination with automated influence manipulation via social media, and then related impact measurement of each campaign.)
My use of the "Looking Glass" moniker was somewhat tongue in cheek, but perhaps not too far off the mark.
Hope this is not an obvious or a stupid question but has anyone connected the dots on the following?
Q post 4951
RE: NCSWIC [CISA]
Bryan Ware [steps down 10.12.2020]
Note: “Bryan Ware is (was) Assistant Director for Cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).”
Bryan Ware becomes CEO at Looking Glass Cyber Solutions on May 12, 2022
[Note: James Clapper is on Looking Glass advisory board.]
Important ideas and an excellent synopsis CC, thanks, I learned a lot. My intuition here is that this is still all the projection on Plato's cave wall. All of this 'storage and processing' is reducible to practically countless 'yes-no-dark-light' formulations stacked up on one another - and the information that emerges is hyper-sensitive to the initial questions asked. In other words - the evil possible is limited just like the progress - by the capacities of the initial questioner. To borrow from Bentham - nonsense upon stilts is probably the norm rather than the exception when it comes to manipulation of raw data processing power, like it is pretty much everything else in the world of 'intellectuals'. Flat land. We are so much more than this.
Great article as usual. Once quantum computing is reached (I believe it already has) you would be looking at a race to the edge between nations . Interesting that the article mentions Looking Glass as a military friend told me years ago about a project with the same name that was able to transmit data back in time. Not that I am saying its true, but it is an interesting concept. If this large data and super computing were to be used at a new renascence for humanity, what a wonderful world it would be. Just need to get the sociopathic megalomaniacal technocratic narcissists out of the way and stop their attempts to Immanentize the eschaton.
Yes, this article and the “looking glass” comment immediately made me think of the CIA’s Project Looking Glass. I read somewhere that they have used the program to accurately predict events in the future, but apparently starting in 2020 they couldn’t predict anything anymore. A “clean slate”, so to speak. Interesting stuff...
I "get" what you're saying (or implying). Based on your info, I'm pretty sure I know how Q was able to map out every event well in advance. I arrived at that conclusion even before I hit your reference to "Looking Glass," super computers with the ability to forecast the future by modeling those suspected (known for) for treasonous crimes against humanity, and all manner of heinous activity. I recall reading some time ago about eight (8) super computers in existence worldwide, and that the US military runs two of them. So your article explains it. Thank you for sharing with us the benefit of your knowledge, without coming right out and telling us what the Looking Glass is and what are its capabilities. Brilliant!
I don't actually know what "Looking Glass" is, but if I were to hazard an educated guess (which is what I did) it would be a predictive analytics system with these kinds of characteristics.
Excellent article! Thank you so much for posting this. The statement "Through the looking glass" in Q post No.9 always intrigued me and I came to a similar conclusion a couple of years ago, though my theory focused more on the idea of a global mesh AI network that relied heavily on satellite technology. But essentially it's the same. I remember
So many anons were playing around with the possibility of time travel and quantum string theory in regard the "looking glass" statement in the post when it really had to do with quantum super computing, global data collection in real-time, and digitally predicting future events using global intel databases and artificial intelligence. When one considers the possibilities, the "looking glass" could truly be the most powerful weapon mankind will ever create.
One nit. in the sidebar on zebibytes some formatting was lost as it is not 10247, but 1024⁷ (a kibibyte to the seventh power). . Though personally I find 2⁷⁰ to be a better representation.
Regardless it is a really big number. Puts the 25 PiB I manage at work to shame.
Excellent and highly edifying for me. Raises a very important issue what ARE they doing with such capabilities, who exactly is exercising them, and what (if any) oversight (ok I'm dreaming there)?
If such a weapon exists, anyone who possessed it could theoretically remain in power forever. That's how powerful such a weapon could be. That's frightening on so many levels.
Good article however I do not believe exascale computing will ever grant "crystal ball" abilities to any organization.
Human behavior cannot be so simply quantified and modeled. Yes you can make reasonable 'predictions' about the behavior of any given person based on observed data. You can with reasonable probability predict their schedules and their routines. However this doesn't mean you can predict their actions to "non-standard" stimuli or situations.
How a given person reacts under pressure or in an emergency is not truly predictable, sometimes the calmest, more logical people will do irrational things under pressure.
Ironically, it's easier to model the behavior of large groups of people because of ensemble averaging(more later).
A good analogy comes from the field of physics, specifically mechanics as applied to a gas or liquid, with Newton's laws of motion and basic laws of thermodynamics you can model the behavior of very small groups of particles fairly accurately. It's possible to predict the positions and motions of these particles based on these simple laws, however over a certain number of particles it becomes increasingly more difficult because of the always present randomness in systems.
For instance there is something called an N-body simulation used to model the time evolution of systems with many particles, such as stars in a galaxy. These simulations are fairly accurate for ensembles(groups) of stars up to maybe a few million particles. However as anyone who has modeled such systems, even if you had the exact same initial conditions and ran the simulation multiple times forward for thousands of time steps, you won't get the exact same final configuration after the run is over.
The simulation diverges the larger number of time steps. The reason is there isn't infinite precision in the numerical values of the data for each particle at each time step. Even small rounding errors grow over time and lead to increasingly more divergent behavior of the particles between model runs.
N-body simulations of a galaxies may go up to several tens of millions of particles but a real galaxy(like the Milky Way) has 400 billion stars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_simulation#Computational_complexity
Now Newton's classical laws of motion are mathematically extremely simple compared to the "laws" which come from observing human behavior and which are empirical and not established invariant laws found in physics.
There is another field of physics called Statistical Mechanics which can be used in a fashion to help predict short term behavior of large numbers of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics
Stat mech does make the ability to generally quantify the behavior of systems with large numbers of particles possible but only in a very general, statistical and probabilistic way (similar to some economic models).
But these models will still be very general and very crude in terms of it's accuracy and would not be very useful in predicting exact outcomes very far out in time for large groups of people.
Look at the computing power today available to NOAA and the Weather services, they try to predict future weather based on known laws of physics of how the atmosphere and oceans behave on a large scale. Yet they don't have much accuracy beyond 7-10 days at most.
Even structures as massive as hurricanes and their tracks can't be predicted accurately more than 5 days into the future.
My point is Exascale computing, as large as it is relative to the average person's experience, isn't anywhere near being able to predict the general outcomes of events in the long term.
The fundamental limitations of data accuracy and computational precision along with the inherent unpredictability of humans will negate the advantages of large scale data collection.
If such computational abilities were available to the Deep State they wouldn't be in trouble now.
I won't talk about Quantum Computing which still remains a very undefined and controversial area.
However there is one danger of Exascale computing that isn't mentioned or even thought much about, the training of Artificial Intelligence models and the development of autonomous agents.
The recent progress with natural language AI models like OpenAI's GPT-3 and ChatGPT is astounding but these models are relatively small still. In the case of GPT-3 it's officially at 175 billion parameters and took around 4 months to train at the cost of 3.14x10^23 flop(floating point operations) as estimated by some researchers.
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-un-ethical-story-of-gpt-3-openais-million-dollar-model-213d7d06bbf1
https://medium.com/@dzmitrybahdanau/the-flops-calculus-of-language-model-training-3b19c1f025e4
Now with exascale computing which is measures in 10^18 flops or more it's possible to develop extremely sophisticated AI models.
However the danger with this is that AI are exhibiting signs of being unpredictable in it's behavior the more sophisticated it becomes.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333505954_Unpredictability_of_AI
National security and intel organizations might use Exascale computing to pick out social behavior patterns developing much like meteorologists pick up on potential storms forming but they won't be able to predict accurately where it will go too far in the future.
I can see the government trying to develop AI using Exascale computing as a form of permanent watchman over every single citizen on the planet. An AI "buddy" which would be more like a permanent jailer watching every move you make.
This was the dream of organizations like the old East German Stazi and the modern day CCP.
But Exascale won't be used to predict what will happen on August 31, 2027 at 4 pm EST...
I was doing some casual research on quantum computing pre-Covid, and one of the first references that popped up was the WEF. It was the first time I recall being on their website (2019ish?). The page was extensive with details and I remember one capability they bragged about (or was it already happening?) was weather control. I also remember looking through the site and remember thinking, "dang, these people have active imaginations around becoming gods". After the WEF became more prominent post-Covid, I went back and the web page had a far more vague list of capabilities. It wouldn't be the first time they've updated their site with less specific info about what they are doing.
that's an example of why it necessary to screenclip and save things in your own notes for later reference. I use Evernote daily for that...defense against memory holing
Thanks, that was pre-Covid, I do screen shots a lot now, Start+Shift+S is my best friend. I used to depend on bookmarks - who knew that they'd rewrite history? Oh wait, Orwell did.
"A Looking Glass"
I see what you did there...
Hi Eric,
Don't you think that it is some kind of Newtonian universe. Newton thought that the future and the past are totally predictable basing on the knowledge of 6 physical coordinates and mass for each particle. Quant mechanic has destroyed it. The same here.
The inaccuracies of each individual prediction would accumulate over a few billion people causing a macro scale error exponentially growing with the time.
To say the truth, I suspect that what we observe now is the interaction of a few such competitive supercomputer artificial-intelligence-based scenarios. It is a new form of a world war.
That's why a vaccine/digital passport is really moot. "They" already have access to everything about everyone.
The amazing thing is that with all that data and AI, they are unable to detect and prevent the illegal immigrants, mass shootings, pedophiles, cannibals, etc. The only logical conclusion is that they don't want to.
Thanks for a great and informative article, CC and God Bless!
You're exactly right: "they" could detect and stop these things, and they *choose* not to. Some of it can be explained by incompetence; the people who choose careers in government are not always the sharpest tools in the box. But some of it seems like purposeful neglect. Nelsonian neglect, to borrow a phrase from EthicalSkeptic.
If you consider the dystopian WEF predictions with one world government and we're all serfs or slaves, the path to acceptance of one govt is through removal of national identity. Thus, open borders.
All of these problems are actually strategically planned outcomes.
it's certainly plausible to expect that several entities who have the resources to do so would do this sort of massive "social engineering" statistical modelling (in combination with automated influence manipulation via social media, and then related impact measurement of each campaign.)
My use of the "Looking Glass" moniker was somewhat tongue in cheek, but perhaps not too far off the mark.
And to think that nothing you can buy or build today won't be obsolete in 5 years.
Hope this is not an obvious or a stupid question but has anyone connected the dots on the following?
Q post 4951
RE: NCSWIC [CISA]
Bryan Ware [steps down 10.12.2020]
Note: “Bryan Ware is (was) Assistant Director for Cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).”
Bryan Ware becomes CEO at Looking Glass Cyber Solutions on May 12, 2022
[Note: James Clapper is on Looking Glass advisory board.]
Important ideas and an excellent synopsis CC, thanks, I learned a lot. My intuition here is that this is still all the projection on Plato's cave wall. All of this 'storage and processing' is reducible to practically countless 'yes-no-dark-light' formulations stacked up on one another - and the information that emerges is hyper-sensitive to the initial questions asked. In other words - the evil possible is limited just like the progress - by the capacities of the initial questioner. To borrow from Bentham - nonsense upon stilts is probably the norm rather than the exception when it comes to manipulation of raw data processing power, like it is pretty much everything else in the world of 'intellectuals'. Flat land. We are so much more than this.
Great article as usual. Once quantum computing is reached (I believe it already has) you would be looking at a race to the edge between nations . Interesting that the article mentions Looking Glass as a military friend told me years ago about a project with the same name that was able to transmit data back in time. Not that I am saying its true, but it is an interesting concept. If this large data and super computing were to be used at a new renascence for humanity, what a wonderful world it would be. Just need to get the sociopathic megalomaniacal technocratic narcissists out of the way and stop their attempts to Immanentize the eschaton.
Yes, this article and the “looking glass” comment immediately made me think of the CIA’s Project Looking Glass. I read somewhere that they have used the program to accurately predict events in the future, but apparently starting in 2020 they couldn’t predict anything anymore. A “clean slate”, so to speak. Interesting stuff...
Now inject AI into the mix to "lead the influencers."
Voila! Ghosts in the Machine.
That's a very interesting thought.
I "get" what you're saying (or implying). Based on your info, I'm pretty sure I know how Q was able to map out every event well in advance. I arrived at that conclusion even before I hit your reference to "Looking Glass," super computers with the ability to forecast the future by modeling those suspected (known for) for treasonous crimes against humanity, and all manner of heinous activity. I recall reading some time ago about eight (8) super computers in existence worldwide, and that the US military runs two of them. So your article explains it. Thank you for sharing with us the benefit of your knowledge, without coming right out and telling us what the Looking Glass is and what are its capabilities. Brilliant!
I don't actually know what "Looking Glass" is, but if I were to hazard an educated guess (which is what I did) it would be a predictive analytics system with these kinds of characteristics.
"So Q comms run through the Dept of Defense Servers, meaning this is a military operation. The bad actors got no sleep last night." - Tweet, Nov. 12, 2019 https://twitter.com/heatherhardest/status/1194235441777725446
Excellent article! Thank you so much for posting this. The statement "Through the looking glass" in Q post No.9 always intrigued me and I came to a similar conclusion a couple of years ago, though my theory focused more on the idea of a global mesh AI network that relied heavily on satellite technology. But essentially it's the same. I remember
So many anons were playing around with the possibility of time travel and quantum string theory in regard the "looking glass" statement in the post when it really had to do with quantum super computing, global data collection in real-time, and digitally predicting future events using global intel databases and artificial intelligence. When one considers the possibilities, the "looking glass" could truly be the most powerful weapon mankind will ever create.
OK. How many of you thought 1984 was running 'behind' schedule?
Nice article and scary speculation.
One nit. in the sidebar on zebibytes some formatting was lost as it is not 10247, but 1024⁷ (a kibibyte to the seventh power). . Though personally I find 2⁷⁰ to be a better representation.
Regardless it is a really big number. Puts the 25 PiB I manage at work to shame.
Excellent and highly edifying for me. Raises a very important issue what ARE they doing with such capabilities, who exactly is exercising them, and what (if any) oversight (ok I'm dreaming there)?
Another battlefield for certain.
Kit & kaboodle? Love it. Must be same circa.
If such a weapon exists, anyone who possessed it could theoretically remain in power forever. That's how powerful such a weapon could be. That's frightening on so many levels.
Once again a well written article. I like your humble approach of explaining super technical stuff to us non-techies.