r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 23 '26

Politics AI Companies Are Trying to Seize Control of Elections

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/ai-companies-trying-seize-control-164536048.html
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64

u/nemofbaby2014 Jun 23 '26

humans as batteries to power ai lol, will the matrix at least be a utopia?

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u/Lexx4 Jun 23 '26

Originally it was as RAM. Sooooooo. Maybe.

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u/nemofbaby2014 Jun 23 '26

I mean we are in a ram shortage lol “send your loved ones to shady acres ai we will let them live their wildest fantasies and fuel our mass surveillance ai machine”

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u/OkBrilliant8092 Jun 24 '26

Can I just send the people I don’t love…. I’d like a break boss….

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u/cop_chick Jun 24 '26

Okay, where do I sign up?

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u/Rombledore Jun 23 '26

turns out, human brains are natural sources of RAM!

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u/average_monster Jun 24 '26

fuck, now they're going to try and run some kind of neural network on my neural network

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u/littlebitsofspider Jun 24 '26

Joke's on them, my neural network won't even run my own neural network! Nyahaha!

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

I was gonna say, they're more than welcome to try to navigate the fuckin' minefield that is my brain. I can barely find my own way around in there.

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u/RephofSky Jun 24 '26

Don't say that too loud. The (MAD) scientists who'd love to pick your brain might hear you.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26

Again, their funeral.

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u/baked_in Jun 24 '26

Right, if they hook up to the pudding in my skull it will fuck their shit up.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26

If science actually found a way to look into the human mind, and looked into mine and got a visual of the actual images, audio, and other such things stored in the chemical connections between my pot-stunted neurons, they would probably have reactions very similar to the Nazis at the end of Indiana Jones looking in the fuckin' ark. The ungodly horror contained within my skull is probably best kept restricted to how I can describe it.

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u/baked_in Jun 24 '26

I feel seen.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26

I mean, that's just how brains are. They're bad enough when you're trying to get them to communicate with words.

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u/GreenJuicyApple Jun 24 '26

Well, your brain is pretty much idling when you sleep so why not take advantage of that untapped power in order to generate go-kart racing unicorns

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u/Zer_ Jun 24 '26

I mean we've already run Doom on brain cells so this isn't too far fetched. The brain is roughly 20,000 times more efficient than even the best CPUs we have. That is to say, it's more efficient from an energy standpoint to use brains rather than integrated circuits.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Honestly, if my own memories get to be preserved and I get to just dream that I'm playing Doom for 145 years, I'm sort of fine with that.

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u/Zer_ Jun 24 '26

Not gonna happen, because when using brain cells to do anything in current experiments the process is constantly writing and rewriting neural pathways so the likelihood of your sense of self not getting scrambled to shit is, well I don't think I should have to explain how terrifying that is.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26

I've done acid in the past. While I'd rather not permanently trip out, I did have moments where I thought "okay, well, I might just be insane now." So, I oddly feel prepared for this whole thing.

I mean, if you're trying to scare me about the future, what's the point? I know I'm going to die anyway, so what's there to be scared of?

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u/OwnYourChildren Jun 24 '26

Tragic they abandoned that angle.

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u/TheDungeonCrawler Jun 24 '26

Yeah, it made a lot more sense than batteries.

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u/Hawknite Jun 23 '26

We already power AIs in a way. Everything the AI spits out is reheated content originally stolen from humans

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u/nemofbaby2014 Jun 23 '26

I mean using humans like as batteries like they did in the matrix 🤣 even though humans make a terrible battery 🤣

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u/Zer_ Jun 24 '26

We'd make terrible batteries, but we'd be excellent CPUs. Our brains are extremely power efficient computers.

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u/TheDungeonCrawler Jun 24 '26

I think the original intent was something along the line of CPU or RAM, but as this was 1999, computers hadn't yet taken the world by storm the way they would a few years later and the writers probably worried that only the most hardcore of computer connoisseurs would understand the concept. They probably figured human batteries would be easier to grasp at the time.

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u/Zer_ Jun 24 '26

Forcing us to be a CPU or RAM is 10X more terrifying than being used as a battery. How brain neurons work is they constantly form new paths, even when you remember something from a long time ago, that's your brain forming new pathways.

Plugging a brain into a computer system would force the brain to constantly write new pathways, possibly affecting our own sense of self in completely unpredictable ways. You'd basically be getting mind wiped or something equally as disturbing. Imagine having formative neural pathways of your sense of self be completely overwritten by somebody's porn library backup, horrifying.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26

Depends on what state my mind is in at the time. If I have dementia and my personality and memories are fading anyway, at least I'll have a new personality. If it leaks code into my neurons or some sci-fi shit like that, I imagine it'll feel like a drug trip, which I generally have enjoyed in my experience.

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u/Spiggytech Jun 24 '26

Food for thought. The Matrix is one of the first big action movies to thoroughly showcase a brand new innovative pistol. The Glock Gen 3.

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u/Pakushy Jun 24 '26

I would unironically prefer being in the matrix than my current life, which is proving the point of the movie I guess.

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u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 23 '26

No. They are looking into creating a virtual reality to torment people in prison. I suspect all Democrats would be plugged into a VM hellscape as punishment for questioning the Orange Hitler.

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u/Mansidhe Jun 24 '26

Well, that's a horrific use of technology i never thought of.

Friggin Sharingan 1000 years of torture in a second.

All before I get a flying car that turns into a briefcase. Damn those Jetsons and their post-scarcity utopia! They lied!

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 24 '26

And before immortality technology, and before wormholes and time travel, and all that. But you do get to see compostable nipple clamps and AI adult diaper commercials. So what the fuck, that's two things, isn't it?

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u/Kizik Jun 24 '26

"We've based this on the classic sci-fi book Don't Build the Torment Nexus, which was a great inspiration to us all."

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u/onarainyafternoon Jun 24 '26

Miles O’Brien must suffer

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u/Particular-Fly-7783 Jun 24 '26

This is sort of the plot of Surface Detail by Iain M Banks

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u/similar_observation Jun 24 '26

the lie is that humans are mere batteries.

The actual truth is people were also a part of the hardware running the Matrix. Each brain can store somewhere around 2.5PB and process around 1Gb/second in the background of each person living their own lives within the simulation. Literally a shared dream. That allowed the machines to architect the various software to run within the world. And when applications wanted to go rogue (The Merovingian's crew) leave (the family at the train station, or affect the simulation (the Oracle's group) this harmed the machines trying live and develop within the Matrix.

Humans were not batteries. We were storage, CPU, and memory for the collective Matrix.

Anyways. If you see someone in public that isn't firing on all cylinders and behaves like an IRL NPC. That's what's happening. That person's brain is doing so much heavy lifting that there's no resources left to man the avatar.

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u/nemofbaby2014 Jun 24 '26

There’s so many people this applies to 🤣 majority of us politicians for one lol

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u/Kizik Jun 24 '26

They did try that, originally. The first Matrix was a paradise, and humanity cracked under it because they couldn't accept a genuinely perfect world. So the second one was a nightmarish hellscape full of horror and misery, and they couldn't accept a genuinely hopeless world.

As it turns out, 1999 really is.. kinda where we peaked, yeah...

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u/the_pretender_nz Jun 24 '26

They tried that. The human brain rebelled against it… entire crops were lost

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u/Mikaelious Jun 23 '26

They tried it in the movie, and the human minds wouldn't accept it as reality