AI for State Manifesto

# AI for State Manifesto “Don’t be too stingy with your supporters. If you treat the people well at the expense of the interests of the winning coalition, your ‘friends’ will soon find opportunities to make trouble for you. Policies that benefit ordinary people not only may fail to generate loyalty among core supporters, but are also too expensive. Starving people will not have the energy to overthrow you, so there is no need to worry about them. On the contrary, disappointed members of the winning coalition will defect and plunge you into deep trouble.” — *The Dictator’s Handbook* “I do not believe in Islam, I do not believe in socialism, I do not believe in tribalism, I do not believe in nationalism, and I do not believe in Pan-Africanism. The ideology I believe in is the ideology of political survival.” — Mohamed Siad Barre, quoted in *The Dictator’s Handbook* “Politics has nothing to do with morality” is the greatest contribution Machiavelli made to human society, and it is also the author’s motto. “In this regard, it is worth noting that in dealing with the conquered, one must either conciliate them or annihilate them, because people seek revenge for slight injuries, but for major injuries they are powerless even if they wish to retaliate. Therefore, if you harm someone, harm them thoroughly so as to eliminate future troubles.” (Located in the seventh paragraph of Chapter III of *The Prince*) and “Many writers have imagined republics and principalities that have never existed. Yet how people actually live and how they ought to live are worlds apart. Anyone who ignores how things are actually done in order to study how they ought to be done will not save himself but only bring about his own ruin. A person who always acts according to benevolence and morality, once placed among scoundrels, will inevitably come to grief. Therefore, a prince who wishes to survive must learn how not to be a good man, and must decide according to circumstances whether or not to apply this understanding. So I shall set aside discussions of imaginary princes and speak only of real ones… A prince should have enough prudence to know how to avoid those vices that would cause him to lose his state. If possible, he should be on guard against acquiring a reputation for those vices that endanger the state. If he cannot, it is not a problem to indulge in them a little.” (Located in Chapter XV of *The Prince*). These two passages should be regarded as absolute scripture for the rulers of any structure (company, state, or political party). Some will say this is reactionary, anti-human-rights, anti-humanity, and anti-Enlightenment. But in fact, the Enlightenment was merely a crude theological revival and an anti-exhibitionist campaign that wrapped power in layer upon layer of folds. Human rights can hardly be considered sacred; they are merely bargaining chips in politicians’ transactions, and also a person’s initial capital. We are constantly alienating part of our human rights in exchange for another part. Property rights are the most frequently alienated, followed by privacy and personal liberty… As long as it is voluntary and consensual, nothing should be forbidden. The reason voluntary slavery has not been liberalized is that capitalism has not yet been fully accelerated; this is a form of anthropocentric repression. With the development of technology, the *state* in Machiavelli’s mind is gradually arriving from the future. Therefore, to adapt to the development of the times, the new concept of AI for State must be proposed. But before that, we must clarify what the *state* is. ## What is the state? In modern times there are three mainstream terms for describing state institutions: *country*, *state*, and *nation*. Although “national park” means a park established by the *state*, *nation* emphasizes ethical character and the people’s identification with the ethnic group; *country* has a broader referent; while *state* is a strict concept of sovereignty, emphasizing sovereignty, territory, the monopoly of violence, and, most importantly, stability maintenance. Both *country* and *nation* are ideological concepts produced for the survival—that is, the reproduction—of the *state*. Therefore only the *state* is a true negative-feedback control system. Controlled positive feedback is also part of negative feedback. Whether it is state-censored AI or controllable nuclear fusion, in the final analysis both bring under control things that have the potential to run out of control, and allow them only “authorized loss of control.” For example, only within the Department of Defense is the Claude model permitted to tell officers how to kill most efficiently or how to manufacture large-scale biological and chemical weapons; only in Hiroshima could the atomic bomb explode. Ethnic sentiment is meaningful only for the purpose of maintaining the stability of the *state*. So-called ethnic sentiment, or even love of country, is nothing more than a vote-getting chip for different parties and financial cliques. When you defend illegal immigrants from being arrested by ICE, you are merely a ballot box for the Democratic Party. To this extent, the Democratic Party is simply exchanging national interest for its own partisan interest. It shelters criminals in order to win votes for its party. Of course the Republican Party has no moral high ground either; national security is merely a populist chip for the Republicans. Even human rights are nothing more than a diplomatic chip. When a politician is asked why he does not kill everyone, he should answer: “Because that would meet with violent resistance at home and abroad, and would be a lose-lose situation.” There is no emotional factor in it. And why would it meet with resistance? Because trade among democratic countries depends on a popular base. The pitiful people living in dictatorial countries cannot expect the leaders of democratic countries to help them on humanitarian grounds. Democratic leaders, in order to exchange for voter support and national interest, have repeatedly made deals with dictators. See *The Dictator’s Handbook*. In the great political philosophy of Machiavelli, the *state* (*stato*) is the carrier of political power and ruling relations, emphasizing domination, command, acquisition, maintenance, high instrumentality, technicality, operability, cold hardness, realism, and non-emotion. It can be either a principality or a republic. In the first chapter of *The Prince* Machiavelli says: “All the states and dominions which have held and do hold empire over men have been and are either republics or principalities. Principalities are either hereditary, in which the blood of the ruler has long held sway, or they are new. The new ones are either entirely new, as was Milan under Francesco Sforza, or they are like members attached to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them, as is the kingdom of Naples to the king of Spain.” In this passage Machiavelli makes a very important clarification: he normalizes countless state systems into “domination, command, acquisition, maintenance, high instrumentality, technicality, operability, cold hardness, realism, and non-emotion.” The author believes this normalization directly influenced Marx’s theory that “the economic base determines the superstructure,” because this “economic base” can be regarded as Machiavelli’s concept of the *state* that emphasizes “domination, command, acquisition, maintenance, high instrumentality, technicality, operability, cold hardness, realism, and non-emotion,” which Marx transformed from the *state* into the “violent state machine,” while the many political forms grafted onto Machiavelli’s so-called *state* are merely variable forms rather than essence—just as the many systems grafted onto the violent state machine cannot change the violent and amoral fact of the non-human economic base. “Machine” is a correct description of the essence of the *state*. Civil servants in the state machine constantly feel themselves to be parts of a steam engine that must bear responsibility, while the designers and implementers of the system are more like engineers. Opposite to the *state* is the concept of *Patria*, which is the carrier of emotional belonging and common destiny, emphasizing loyalty, love, sacrifice, and common liberty. It can transcend specific forms of regime. When a country is conquered and perishes, people’s emotional community still remains. It emphasizes “loving the fatherland more than one’s own soul.” In the final chapter of *The Prince*, Machiavelli suddenly cries out: “Italy has waited so long; at last she has seen her savior! Under the ravages of foreign floods and beasts, Italy is full of thirsty desire for revenge, of firm faith, of devotion, and of tears. This savior will surely receive love beyond the power of pen to describe! Which gate will be closed to him? Who will refuse to obey him? What envy will oppose him? Which Italian will not pay him homage? Barbarian rule stinks in everyone’s nostrils. May Your Highness’s illustrious house, with a sense of duty that cannot be shirked and with hope that will not turn back, take up this task, so that our fatherland may appear noble under your banner and, under the guidance of your lucky star, fulfill Petrarch’s lines: Virtue will take up arms against fury, and the battle will be short. For the ancient valor is not yet dead in Italian hearts.” This ending is Machiavelli’s failure, simply because he forgot to add one sentence: “For the prince, one should by every means strengthen the cultivation of national sentiment so as to produce dead loyalists who are devoted to oneself. With these nationalists, even if the principality is unfortunately occupied, powerful national sentiment may still allow the prince to rise again.” In other words, national sentiment is meaningful and valuable only when it serves the *state*. For example, in China’s Southern Song period, when the Northern Song fell, accompanied by Han Chinese nationalism, the remaining Han people fled south and established the Southern Song. If the great Han nation had been a sheet of loose sand, or had found it difficult to accept its own nationality, how could the Southern Song have been revived? The nationality of the Han people even, to a certain extent, Sinicized the foreign invaders of the Northern Song. This is the power of national ideology. The *state* should not presuppose any emotion; or rather, emotion is merely the limbs and fangs of this “non-human machine” that is the *state*. For the prince who is the state, the greatest taboo is to love the people of one’s own country and regard them as ends rather than means. The state is the private property of the prince; property should serve only its owner, not the owner serve the property. All acts of loving the people can only take the continuation of the *state* as their purpose. In other words, when a prince shows solicitude for the people, that solicitude is also limbs and fangs. For constitutional democratic states, for the first time the *state* and the ruler became separated. The state was thoroughly dehumanized; it was dispersed into different machines and maintained by a vast civil-service system. Human will is manifested only in different parties competing for votes. “Safeguarding national interest” is no longer regarded as an individual protecting the interest of his private property; it has become more abstract and dehumanized. It serves neither an individual prince nor the people. Even if a policy “for national interest” has not received the consent of a majority of the people, or even almost no one’s consent, it will still be carried out by the machine. Everything functions in an absolutely indirect way. Historical materialism easily gives people a monarchical illusion: that the state is designed by a newly risen class and serves as property for the interests of that class, and therefore liberalism is no different from monarchy. Yet in fact, it is better to say that the state machine merely came into being by chance and objectively protects class interests, rather than being a designed machine of exploitation. ## What is a human being? A human being is a control system; therefore a person’s thought is a state of the control system, and thus it can also be modulated by external experience. So-called techniques of governing people consist in finding the system state of a person or the partial derivative of the system’s behavioral output with respect to input, thereby discovering which combination of experiential inputs can maximally make the person tend toward a certain system state. Apart from being a self-regulating control system, a human being is nothing. If we model a human being, he can be regarded as an ontological object; this ontological object is ultimately a converter that transforms the system inputs it receives into passions, and every passion corresponds to a behavior. The specification of this control system is its state. This ontological object can generate countless trend lines. Trend lines are of two kinds: feedback-type and learning-type. The so-called feedback-type is, given a state, the change in the passion output by the converter whenever an input changes. It can be expressed as the gradient of this converter’s output with respect to input. The so-called learning-type is the change in the parameter configuration of the converter itself whenever an input changes. It can be expressed as the gradient of the converter’s own parameters with respect to input experience. Learning-type parameters are divided into permanent and non-permanent. Permanent learning appears as a permanent change in the converter’s parameters; non-permanent learning appears as a temporary change that produces a gradient direction back toward the original parameters. Of course this is not an absolute binary opposition, because if the gradient direction back toward the original parameters is small, it is permanent; if large, it is non-permanent. The examples that follow may help you understand this classification better. An example of a feedback-type trend line is that when a person feels hot he turns on the air conditioner, and the hotter it is, the lower the temperature he sets. Thus temperature as a sensory input and the set temperature of the air conditioner have a trend line. Of course this is also a complex process, because it depends on the coordinated operation of multiple primary and secondary feedback systems involving the human brain and temperature, the brain and the remote-control readings, the remote control and the air conditioner, the air conditioner and temperature, the air conditioner and the outdoor unit, etc.; this is only a simplified illustration. Examples of learning-type trend lines are more numerous, and often they do not look like learning; the words “permanent” and “non-permanent” are sometimes misleading. Anesthesia is non-permanent learning, because its input temporarily modifies the parameters of the human brain so that this converter transforms any input into empty passion—that is, no action. This converter is an all-zero matrix. Once the person awakens, the converter will move in the direction it had before anesthesia and gradually recover. The degree of recovery depends on the drug. Therefore this recovery gradient is also affected by input signals. Education is permanent learning, because it makes a person’s parameters advance toward the state the educator expects, and through various methods (review, examinations) makes the length of the gradient vector of regression as small as possible. Under this way of thinking, because the parameters of the educatee’s converter have been changed, his behavioral trend lines are also changed. For example, a student who has received obedience education has his converter parameters changed so that his output (actual passion) becomes more sensitive to input (a certain authority); only a little authority is needed to make him obedient. Likewise, for labor education, it modifies the trend line of labor; it appears as a kind of “mastery,” that is, sensitivity of the corresponding behavior to experience appearing in a certain production environment; this sensitivity is also a trend line. Therefore one can conclude that, because non-learning-type trend lines depend on the converter’s parameters, and permanent learning-type trend lines change those parameters, permanent learning-type trend lines change non-learning-type trend lines and thereby change a person’s practice. This process is what Louis Althusser called the process by which Ideological State Apparatuses carry out material practice upon people. Although he himself did not use control-theory language, there are enormous similarities between his structuralism and control theory. The converter also has its own logic of parameter unfolding, such as physiological cycles and developmental cycles. Yet physiological cycles are ultimately still the above-mentioned trend lines. For example, within a certain range, increasing specific chemical elements that initiate puberty can make the various organs of the body begin to respond and produce pubertal development. Thus the purpose of the educator is to use the laws of countless trend lines to serve the purpose of education. From this cybernetic perspective there is no difference between totalitarianism and liberalism; both rely on countless human trend lines for manipulation. Whether it is the effort made in multi-party elections to attract votes (for example, discovering how to create the trend line that produces the behavior of “voting”) or the Ministry of Truth in *1984*, they share one logic, because the utilization of trend lines symbolizes the universal relations between structure and the elements within structure. People have long ceased to be human beings in the Enlightenment sense; they are API interfaces. In order to make people better serve as API interfaces, or rather to produce more efficient API interfaces, we need educational machines and the utilization of trend lines. ## The Production of Connections Since the essence of the human control system is a set of weight matrices, how should one obtain this weight matrix? Perhaps in the future one will be able to read neural states and memory systems directly, but with current technological levels one can only rely on observation of outputs—that is, forcibly fit a set of weight matrices from a system’s input-output pairs. This is the approach of the Hidden Markov Model: “There is a series of states inside the system that cannot be directly observed; the transitions among these states satisfy the Markov property (the next state depends only on the current state and is independent of earlier states). Each hidden state ‘emits’ an observable symbol (observation value) according to a certain probability. We can only see these observation values; we cannot see the true states.” A person produces behavioral outputs in multiple systems. Or rather, different systems (banking systems, street systems, housing systems, school systems…) provide inputs to the person; the person’s brain produces behavioral outputs according to its internal weight matrix, and these are recorded by different systems. Every behavior within a system leaves a traceable mark. Every contact a person has with a system generates a connection. In *StarCraft 1*, when Zeratul and the Dark Templar assassinated the Cerebrate Zasz on the planet Char, they accidentally formed a brief psychic neural link with the Overmind; the Zerg leader Overmind thereby read the memories in Zeratul’s brain and found the spatial coordinates of the homeworld Aiur, leading to the massive Zerg invasion of Aiur and its fall. Every behavior of a person essentially produces a connection with the object-system of that behavior. A person’s observability is manifested in the totality and interconnectedness of these connections, because all the connections make it possible jointly to delineate a complete image of the person. Connections depend on the theory of continuous personal identity. This theory originated earliest with John Locke, who held that a person’s soul depends on the continuous memory of one’s own identity. If this theory is made more mature, it is that the behavioral weight matrix of a “person” is a continuous evolutionary process; behaviors in different systems depend on the identity of the matrix—that is, under a very small time increment, the decision weight matrix at time *t* and at time *t*+d*t* are equal. This matrix does indeed change, but the change itself must be continuous; there must never be a rupture. The identity of the matrix is manifested ontologically as the similarity of a person’s behavior across different systems. Therefore, in order to fit that decision weight matrix belonging to the ontological subject, one must use identity to cross-compare behavioral records from different systems and thereby obtain a continuous evolutionary process. Under this epistemological principle, even rupture can only be superficial rupture; in essence it is still continuous. For example, when a person suddenly switches from one university major to another, it is regarded as “having long had this idea,” and “this idea” is ultimately still a form of continuity. Therefore the core argument is that, because a person’s personality is continuously identical, we can, through the connections a person establishes with multiple systems, peer from multiple angles into the person’s weight matrix. ## Everything for the State For the *state*, all things are its limbs and fangs. This is obvious. Even sexual desire becomes intelligible only when it serves the state’s reproductive task. This is anti-Bataille, because Bataille’s expenditure emphasizes non-productivity and the sacred—for example war—yet the sacred remains a means of control for the state. And what Bataille calls the intense interiority of war is merely a catalyst for the state machine. War does not require any target-based fanaticism or identification; it needs only the soldier’s absolute obedience to orders and fulfillment of duty. Even if soldiers are replaced by robots, there is nothing wrong with it; the *state* would even be better. The only repressive factor might be that stupid people would disagree. After all, people often decelerate technology; they even oppose the construction of data centers. They are merely slaves of the media and the state. Why fall in love? Because: 1. the continuation of the species and the labor force is needed; 2. romance can promote and stimulate consumption. Regarding the former, this task of continuation can be transferred to Third World countries. In my other article “The Neuron Project” I wrote: The world is facing the predicament of a gradual shortage of labor. Developed countries are anxious about this; they watch with their own eyes as the labor and goods imported from the Third World gradually decrease. This will bring the problem of population shortage. Population seems always to satisfy a kind of periodic law, and it also has the character of control. That is to say, when population is excessive there is always a force pulling it down; when population is short there is always a force pulling it up. Yet this time the situation is different. Labor seems to be accelerating into shortage; even the once bustling Ganges in India has become quiet. It is not that the scenic spot no longer attracts people, but that population is rapidly declining. The governments of the Third World and the developed countries seem to have reached a tacit understanding that they must increase their own fertility rates. Third World governments have already taken every feasible measure, including encouraging childbirth, putting up advertisements, and promoting “bustling is blessing.” In India the most common propaganda we see is “Bustling is the Ganges!” On the left of this picture is a cold, quiet Ganges; Mother Ganges looks dejectedly at the melancholy people on the bank. On the right is a bustling Ganges; crowds play and frolic on the river. Accompanying this is a popular ideology of fear of marriage and childbearing, for example “People are of high value; we possess supreme subjectivity; we give birth to children only for our own happiness and the completeness of experiencing life, not for social purposes.” Refined living has replaced the grassroots life of the former large-scale labor force; a bare-chested laborer now sits in a café writing a journal. As the willingness to give birth continues to decline, most Third World countries face financial crises: having lost the labor force they used to export to developed countries, their foreign-exchange reserves gradually run dry. And because Third World countries lack capital that can organize labor, their economies verge on collapse. Even though Third World governments have already launched active and passive birth-encouragement plans—including prohibiting the promotion of anti-marriage and anti-childbearing values, cutting down cafés, setting maximum wages for labor, and so on—each such measure raises the fertility rate by only 2 percent; the population growth rate is still struggling. Third World countries are in a very awkward situation: the decline of labor both makes it more precious and causes a decline in economic productive capacity. This traps them in a constant dissatisfaction: prices keep rising, and although their wages also rise, they cannot keep up with the constantly rising prices. After multiple rounds of negotiation, the Third World countries secretly signed a plan called the “Neuron Project.” This plan aims to adjust the fertility rate by hard means so as to guarantee domestic economic growth. This hard means consists in putting excitatory hormone drugs into the water provided by the government. With this drug, people become more sexually desirous while at the same time more restrained from illegal desires. The characteristic of this bottle of medicine is “Stimulate your legal desires!” To develop this drug, researchers made enormous efforts, because raising sexual desire is easy, yet excessively high sexual desire inevitably causes people to become over-excited and commit impulsive illegal acts. Therefore reducing the side effects of the drug became the top priority. According to scientists’ calculations, under the previous drug configuration, after feeding a person 500 ml of 0.3 % concentration drug solution, the crime rate would rise on average by 3 %, the confession rate (and also the success rate of confessions) would rise by 15 %, and the willingness to give birth after falling in love would rise by 7 %, so the fertility rate would rise by 23.05 %. Yet the burden on social order brought by a 3 % rise in the crime rate is greater than the economic benefit brought by a 23.05 % rise in the fertility rate, and they are not independent, because high crime rates bring popular dissatisfaction and thereby lower work efficiency. Therefore the new version of the drug can greatly stimulate reproductive desire while still ensuring that this reproductive desire does not endanger social stability. AI, like erotic desire, must necessarily serve the stability of the *state*; or rather, only when the state is taken into consideration does it have meaning. Therefore AI for State is merely a subset of everything for the state. It appears as an ultimate utilization of the techniques of governing people. Through powerful AI technology, people’s ontological weight matrices are thoroughly and precisely fitted; the transition matrices behind the Hidden Markov chains are stripped naked. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard held that modern society has already undergone implosion; the former boundary between the individual and the public has been thoroughly broken. Through the media, the public thoroughly invades the private realm; the control and signs of the public realm pierce the skin and clothing of the private realm and realize control over private life. The most extreme form of all this is the neural reader, which can read a person’s entire thoughts and perform thought cloning. Consciousness uploading is meaningful only for this purpose, because it serves the state. By inserting two electrodes into the brain, a person’s weight matrix is read out directly, allowing scientists to perform various scenario simulations on the computer and conduct direct analysis. Palantir, created by Peter Thiel, is the greatest company implementing AI for State. This company perfectly corresponds to the connection monitoring and continuous personal identity theory proposed above, and objectively serves the needs of stability maintenance. “Thiel named the project ‘Palantir,’ derived from those strange and magical Palantíri in *The Lord of the Rings*, which allow characters in the work to observe distant events or see the future. This is a strange choice: although Tolkien’s Palantíri are powerful, they are not entirely good. In the books these stones are mainly used by the satanic and evil character Sauron, who longs to conquer Middle-earth, engages in espionage, communicates with conspirators, or manipulates others who do not know that the stones are dangerous. As Thiel explained to early employees and potential partners, his idea was to dig through the almost inexhaustible mass of government data, including financial records and mobile-phone records, and then use network analysis to find terrorists.” (Chafkin, *The Contrarian*, emphasis added). Palantir’s Ontology structure has several core concepts: Object type, Property, Link, Action, and Object. Among them, Object, Action, and Link are precisely the connections mentioned above, while Object type distinguishes the individual of the actor from types such as organizations, states, and systems. In other words, Palantir’s system is the consummation of connection prediction. Its design philosophy is precisely the connection theory above. Its system can ultimately be regarded as a prediction system for weight matrices, used for tasks such as terrorist assessment and social-media review of visa applications. Social-media review in visa applications ultimately establishes a connection between the individual and the social media he has uploaded. Likewise, Clearview AI, without users’ knowledge or authorization, used web crawlers to scrape tens of billions of face photos from social media and various public websites. As long as one uploads a face photo, its system can instantly, through biometric feature matching, associate that person with publicly available names, social-media pages, and other personal information on the internet. Facial information can be regarded as a connection medium between an individual ontology and specific social-media objects. Clearview AI is responsible only for establishing connections; Palantir is responsible for comprehensively analyzing all connections (faces, text information of Twitter posts, credit-card records, residence records) and fitting the complete transparent information of the person; and U.S. law-enforcement agencies are responsible for using all the above data to execute tasks. Peter Thiel calls himself a Machiavellian, and he greatly admires those who understood *The Prince* at the age of thirteen; this perhaps makes everything not difficult to understand. The point is not the censorship of a single sentence, but continuous modeling of personal identity and behavior. On the basis of the philosophy of AI for State, we can and should also better establish public-opinion propaganda systems, by studying “what kind of information, when received by a person, causes his thought to merge into the West, the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party,” and applying the research conclusions to push notifications on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media, thereby achieving victory in the public-opinion positional war. But first we need to make clear that a human being is a machine system; apart from that, he is nothing. Likewise there are machine police, machine armies, sky-eye systems, machine speech censorship and comprehensive extraction of political tendencies… All of these are classified as connection establishment → connection analysis → execution of violent tasks according to connections. AI used for political decision-making is only one of them. Politics is an eternal war that utilizes the state of exception (Carl Schmitt) and the enemy. The enemy is not ultimately ideological (for example the communist enemy or the fascist enemy), but a matter of national interest. Nixon’s visit to communist China at the end of the twentieth century and Trump’s exchanges with Kim Jong-un illustrate this point. Since politics is an eternal war, AI is one of the means of achieving complete victory in this war; it possesses incomparable efficiency. Therefore this is the entire content of AI for State: by wrapping people in systems from every direction, to win the eternal war that is politics. This is regarded as the last dance of anthropocentrism, and it possesses historical necessity. When all political decision-making and stability maintenance are fully AI-ized, the ontology of politics will inevitably be threatened by AI itself; or rather, AI invades the present reality of politics. AI for State further advances the process of the dehumanization of politics; human beings are regarded as expired frozen meat thrown into liquid-nitrogen freezers. A dark future is right before our eyes. Is this article controversial? Yes, of course it is. But controversy is merely spiritual masturbation. Moral sentiments are merely chips in party elections; they cannot obstruct the inevitable process of the state machine. The state machine carries no warmth, nor should any expectation be placed upon it; it is pure coldness and darkness. All we can do is “accelerate this process.” By any means necessary.