Speculative commentary on AI, programmer power, and the 'New Caste' without concrete allegations

sounded kind of wonderful. “A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of therapy,” Weizenbaum wrote. “I had thought it essential, as a prerequisite to the very possibility that one person might help another cope with his emotional problems, that the helper himself participate in the other’s experience.” To use a machine for such a task? He was horrified. Weizenbaum knew the empathy ELIZA was exuding was faked. It was just code. “Science,” he concluded, “has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.” “Would you mind leaving the room,” Weizenbaum’s secretary said to him once, lost in a particularly personal discussion with ELIZA. “The reaction,” he wrote, “showed me more clearly than anything I had seen hitherto the enormously exaggerated attributions even a well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to make, to a technology it does not understand.” This was black boxing at its worst: “I have no idea how this thing works. And it’s wonderful!” What makes the New Caste so particularly powerful is that their essential work is to build and operate the cores that control these systems. And the more people they lure onto them, the more powerful the platforms - and the people who run them - become. “The computer programmer,” Weizenbaum wrote, summing up his lessons from ELIZA, “is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver.” Each of these cores represents a fusion of power and politics and technology like nothing the world has ever seen. They are assembled mostly from scratch, they represent the concentration of billions of connections, and their direction is determined by technological and market factors as much as by any democratic twitch. The strategic power of societies that train the best of the New Caste is probably self- evident by now. To educate and deploy masses of people capable of such transcendent design genius will mark a difference, an electric gating line between the nations that succeed and those that fail. But such training brings a real tension, if this group is allowed to really rip away at their work. What won't they attack? Control over the protocols that answer questions, move money, protect data, analyze your DNA - it’s hard to think of any single locus of power that will ever be greater than the tight, gravitationally inevitable platforms emerging around us now. These essential webs are filled, as we’ve seen, with complex bugs and errors and loopholes. They depend on design decisions whose implications resonate for decades — both inside the black boxes and the external world that vibrates to their quiet demands. “If builders built buildings the same way programmers write programs,” one famous coding lemma runs, “then the first woodpecker who came along would destroy civilization.” Who would know if rot is spreading in these systems? Who would stop it? Recall Paul Virilo’s line that trains produced train accidents, planes produced airplane accidents. So: Black Boxes? As much as the work of the New Caste looks tactical in nature - what protocols to use, how to engineer networks or design machine boards - the reality is that most of what they do would be blind without a strategic urge. Behind even the smallest 122 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018354