Category Archives: Regulation of Big Tech

Let the accelerating AI annexation stay regulation-free as ‘it’s just version 2.0 of the Industrial Revolution’? Geoffrey Hinton, the newest physics Nobelist, is telling us why that’s a fool’s argument

. AI and theatrical misdirection, Regulation of Big Tech . , , , , , , , , , ,

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A jumping caption problem: the speaker was not, of course, Geoffrey Hinton but an astonished Sajid Javid

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Reader, may your 2025 begin well, continue better and make you resolute. 

May you be especially determined and resilient if you can see this as an all-hands-on-deck time unless you don’t mind watching what we dread most about the AI revolution coming true. A time of orcs and goblins when saying simply ‘our’ is less apt to make minds switch off than talking about ‘humanity,’ particularly when the h-word is joined to ‘extinction,’ because we’re also in an age of acute, enfeebling threat fatigue. 

They were notably paired in a conversation on BBC Radio 4 last Friday in which Sajid Javid, a former British government minister acting as guest editor, did his best to tilt the AI research pioneer Geoffrey Hinton’s vision of our AI-shaped future from dystopian to cheerily utopian — bringing us all ‘longer, happier and healthier lives’. 

Just like a politician, a slab of beef in every crockpot and a Tesla in every garage! you might have snapped irritably. But this one’s unusual. Born a bus-driver’s son in a provincial English city, he is estimated to have taken a ninety-eight per cent cut in salary in giving up a banking career for politics. He has remained likably bloke-y and unaffected in spite of being appointed to at least five ministerial posts in the UK cabinet, at different times, including chancellor of the exchequer, and being entitled to put a ‘sir’ before his name for audiences that understand Britain’s public honours system. 

As investors’ cash pours into AI like a defective flash flood without a celestial shutoff valve, governments worrying about slow economic growth, including the UK’s, are under ferocious — all but brutal — pressure to allow Big AI to do what it likes. 

This was already happening last January, when the right-of-centre party to which ‘Sir Saj’ belongs was in power. In a short news item Private Eye — the satirical magazine and only high-profile print publication still distinguishing itself for serious, difficult, complex investigative journalism — reported, with its usual breezy insouciance, on lobbying in Britain’s parliament by Silicon Valley’s A16Z, referred to there as Andreessen-Horowitz. Notoriously the most aggressive AI advocate in top-tier venture capital, the firm had the ear of a Tory prime minister a year ago and must now be reckoned with by today’s Labour leaders — just as liable to turn puce when reading some updated version of this:

Following founder Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, the company says in its submission that ‘big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can’, ‘development of open-source code should continue to be unregulated’, and that any potential risks posed by AI should be mitigated by, er, ‘using AI to maximise society’s defensive capabilities’. 

So AI is going to regulate AI … 

— Private Eye 1615, 19 January – 1 February 2024

It is over-confidence — or arrogance — on that scale that Geoffrey Hinton has been opposing in recent speeches and interviews, as when he spoke for about three minutes on 10 December at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm in honour of his physics prize. Remarkably, no one seems to have noticed that he is the only Silicon Valley scientist — he led Google’s research into deep learning for ten years — to have been so ennobled in Sweden.

The transcript below could contain minor errors, even if the transcriber paid special attention to nuance, hesitations and emphasis. The BBC’s own record of the exchange is set to be removed from its website soon, with the rest of the three hour-plus episode of the 27 December Radio 4 Today programme of which it is part. 

The thought-provoking reference to Charles Dickens in it is presumably about extreme social inequality: the man in the street’s limited defences against pitiless exploitation and near-absolute control by members of the ruling class in mid-1800s England. Not the least Dickensian in the other sense — referring to humour or divine caricature.

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SAJID JAVID : I wonder whether you thought when you started this work that this is where we would be now.

GEOFFREY HINTON : I didn’t think that it would be where we are now. I thought at some point in the future we would get here. 

Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that some time within probably the next twenty years we’re gonna develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.

SAJID JAVID : Well, I’d read somewhere that — [ laughs ] I know this is a really silly way to put it, but — humans were something like 10,000 times-plus smarter than the goldfish. And an ASI — artificial super-intelligence — could be 10,000 times more intelligent than a human. 

Is that the kind of thing we’re talking about?

GEOFFREY HINTON : It’s not clear what times means in that context. I like to think of it as imagine yourself and a three year-old. We’ll be the three year-old, they’ll be the grownup. 

SAJID JAVID : Do you think people and sort of society generally realise the profound change that is coming? You know, I’ve referred to the change AI will bring on par with the — sort of creation of the wheel and fire. Do you think it could go that far? 

GEOFFREY HINTON : Oh yeah. Yes. I think it’s like the Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution human strength ceased to be that relevant because machines were just stronger. If you wanted to dig a ditch you dug it with a machine. 

What we’ve got now is something that’s replacing human intelligence. And just ordinary human intelligence will not be at the cutting edge any more, it will be machines.

SAJID JAVID : What do you think life will be like ten to twenty years from now?

GEOFFREY HINTON : It will depend on what our political systems do with this technology. So my big worry at present is that we’re in a situation where we need to be very careful, very thoughtful, about developing a potentially very dangerous technology. 

It’s gonna have lots of wonderful effects in health care. And in almost every industry, it’s going to make things more efficient. But we need to be very careful in the development of it. We need regulations to stop people from doing bad things with it. 

And we don’t appear to have those kinds of political systems in place at present. 

SAJID JAVID : Speaking as myself, as a former government minister, as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, I’m interested to know also how you think this might change existing structures. For example, you have talked about many people losing their jobs as obviously happened in the Industrial Revolution. What that means for society and the types of jobs that might be lost, and that’s what I might call — when I’m talking about the ‘bad’ [ dimensions and effects of AI ] — that … it’s a sort of necessary outcome of technological change. But how profound do you think that will be?

GEOFFREY HINTON : Well, if you want to know what happened in the Industrial Revolution, to ordinary people, I think reading Dickens is good. 

… I think there will be similar amounts of change caused by AI. And my worry is that even though it will cause huge increases in productivity — which should be very good for society — it could be very bad for society if all  the benefit goes to the rich, and a lot of people lose their jobs and become poorer.

If you have a big gap between rich and poor it’s very bad for society. 

SAJID JAVID : What’s different this time? 

GEOFFREY HINTON : So these things are more intelligent than we are.

So there’s never any chance in the Industrial Revolution that machines would take over from people just because they were stronger. We were still in control because we had the intelligence. 

Now, there’s a threat that these things can take control. 

So that’s one big difference.

SAJID JAVID : And I think it’s the pace of change as well — how quickly this is all happening. 

GEOFFREY HINTON : Yes, it’s very, very fast. Much faster than I expected. Because it’s so fast, we haven’t had the time to do the research needed on how to keep it under control.

SAJID JAVID : And let’s just talk about … some of the good things that are already emerging from AI. For example, as a former health secretary I think a lot about the advances that can be made in medical research, in life sciences. Is that a sector you can pick and say that actually is something where you can really extend life years for people? We can all live longer and have happier and healthier lives.

GEOFFREY HINTON : Yes. So I think it’s going to do tremendous good in areas like medicine. And that’s why it’s unrealistic to talk about stopping the progress. 

I didn’t sign the petition that asked for that a few years ago because it just seemed completely unrealistic to me. In health care, for example, we’ll be able to have family doctors who in effect have seen a hundred million patients. And have all the tests that have ever been done on you and on your relatives. 

Two hundred thousand people — about — die everywhere from bad diagnoses. Most of that’s gonna go away. 

Already, an AI system is better than a doctor at doing diagnosis. And the combination of an AI system and the doctor is much better than the doctor at dealing with difficult cases, and the AI system’s only gonna get better.

SAJID JAVID : In the past, you previously predicted — I think you said there was a ten percent chance that AI will lead to human extinction within the next three decades. Has anything changed your analysis of that?  

GEOFFREY HINTON : Erm. Not really. I think, ten to twenty [per cent].

SAJID JAVID : Oh, you’re going up!

GEOFFREY HINTON : If anything. You see, we’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. 

And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing?

There are very few examples. There’s a mother and baby. Evolution put a lot of work into allowing the baby to control the mother. But that’s about the only example I know of.

SAJID JAVID : Perhaps then just to end on — despite what you’ve said — I remain an optimist about AI and what it means. Am I right to feel that way?

GEOFFREY HINTON : I hope you’re right to feel that way. My friend Yann LeCun, who’s also very knowledgeable about AI feels that way. … My worry is that the invisible hand [ capitalism ] is not gonna keep us safe. 

So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not gonna be sufficient to make sure that they develop it safely. 

You can see that if you look at the history of Open AI. Initially, they were very concerned with safety and as time went by and the potential profits got bigger, they’ve got less and less concerned with safety. 

The only thing that can force these big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation. 

Tech power has gone bully-boy, part 3: Gen Z knows that apps are feeding into early command-and-control AI. It must stop feeling powerless and act

. Big Data collection, Coercive early AI, Commercial surveillance, Regulation of Big Tech, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism, Take Back Your Data movement . , , , , , ,

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In the montage above, R: one of many British child-soldiers who lied about being old enough to join the fighting in World War I. L: the face of today’s enemy, for anyone young and protective, could be a seemingly harmless, data-siphoning app

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[ Part 1 and Part 2 ]

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[ This post — delayed by unwanted adventures beginning in February that scrambled all plans and routines — is being published outside post-Gutenberg’s paywall with the hope that ‘influencers,’ especially those in Generation Z, will read and discuss it. 

For any subject in dire need of public understanding, there may never have been as wide a gap between what technologists and scientists know, compared to even highly educated non-experts, as in prospectively all-transformative artificial intelligence. 

The effects of public incomprehension, here, will be grave. Where we need vigorous opposition all we have is inaction. A deadly paralysis.

The finest tech and science brains struggling yet failing to enlighten us fear that it will take a calamity to shock us out of our resistance to paying attention. As tricky as the public education task was for them in explaining viruses and vaccines during the COVID pandemic, this is so much harder. 

How, for instance, do you demonstrate to someone uninterested in technology the implications of AI already revealing a capacity for complex practical judgment in answering a question about precisely how — and why — it would go about stacking a set of objects including nine eggs, a book, a laptop, a bottle and a nail ‘in a stable manner’? The significance of a report about this— ‘Proof of AI coming alive? Microsoft says its GPT-4 software is already “showing signs of human reasoning”’ — is not easily absorbed by the likes of a commenter on one London-based news site last month for whom this spring’s AI uproar is a silly fuss about progress in auto-complete word processing.

Instead of thinking about the meaning of Microsoft’s alert about GPT-4’s upskilling, too many of us would prefer to zone out and into a video clip that is undeniably delicious — recording a 1970 meeting of the Monty Python Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Things. Enjoy the laugh, o reader, if you watch or re-watch it, but then you must return to trying to understand what we must all keep trying to understand better, and assist with preventative measures. ]

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The rule is the same for wildland firefighting as for a kitchen blaze. First, cut the fire off from its source of fuel. Smother it if you can to deprive it of oxygen. Whether in chaparral or woodland, you’ll want to clear a fire break, deploying muscle power or bulldozers to rip out parched greenery all the way down to bare earth. You could be a battalion chief in CAL Fire, California’s stellar firefighting army, and the rule for the order of business would not change — even if your range of experience and excellent judgment mean that you are routinely invited to Sacramento for consultations on state-wide planning for cataclysmic firestorms.

However small and insignificant it might look, the fire burning this minute is where you have got to focus. 

From this angle of approach — nip horror in the bud — there’s a curious back-to-frontness about the sudden explosion in debating and bell-ringing about our AI-enslaved future without any mention of, or pointers to, developments in the present leading us to it in plain sight. 

Worse, some of the people you might expect to be concentrating on stamping out the digital equivalent of feeder-wildfires are actually igniting them — even as they issue one public caution after another about, metaphorically speaking, the whole globe burning unless ‘regulators’ step in like superheroes to save us.

What would digital equivalents of feeder-conflagrations be?

Systems for collecting personal data about you 24 hours a day, starting with those apps you unthinkingly install on your phone, you will answer — if you have read the first two parts of this Tech power has gone bully-boy series. Anything from that innocent-seeming app software you know as the icon you click on to get straight into your bank account; or the one from the idealistic literary magazine capable of retrieving an archived essay in a flash; or another downloaded when you failed to resist the siren smile of the double-tailed Starbucks mermaid. 

Here is Stuart Russell — an Atlantic-hopping British computer scientist and founder of Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence — pronouncing on apps in the BBC’s most prestigious lecture series at the end of 2021:

If you take your phone out and look at it, there are 50 or a hundred corporate representatives sitting in your pocket busily sucking out as much money and knowledge and data as they can. None of the things on your phone really represent your interests at all. 

What should happen is that there’s one app on your phone that represents you that negotiates with the information suppliers, and the travel agencies and whatever else, on your behalf, only giving the information that’s absolutely necessary and even insisting that the information be given back, that transactions be completely oblivious, that the other party retains no record whatsoever of the transaction, whether it’s a search engine query or a purchase or anything else.

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You might think it strange that, as far as I can tell, no newspaper has so far quoted Professor Russell’s silver bullet suggestion in a high-profile public lecture until … oh, wait … most newspapers are also in the business of collecting data about you nonstop, aren’t they? You could also wonder, should news media that decline to publicise alerts by eminent scientists about data-gathering systems being feeds for early AI recuse themselves from covering the subject of machine intelligence? 

Should they hand the task over to honest scholars with a gift for communication? — because old, venerated media brands are clearly profiting from peddling data, ’the oil of the 21st century,’ and almost certainly ‘sharing’ with the search engine giants information they gather about their readers from website cookies and apps?

But there are no regulations to stop them from doing this, yet — or, barring the odd high-profile case in which EU authorities slap some Big Tech colossus with a billion-dollar fine — effective enforcement where they do exist. Here is a Financial Times reader’s depressingly accurate statistical perspective on why regulation is too far behind technological advances to protect us from AI harms, including intrusive data collection for training its algorithms: 

@Draco Malfoy The technology behind Artificial Intelligence is understood by such a tiny number of humans globally, probably a few tens of thousands are genuine experts in the field, out of what 7 billion, or is it 8 now?And yet a few thousand non-technical bureaucrats representing hundreds of millions or billions of people are tasking themselves with regulating it. … AI … [is] … already ridiculously good and only getting better.

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An unnerving obstacle to finding a way out of the dilemma is this: the demographic segment best informed and most anxious about the link between data collection and dark visions of future AI feels powerless. Members of it may be more suspicious of apps and more likely to resist installing them than their elders, but are largely passive — so far.  

On the Stanford University campus in early March I fell into a lively debate with two inquisitive, endearing Gen Z-ers who were adamant that any defence against command-and-control tech power would be taken apart by governments and corporations. Gesturing at his companion as he summed up their joint conclusion, one of them sighed, ‘Like he said, capitalism is the problem. Too much money is at stake — from exploiting this technology.’ Their gentle dejection lent them an air indistinguishable from anti-materialistic Hobbits reminding me that even their revered ancestors Bilbo and Frodo had experienced the corrupting pull of the ring of Sauron.

‘But you’re not going to give up without a fight, are you? After all, this technology is shaping what will be your world for far longer than mine.’

Their smiles as they gazed back at me were as sceptical as they were indulgent. They said that they would keep thinking about what might be done. In the months since then, I have had virtually identical exchanges with their contemporaries elsewhere. 

I have also stumbled on a confirmation of my impressions of them in Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (2021), a collaboration between four scholars working in the UK and US. 

‘[A]dvances in technology scare me because they’re tied to corruption, power, like inappropriate uses of dominance,’ said one interviewee for the book. Technology is described as ‘a monster god on the horizon running towards us’ on the web site of Tim Urban, a writer popular with this group, the authors note. They report that Gen Z-ers ‘are often … deeply pessimistic about the problems they have inherited’ and ‘have a sense of diminished agency,’ because ‘institutions and political and economic systems seem locked, inaccessible to them.’ 

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I have been puzzling over the contrast across time between their defeatism and the gung ho sang-froid of boy soldiers in Britain in World War I. In our information-soaked century, perhaps our teenagers and youngest adults are too well-educated about obstacles to making a difference to bear any resemblance to the twelve- and thirteen-year-old enlistees who lied about being over eighteen to serve, answering feverish recruitment appeals by government leaders. But the under-age signups slowed noticeably once news of the hellish deprivations and misery of fighting from muddy, sodden trenches in the bloodbath got home, despite the national mood of ‘almost hysterical patriotism.’

A combination of conflicts of interest related to investment opportunities in AI; international competition for tech dominance; and plain ignorance means that there are no calls to action from Gen Z’s elders. Nor are their any from their own tribe, as far as I can tell, because they are apt to be leaderless, preferring engagement ‘in a distinctively non-hierarchical, collaborative manner,’ — another independent observation of mine supported by Gen Z, Explained.

Nor is there the blanket media coverage you might hope for of the insults to any notion of privacy or safety in the data collection grinding on and on. Hardly any other media organs followed the online Daily Mail’s example in following the scoop that grew out of a fine investigation by the UK’s Observer — a report on 28 May that twenty regional National Health Service (NHS) websites had for years been using a ‘covert tracking tool’ of Meta/Facebook, through which they passed on to the social media giant ‘private details of web browsing’ by citizens. Data sucked up by what is arguably the least trusted bully-boy corporation — from the databases of the one organisation that has ranked repeatedly in first or second place in opinion polls about trusted British institutions — included …

granular details of pages viewed, buttons clicked and keywords searched. [ These are ] matched to the user’s IP address — an identifier linked to an individual or household — and in many cases details of their Facebook account.

Nor, considering its implications, has there been remotely like enough attention paid to the US Federal Trade Commission’s announcement on 31 May that it had punished Amazon with a $25 million fine, the amount agreed in a settlement of the FTC’s complaint alleging that ‘Amazon prevented parents from exercising their [data] deletion rights … kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.’

Another FTC settlement announcement on the same day imposed an effective penalty of $5.8 million on the online retailer for spying on women — by employees of its Ring subsidiary — in bedrooms and bathrooms, and ‘for failing to prevent hackers from commandeering the devices.’

Such, such, are the joys of misused tech power.

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Celebrated brainboxes, the likes of the ‘AI godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton and Elon Musk, can surely do a bit more than make speeches you could easily take for techies doing their best to out-gloom biblical end-times pronouncements ( ‘ … an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth …’). 

Even as they call for urgent AI regulation, they know that we do not have a fraction of the rule-makers and enforcers we need to make AI development safe.

Why is no one asking them what they propose for alternative technological brakes, or sleeping policemen?  

Notes on a U.S. congressional hearing: turning antitrust guns on Big Tech will not shield us from Orwellian puppeteering. Why did the politician-legislators choose the wrong focus?

. Big Data collection, Big Tech, Social media, Commercial surveillance, Regulation of Big Tech, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism . , , , , , , , , , ,

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‘Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills … …’postgutenberg@gmail.com

‘… Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills …’: William Empson

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Notes scribbled after the second day of grilling this week for the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google by the U.S. Congress’s antitrust judiciary committee: 

Can protecting citizen-consumers really be the point of telling Big Tech chiefs that they have too much power, when this is news to no one?

If yes: horse, barn door; 

problem has gone viral — the uncontrolled proliferation of harm to citizen-consumers (not Covid-19; the commercial surveillance virus);

hardly any citizen-consumers understand this or implications.

Conclusion: too late to save us so we’re doomed — barring lucky accident of stupendous dimensions.

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1. In the frightening background to the hearing, unenlightened citizens: 

A disturbingly high proportion of consumers in six countries surveyed by the San Francisco technology security firm Okta this year have no idea of the degree to which they are being tracked by companies. They are equally oblivious to being milked for their personal data. Though ‘people don’t want to be tracked, and they place a high value on privacy … 42% of Americans do not think online retailers collect data about their purchase history, and 49% do not think their social media posts are being tracked by social media companies. … Nearly 4 out of 5 American respondents (78%) don’t think a consumer hardware provider such as Apple, Fitbit, or Amazon is tracking their biometric data, and 56% say the same about their location data.’

With those findings, the reason why rich Big Tech is only getting richer in a pandemic-battered US economy is obvious. It is just as clear that the average citizen cannot be expected to grasp that the execrable business practices of the technology leaders — including deceptive ‘privacy settings’ in devices sold by the most successful brands or guaranteed by popular platforms — are being copied by every type and size of business. 

2. Shouldn’t Congress’s focus be on eg., the unfair risks in installing apps — used to turn citizens into pawns of corporate surveillance?

Businesses once never thought of in connection with digital technology are forcing surveillance and tracking tools on us, mostly in the form of apps — but also when we think we are just popping in and out of their web sites. 

You can, for instance, log on to the site of a credit card company you trust and for the fifth month in a row, have to complain to the IT support desk about error messages obstructing you from completing your task. Finally — with an embarrassed acknowledgment of your loyalty to the brand — an unusually honest tech support supervisor confesses that the site’s glitches are not accidental but part of an effort to push customers towards installing the company’s app, and conduct their transactions on their smartphones. You say exasperatedly, ‘Oh, to track what I do all day long?’ The techie does not answer directly, only laughs and says that although most customers seem to love the app, he would not install it on his phone. He promises to notify colleagues responsible for the manipulation that you will never install the app. The site goes back to working perfectly for you. (Note: that was an actual, not an imagined, experience.)

3. The companies will not stop at tracking, data-gathering, and individually targeted advertisements

As in this site’s testament two years ago about another low-tech company, the esteemed media organ we called ACN.com, — ‘Big Brother takes an alarming step past watching us …’  — businesses are proceeding from spying on us and selling or sharing their discoveries with third parties to using them to limit or redirect our choices, and even scolding us for legal and reasonable behaviour that does not suit them. The ACN manager we argued with in that incident said that his organisation had ’special software tools’ that monitored every click and keystroke by visitors to its web site. In fact, the newspaper had graduated from unremitting surveillance to: 

demanding that we make personal contact with our monitors; insisting that we submit to interrogation by these monitors, and account for our actions; cross-questioning us about our answers, and about why we say that the obtuse interpretations by monitors — inadvertently or tactically — of what we are doing are mistaken.

Imagine what that would mean in even more intrusive and unscrupulous hands.

4. Politicians in both parties campaigning in the U.S. presidential election are copying the methods of commercial surveillance: is this why antitrust rather than tracking and data-gathering was the focus of the Congressional hearing?

On 14 July, the U.S. president’s digital campaigning strategist Brad Parscale boasted on Twitter about a ‘biggest data haul’ on supporters and prospective voters. That was done with the same nasty spying technology, software apps. The Republicans are not alone, here. The campaign of the Democratic front-runner has its own equivalent. In fact, an article published by the MIT Technology Review on 21 June said that across the globe, politicians are using apps to organize support, manipulate supporters and attract new voters. Many are using the particular app developed for the Indian prime minister in his last campaign — which ‘was pushed through official government channels and collected large amounts of data for years through opaque phone access requests.’ To be perfectly clear, electioneering software used ‘“just like a one-way tool of propaganda”’ is also being used to govern India.

The Trump campaign app seeks permission from those who install it for — among other startling invasions of privacy — confirming identity and searching for user accounts on devices; reading, writing or deleting data on devices; getting into USB storage; preventing the device from sleeping.

The authors of the piece, Jacob Gursky and Samuel Woolley, say: ‘As researchers studying the intersection of technology and propaganda, we understand that political groups tend to lag behind the commercial ad industry. But when they catch up, the consequences to truth and civil discourse can be devastating.’

How strange that there has not apparently been the smallest whisper about any of this in connection with the politicians’ heroic interrogations of Big Tech leaders this week … or is it, really?

5. Is poetry all we will have left for comfort?

Society is being hurt by these technologies and practices in damage going deep and acquiring subtle dimensions, inexpressible except in poetry — as in these lines from the 20th-century poet William Empson:

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills …

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… It is not your system or clear sight that mills

Down small to the consequence a life requires;

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

— ‘Missing Dates’

Or there are the 1992 predictions of the late Leonard Cohen, in a song last quoted here a few months ago in a different context just as apt:

… There’ll be the breaking of the ancient

Western code

Your private life will suddenly explode …

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… Give me absolute control
Over every living soul …

— ‘The Future’