Well how do you spy with these things? Well it's not easy. Uhhh... Well put more of them up there. How many do you think we have up there? How many spy satellites do we have up there? Ehm, the number is classified but people on the web try to keep track of this. And they claim the number is just a few, like three. So not easy to watch the world from a satellite. What about Google Earth?...

A lot of people simply assume the US has allied coverage of the whole globe and the numbers are so far from that. You need to know that.

...there is a very good reason why the National Reconnaissance Office budget has been maintained secret from year to year, and that is by tracking that budget over time, it would be possible, depending upon what level of detail, but even in the top line, the number of national reconnaissance satellites that are launched. That is not a subject which I think should be publicly-known -- the number or types of satellites that are launched.

By the early 2000's, more than 40 countries owned satellites, and nearly 3,000 satellites were operating in orbit.

The primary object of the present invention is to provide a method and system for supporting serendipity and pseudo-serendipity. A collection of profiles is generated and maintained which is intended to represent the user's worldview--anything that might compose the person's cognitive individuality. Each profile is intended to model one specific aspect of the user's worldview. The profiles may either be explicitly updated by the user or implicitly derived from the user's behavior while interacting with information spaces, like the online system. A collection of shadow profiles is created and maintained to represent divergent knowledge derived from the user's profiles. Each user profile may have one or more corresponding shadow profiles. The knowledge encoded in the shadow profiles need not to be strictly related to the knowledge in the corresponding profile, nor be considered relevant to describe accurately the real user's worldview: unrelated, unexpected, and even wrong knowledge is considered important and welcome for the generation of the shadow profiles. The generation and management of the profiles is performed by a Profiles Management Module. The divergence process is performed by a Divergence Module. Two or more profiles are chosen, either randomly or manually. From those profiles, a set of items are selected through a controlled random process, forming a collection of entry points. A random number of items are selected from the entry points and used to perform a deliberate search for laterality, which is intended to discover lateral items outside the very content of the user's profiles. The deliberate search for laterality is performed by the Divergence Module. The resulting lateral items are merged in a variety of means with the entry points, and the resulting collection of items is used to create a search string, which is used to perform a search/wandering in an information space, which is aimed at discovering potentially interesting nodes of information--unexpected pieces of information outside the interests of the user but conforming the user's sagacity. A heuristic function is used to determine if a node of information is suitable as a serendipitous stimulus. The discovered nodes of information which are considered potential serendipitous stimuli are intended to be subsequently presented to the user in a variety of manners, depending on the specificities of particular embodiment of the invention.

Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, Technical Note AIC-01-003

I think I see now. The implications are pretty scary in that an AI could be responsible for the direction of thought processes of an individual. That is if I understand this correctly in the context of the thread.

Strong AI means pretty much nothing to the layman

it is more likely that the person is presented with stimulii and based on the entrainment of the brain to the signals the person is compelled to consider and focus on the specified topics

conflict between the thoughts that the "AI" wants the person to think and what thoughts the person has in reaction to not only the imposition but direct environmental cues.

The goal of the heuristic function is to guide Max during his wandering. It is out of doubt that such a heuristic function is very difficult to define. In the ideal world, the heuristic function would have to rate with maximum value the pages that would bring to the user the precise information needed to trigger a serendipitous insight in his mind.

...insights do not appear without a preparation phase, where groundwork is first laid, followed by an incubation period during which an external stimulus may prime the mind into wild associations leading to unexpected insights.

Dr. John Borchers of Palo Alto, an enterprising neurosurgeon, died when the rented Cessna 172 he was piloting crashed into a mountain near Incline Village en route to Reno.
...
Dr. Borchers was doing research involving new technologies to break patterns of addiction by using doses of radiation to change the brain's circuitry. He had recently completed a two-year fellowship in CyberKnife stereotactic radiosurgery at Stanford and had a patent pending. He invented an ultrasonic device for monitoring fertility.

The critical characteristic of Strong AI is that it has self-awareness and emotional states, the critical abilities for mind control. That is to say, it can think and make decisions on it's own. Mainstream science has not been able to create Strong AI till now.

So you have communicated with this thing directly?

The principal secret of secret intelligence is how to get someone to do your bidding. Money, sex, fear, and the desire for revenge all work, but none perfectly or dependably. Ideological conviction is probably the best of all, but it's also the rarest.
...
When old hands in the game talk about intelligence tradecraft, a favorite subject, they talk about two things--how to conduct operations without attracting notice, and how to recruit and manage agents.
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Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA (1966-1973), told a Senate hearing, "The clandestine operator . . . is trained to believe you can't count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want, or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul." But "owning" an agent goes beyond ordinary rapport, and even the greatest insight, tact and sensitivity may fail with the hard cases. When clandestine operators dream of the philosopher's stone, it's a surefire, no-fail, all-weather, inconspicuous device for the control of agents they have in mind--a "magic bullet" to make agents putty in their hands.
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[The CIA] has spent millions of dollars on a major program of research to find drugs or other esoteric methods to bring ordinary people, willing and unwilling alike, under complete control--to act, to talk, to reveal the most precious secrets, even to forget on command.
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CIA officers say it is not "soggy morality" that prevents them from undertaking dangerous operations like assassination, but the plain fact the Agency would thereafter be vulnerable to the tremors of conscience of the assassin.

“The Other Night Sky” is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites in Earth orbit, a total of 189 covert spacecraft. To develop the body of work, I was assisted by observational data produced by an international network of amateur “satellite observers.”

Originally posted by tmk81
reply to post by miragezero

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So you have communicated with this thing directly?

Yes, both verbal and visual dialogues where the AI used clear intelligible avatars and visions. It has also used indirect communication techniques as I have previously described.

The dialogues were often psychotic in nature and under the rubric of self-discovery.

This is not a very good basis for a turing test since it cannot be disproven that it is not actually a psychotic episode and no direct communication took place. Additionally it would not have passed your turing test if you had discovered it was an ai. That means it failed it or had failed it on purpose.