In the 1940s, an unlikely group of espionage agents helped America win the Second World War.
Historian Elyse Graham’s volume, Books and Dagger, details how the newly formed OSS — forerunner to the CIA — recruited hundreds of librarians, literature professors, historians, and other scholars to find and correlate data to be used against Germany and Japan. They conducted this espionage against foreign enemies without leaving their school campuses. University libraries hold not only thousands of books on every imaginable subject, but also more periodicals from around the world than even the best newsstands. World War II became the age of the scholar-spy.
At its peak, the program employed about 900 of these stay-at-home scholar-spies. They made a major contribution toward winning the war. But what those 900 scholars accomplished is primitive compared to the completeness with which Artificial Intelligence models can now scour the world for information. We now live in the age of the AI-spy. It’s interesting that AI models are often referred to as AI agents.
These agents are flawed and can reach wrong conclusions. Their isolation from each other limits their power. But taken together, they already have libraries’ worth of data on each one of us. Many people have their DNA in the system somewhere. Your DNA, present in almost every cell of your body, contains roughly three gigabytes of data about you — equal to about 3,000 books. AI agents have access to digitized dental records. Do you floss? Somewhere, an AI probably knows. Your car quietly reports how often you speed, how much fuel you use, where you go — and how long you stay there. Other AIs know the topics you find interesting and the ones that bore you — along with your age, political leanings, and countless other details.
This trove of data is spread among many different companies in many different countries. Some of it is bought and sold like oil, wheat, or gold. Some of it is proprietary to individual companies. Governments have the biggest databases around, and they are also known to nationalize companies’ assets in times of crisis. It’s not hard to imagine governments seizing these knowledge assets.
There is evidence that China already taps into private databases — not only regarding its own citizens, but citizens of other nations as well. They can potentially obtain data from any digital device made in China — even if the final product is not owned by a Chinese company.
Human intelligence agents read newspapers from certain cities to learn about ship deployments, military promotions, and other military-related activities in those cities. The same information can be assimilated and assessed by AI within microseconds. AIs still make mistakes, but the technology is improving so fast that humanity can barely keep pace. Despite what it already does, AI is still in its infancy. We don’t know what capabilities it may eventually gain — especially as it increasingly rewrites its own programming.
AI agents don’t just hold knowledge but correlate it. For instance, it could one day correlate psychological knowledge with social media posts. In war, every kind of knowledge comes into play. AI is already a spymaster with unprecedented capabilities. And unlike human spies, these digital agents never sleep, never forget, and never stop watching.
Now imagine a global dictator commanding a worldwide network of AI systems. Imagine him constructing a digital police state using every camera already on earth — plus billions more. Imagine autonomous drone probes watching and listening through walls and over vast distances. And in the future, some of those autonomous AI spies won’t merely watch. They could be armed to the teeth — and capable of acting without human hesitation.
I’m only scratching the surface of a massive topic, but believe me when I say that you will not want to live in the Antichrist’s world. Come to Jesus now — before the world enters tribulation and its darkest hour.
