Chatbot Passed the Uniform Bar Exam

Word on the street is that the latest Microsoft-backed AI has passed the universal bar exam, an exam that lawyers in the United States have to pass in order to get licensed to practice law. Not only did it pass it but its score “fell in the top 10% of test takers.”

The AI software, made by the Microsoft partner OpenAI, is called “GPT-4.” It is an upgrade from GPT-3.5, which is what the recently famous ChatGPT program is based on. In case you are curious, “GPT” stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” which is a computer language model that uses “deep learning” to produce text.

Deep learning stands roughly for combing through vast amounts of data, algorithmically extracting meaningful characteristics of different types, and then summing them up in a way that makes it look like the computer “understands.”

This software falls under the definition of “generative AI,” which is the type of AI that goes beyond analyzing large amounts of data and producing a summary and that is capable of generating its own “creative” output based on the data is has analyzed.

Per OpenAI’s GPT-4 Technical Report, the program was tested “on a diverse set of benchmarks, including simulating exams that were originally designed for humans.”

An Interlude

Can I please use this opportunity to express my annoyance with the popularization of the hipster use of the word “humans” instead of “people,” as if there is ever going to be a point in time when robots grow sentient and start participating in society not as a type of technology at the hands of whoever is in charge but as living beings in their own right?

This is of course never going to happen (although the patent owners may pretend). This is nonsense and fiction. But calling people “humans” introduces a new of viewing ourselves through externalized mechanical eyes. It is yet another magical trick by the crazies in high chairs to disconnect us from our innate personality and our souls. It also helps the tyrants to bring about “robot citizens” and give them “rights.”

The “robot citizens” may even include “financial actors,” to justify the fraud! And when the actual people complain about the absurdity of it based on the fact that robots aren’t actually “human,” they’ll be accused of having a phobia of some sort.

Using “humans” instead of “people” when describing us all just makes the trickery a tad easier because, are these machines or software products people? Obviously they are not. We know they are not people. But are they maybe a little bit human-like? Trying to be human? Wanting to be human? Deserving to be human? Don’t you think they at the very lease deserve-human-like rights? Etc.

Back to the Topic of AI Passing the Bar Exam

Anyway, according to OpenAI, the company used the necessary precautions to ensure that the AI product didn’t just mechanically reproduce already known correct answers to the already known questions on the bar exam. In their own words: “we did no specific training for these exams.

A minority of the problems in the exams were seen by the model during training; for each exam we run a variant with these questions removed and report the lower score of the two. We believe the results to be representative.”

“Exams were sourced from publicly available materials. Exam questions included both multiple choice and free-response questions; we designed separate prompts for each format, and images were included in the input for questions which required it.

The evaluation setup was designed based on performance on a validation set of exams, and we report final results on held-out test exams. Overall scores were determined by combining multiple-choice and free-response question scores using publicly available methodologies for each exam.”

“On a simulated bar exam, GPT-4 achieves a score that falls in the top 10% of test takers. This contrasts with GPT-3.5, which scores in the bottom 10%.” Here are the uniform bar exam scores and for the LSAT test results, according to GPT-4 Technical Report:

Uniform Bar Exam (MBE+MEE+MPT)

• GPT-4: 298 / 400 (approximately 90th percentile)
• GPT-4 (no vision): 298 / 400 (approximately 90th percentile)
• GPT-3.5: 213 / 400 (approximately 10th percentile)

LSAT

• GPT-4: 163 (approximately 88th percentile)
• GPT-4 (no vision): 161 (approximately 83rd percentile)
• GPT-3.5: 149 (approximately 40th percentile)

Here is what a mainstream review of the software, written by Dr. Lance Eliot and published on law.com, has to say:

Does the passing of the simulated uniform bar exam imply or prove that GPT-4 is legally capable and fully ready to perform legal tasks on par with human lawyers?

The answer is a resounding No, namely that despite the wink-wink implication or innuendo, all that can be reasonably said is that GPT-4 was able to use its extensive computational pattern-matching of words related to other words in order to successfully derive answers to the presented exams.

My comment: I think it is important to emphasize the fact that the “wink-wink” component is a big part of the AI myth. We need to remember it when it comes to all AI “work,” not just the tasks that people do in their currently still prestigious career paths. And is it possible that when the overlords came up with their conveyors and “systems management,” they just duped us point-blank?! Back to Dr. Eliot’s analysis:

“As I’ve stated in my prior posted piece entitled “Best Ways To Use Generative AI In Your Law Practice,” care needs to be exercised in overstating what generative AI can attain. Furthermore, the comparison of GPT-4 to “human-level performance” smacks of anthropomorphizing of AI. This is a dangerous slippery slope of taking people down a primrose path that current AI is sentient or human-like in abilities.

Generative AI such as GPT-4 is notably handy as an aid for lawyers and can be a huge leg-up in performing legal tasks. That being said, relying solely on generative AI for legal efforts is unsound and improper.

The key takeaway for lawyers is that you ought to be giving serious and deep consideration to leveraging generative AI such as GPT-4. No doubt about that. GPT-4 is even better at aiding lawyers than ChatGPT. I’ve said over and over again that lawyers and law practices using generative AI are going to outdo and outperform attorneys and firms that aren’t using generative AI.”

Generative AI

Let’s talk for a second about generative AI. Here is what Reuter’s has to say:

“Generative artificial intelligence has become a buzzword this year, capturing the public’s fancy and sparking a rush among Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Alphabet (GOOGL.O) to launch products with technology they believe will change the nature of work.”

“The most famous generative AI application is ChatGPT, a chatbot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI released late last year. The AI powering it is known as a large language model because it takes in a text prompt and from that writes a human-like response.”

“GPT-4, a newer model that OpenAI announced this week, is ‘multimodal’ because it can perceive not only text but images as well. OpenAI’s president demonstrated on Tuesday how it could take a photo of a hand-drawn mock-up for a website he wanted to build, and from that generate a real one.”

Here is my favorite bit: “Cybersecurity researchers have also expressed concern that generative AI could allow bad actors, even governments to produce far more disinformation than before.” Oh no, governments spreading misinformation? Impossible. Never once happened in human history. At least, not our government. Not here and not now, and not against us (phew). A short video explainer by Reuters (narrated by AI?).

Paying Attention to the Upside-Down Language of AI

One of the things to pay attention to in the talk about AI is the use of the word “harm.” What is “harmful language”? On the intuitive level, we know (calls for violence or child abuse, for example, are actually harmful language) — but in the official, robotic context, “harmful language” is whatever they say it is on a given day.

In an imaginary honest society, in a society where the leaders wouldn’t try to mess with language and with people’s heads, the desire to put in tight controls around what can come out of a robot’s mouth could be a neutral and noble goal. It is a robot, after all. But we don’t live in an honest society, society, and the leaders are already trying to label any “wrongthink” as “hate speech.”

So naturally, as the trend with AI proceeds, and as AI replaces educators and bureaucratic decision making, people facing censorship might be squeezed more and more into the torture of “talking to the hand.” A mechanical hand.

The weaponization of language and automated interactions have been on my mind a lot. In my interview with Dr. Bruce Dooley, we discussed the weaponization of the word “harm” in medicine by the Federation of State Medical Boards. In my 2022 article, “Who is the Terrorist?” I wrote about the ideas about harm and disinformation, put forward by the DHS last year. And a few years before COVID, I wrote an essay titled, “Love & Automation: The Creepy Touch of a Mechanical Mother”:

“The defenders of efficiency typically try to impose it on other people — while allowing themselves to remain just as human and free-roaming as they wish to be. The famous example is how the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates limit their own children’s access to technology while telling the rest of the world that technology is universally and ubiquitously amazing.

Factory owners gladly impose efficiency on the former independent craftsmen and their descendants. Office managers impose efficiency on the office slaves. Makers of software sell efficiency to the general population. But in their own shoes, the salesmen of efficiency like to look at the sky and smell the flowers.”

What Can Be Done With AI in the Legal Field?

As of this second, AI can possibly do the work that is usually done by paralegals and junior lawyers. It can customize template-based documents, such as contracts and form letters. It can go through vast piles of documents quickly and summarize the case for more senior lawyers to review. It can also write draft legal documents, citing the laws and the precedents that apply.

According to a Brookings Institution review, in the legal field, AI can take care of some of the most time-consuming tasks:

“Consider one of the most time-consuming tasks in litigation: extracting structure, meaning, and salient information from an enormous set of documents produced during discovery. AI will vastly accelerate this process, doing work in seconds that without AI might take weeks. Or consider the drafting of motions to file with a court.

AI can be used to very quickly produce initial drafts, citing the relevant case law, advancing arguments, and rebutting (as well as anticipating) arguments advanced by opposing counsel. Human input will still be needed to produce the final draft, but the process will be much faster with AI.”

“More broadly, AI will make it much more efficient for attorneys to draft documents requiring a high degree of customization — a process that traditionally has consumed a significant amount of attorney time.

Examples include contracts, the many different types of documents that get filed with a court in litigation, responses to interrogatories, summaries for clients of recent developments in an ongoing legal matter, visual aids for use in trial, and pitches aimed at landing new clients.

AI could also be used during a trial to analyze a trial transcript in real time and provide input to attorneys that can help them choose which questions to ask witnesses.”

“DoNotPay”

One of the first popular AI legal tech products, branded as “the world’s first robot lawyer” was created in 2015 by Josh Browder, the founder of DoNotPay. That particular software was designed to help people write effective responses and letters to fight unjustly issued tickets, cancel subscriptions, and so on. Once the word got out, the company was able to receive significant investor funding.

In January 2023, the company announced that their AI would act as an informal “attorney” in court, helping the client to fight a speeding ticket.

“A program trained with the help of artificial intelligence is set to help a defendant contest his case in a U.S. court next month … Instead of addressing the court, the program, which will run on a smartphone, will supply appropriate responses through an earpiece to the defendant, who can then use them in the courtroom.”

“Since this is the AI’s very first case, DoNotPay is ready to take on the burden of punishment if the AI’s advice does not help the client. Since it is a speeding ticket, DoNotPay will pay for the speeding ticket. If it wins though, it will have a massive victory to its credit.” The AI was supposed to assist the client in court in February 2023. But then it didn’t.

Good morning! Bad news: after receiving threats from State Bar prosecutors, it seems likely they will put me in jail for 6 months if I follow through with bringing a robot lawyer into a physical courtroom. DoNotPay is postponing our court case and sticking to consumer rights:

— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) January 25, 2023

And then the company was sued for “practicing law without a license.” “The robot lawyer is facing a proposed class section lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm, Edelson and published on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco.”

The way it looks to me, the people-facing, cheaply priced version of AI is seen as a threat by the big boys, and so they want to put a stop to that. I mean, can you imagine a world in which lowly peasants use cheaply priced AI (fast calculator) products to benefit themselves — and possibly even without sending all their personal data to the Central Mother Ship? The outrage.

“Ross”

Another AI product, also branded as “the first artificially intelligent attorney, was Ross.” “Ross” was the AI product made by Ross Intelligence, a startup founded in 2014 by three Canadian students. The product was based on IBM’s Watson series of AI products for business. Spoiler: the company was shut down in 2020. Here is from Futurism (2016):

“Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing IBM’s AI Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which at the moment consists of nearly 50 lawyers. According to CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda, other firms have also signed licenses with Ross, and they will also be making announcements shortly.”

“Ross, ‘the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney’ built on IBM’s cognitive computer Watson, was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. Ross also learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more you interact with it.”

But like I said, in 2020, Ross Intelligence was shut down. That seemingly had to do not with any underlying philosophical issues of using AI in the legal field — but with corporate competition. It was more about the fight of the mobs and the question of who gets to benefit from the potential dollar waterfall.

It was shut down as a result of the company’s financing being blocked by the lawsuit filed by Thompson Reuters who claimed that Ross Intelligence used TR data to build their legal tech AI.

“ROSS Intelligence, a company that sought to innovate legal research through the use of artificial intelligence, and that helped to raise awareness of AI throughout the legal industry, is shutting down its operations, as a lawsuit against it by Thomson Reuters has crippled its ability to raise new financing or explore potential acquisition and left it without sufficient funds to operate.”

“Thomson Reuters sued ROSS in May, alleging that it stole content from Westlaw to build its own competing legal research product. ROSS did this, TR alleged, by “intentionally and knowingly” inducing the legal research and writing company LegalEase Solutions to use its Westlaw account to deliver Westlaw data to ROSS en masse.”

The Owner of the AI Sets the Tone

As usual, the devil is in the detail. If AI technology is used to help regular people accomplish with the tasks that have been previously out of reach without being rich — and without the abuse data offloading to the Central Mother Ship — it could be a useful thing.

And this will be the selling point during the initial phases of the technology rollout. The bait is supposed to taste good, this is how it always works.

But if a collective habit develops for the use of chatbots and coherent-sounding, language-producing fast calculators in our everyday professional lives, and once the sufficient amounts of data have been scooped, the useful stuff will be moved behind a very hefty paywall. And perhaps, at that time, the middle class and even the upper middle class lawyers will get “deprecated,” just like many have been “deprecated” before them. Time will tell!

“Gradually Then Suddenly”: The Conquest

Let’s talk about the concept of the bait. Life works in mysterious ways, and history works in long time spans. The attack on human agency and personality and on our relationship with nature and our own emotional richness started thousands of years ago. Today, we are dealing not just with the intentions and the incessant scamming of Klaus Schwab, the alphabets, and their owners upstairs — but also with the consequence of the scams put forth by the tyrants and tricksters from the past.

Today, we are paying the price not only for the collective imperfect choices of the people underneath the boot of the big tyrants of today (including our own) — but also for the imperfect choices made by tyrant victims of the past, when some people were possibly startled, or bullied, or tricked, or bribed into accepting soul compromises of their time.

And then they passed the compromise on to their children. And they passed it to their children. And so on. See how this works?

Even on a smaller scale, it works “gradually then suddenly.” For example, the U.S. pandemic preparedness model that bit us all in 2020 was set in motion in the early 2000s, during Bush. After being prepared, it sat there behind the bushes (a pun!) for 15 years, waiting to enter the stage. And then it entered the stage with vengeance. And here we are!

The Condemnation of the Algorithmic Model

All these AI developments may be a compliment to the power of technology but they are also a condemnation of the state of our civilization.

Remember the question I asked in the beginning? I asked, what is the point of our time on Earth? And what are we doing with our civilization if our lives are so mechanical that even a dumb fast calculator can do our “intellectual work” more efficiently than we do? What is our “work”?

Did they — gradually and then suddenly — get us? Have our own “human” cognitive models and angles from which we analyze the world become so algorithmic that a stupid machine can outdo us at the “thinking” task? Not good.

And speaking of law, there was a time in history — before our communities and individual people became invisible pawns under various dominating entities — when even “law and order” wasn’t algorithmic but was based on the subjective and honest desire to do what’s right in the spiritual sense.

And I think on a local level, it still happens sometimes, but the “domination” mentality has poisoned our minds, and the algorithm was put in place to keep a semblance of goodness where the goodness had been undermined.

I think that the existential role of the horrible Great Reset is to make that algorithmic poison so big, so obvious to our eyes that we simply can’t be in denial anymore and have to rebel against the ancient abuse of our souls. Because we are more than a collection of formulas. We are more than algorithms.

We are of spirit and water, we have souls, we are capable of navigating subjectivity and thriving at it, we can feel, touch, love, savor our relationships — and that is the point of us being here.

The very feeling of being alive — the breath and the skin — is why we are here. And when someone is trying to further reduce us to pattern-matching machines, we have the full right to say, “No.” I want like to end this article with a quote from a sci-fi story that I wrote in 2019 (I only added a line about a pandemic to it in 2020):

“In order to gain control over the economy and human bodies, they needed to first gain control over people’s thinking. So they created a strong push to shift all major human activities to the digital domain as digital footprints were initially much easier to track and monetize. They set up breadcrumbs and made the transition look like fun.

Simultaneously, they built strong relationships with some of the most influential citizens and organizations of the time. Tech leaders promised easy surveillance to law enforcement — and free access to education and entertainment to common citizens. Everybody thought they were getting a great deal!

They gave the people previously unseen opportunities to create new worlds — both on the developer side and on the user side — but nobody except the top execs knew that the new worlds came with hidden trackers and treacherous on-off switches that could be activated at any point.”

“Early warnings came from artists who figured out that their work was being used as a bait to attract people to tech platforms. But artistic types were not respected members of society, and their cries were drowned in optimistic speeches about the bright future of everything.

Then came the media. After news companies starting crumbling and many journalists found themselves without an income, they realized that the game was rigged. But they, too, were swept out of the way. Some made a bargain and took tech funding, some became “gig economy” workers, and some learned how to code.

Then, at a critical point in time, there was a pandemic of some sort, and powerful technology leaders, including some of the IHT official saints, managed to use their influence on governments to legally mandate digitization of all aspects of life. It was then that unregulated human contact was made illegal and smart wearables and AI assistants became mandatory.”

“By the time lawyers, doctors, bankers, and government officials were personally impacted and practically enslaved on a massive scale, it was too late. Big Tech controlled every aspect of life, tracked everything, and funded every industry. It became the default law enforcement agency and the default news publisher, and thus it had the power to make or break any pundit, academic, or politician.

Everyone — from governments to low-level assistants-to-robots — depended on technology for every life function. Sex and baby permits required impeccable Digital Citizen Scores. No one could even get a low-level job without abiding by algorithms — and most jobs were automated anyway. Municipal councils owed money for smart city maintenance. The grip was total.”

“And while many felt instinctively uneasy about giving up privacy and cognitive autonomy, they also felt alone and helpless. Jobs outside of tech were scarce, competition was harsh, and very few had the luxury to even ponder the big picture. So people kept their heads low and did what they had to do to feed their families — complied, wore mandatory smart masks, and learned how to code if they were allowed.

Developers and other high-level tech industry workers preserved their financial independence and cognitive autonomy the longest — gated coder communities became a fixture on every smart urban hub — but eventually they, too, became obsolete, as AI grew sophisticated enough to produce itself.

Shortly after the institution of biologically compromised governance was deprecated, Big Tech became Interplanetary Holy Tech, and you know the rest.”

Does this sound familiar? If it does, now is a good time for all of us to ponder why we were born on Earth, why were are alive here and now, with all our gifts — and to follow through with the unique, brave and important tasks that we are here to do. With heart.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

• Recently, Australian researchers discovered an enzyme that can be used to produce electricity out of thin air
• The enzyme, called Huc, is produced by a common soil bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis
• While the research is new, according to the scientists, there is a possibility of producing the enzyme on a massive scale allowing production electricity from air
• The way it has often worked in the past, as soon as a widely available natural commodity became a “resource,” its wide availability cane to an end
• Our breathing may be the next commercial frontier, and clean air may become the new bottled water, if we don’t stop this trend

Making Electricity Out of Thin Air

Bad news, folks. The scientists have discovered an enzyme that can be used to produce electricity out of thin air.

This was just discovered, so we don’t know yet whether this can be scaled as easily as they hope, but it so — this may very well be very good news for the “owners” controlling the energy industry — but for us, useless breathers, this is not good news at all. After all, up until now, we’ve been breathing air. Just air. But now we are suddenly breathing a “natural resource,” and we all know how stingy the owners of everything are about those!

Hey, if you were a major investor in BlackRock or similarly minded self-appointed owner of “assets,” would this new discovery not motivate you to consider limiting the free inhaling capacity of the peasants? Those pesky peasants have been taking their breathing privilege for granted but really, should they not be a lot more considerate about their usage of a valuable resource that you turn into solid profits?

So, would you, as a dedicated BlackRock investor, not find it irksome that over nine billions freeloader breathers and carbon exhalers — whom you don’t really like! — habitually suck up your air into their useless noses, without paying you a dime for the privilege of using air? Would you not, in the face of this exciting business opportunity, seek to change “the way people think about breathing”?

And maybe, right now it is an exaggeration. Maybe I am being dramatic. But my concern is not facetious at all because this is exactly how the owners of everything think about everything — so why breathing would be an exception?

Come on, come on, the Blue Ocean Strategy! Come, new markets! Come, new income streams for the BlackRock investors! And away with irresponsible, unlimited use of air resources, formerly known as breathing!

Anyway, here’s the science. On March 7, 2023, Nature published a paper titled, “Structural basis for bacterial energy extraction from atmospheric hydrogen.” The paper is a little dense, so here is a popular rendition:

The researchers looked at a common soil bacterium, Mycobacterium smegmatis. This bacterium uses hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source, especially in nutrient-poor environments. They found that the “machinery” that allows the microbe to turn atmospheric hydrogen into energy is an enzyme called “hydrogenase,” or Huc for short. They have also found that the process produces an electrical current.

The researchers were able to isolate the enzyme by genetically modifying the bacteria. They found that even when isolated from the bacteria, Huc could consume hydrogen at concentrations far lower even than the tiny traces in the air. They also found Huc was uninhibited by oxygen, a property not seen in other hydrogen-consuming catalysts. Here is a press release by Monash University:

“Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published in the top journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air.

The research team, led by Dr Rhys Grinter, PhD student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analysed a hydrogen-consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium.

“We’ve known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean,” Professor Greening said. “But we didn’t know how they did this, until now.”

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current.

Dr Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels — as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”

Laboratory work performed by Ms Kropp shows that it is possible to store purified Huc for long periods. “It is astonishingly stable. It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 degrees celsius, and it retains its power to generate energy,” Ms Kropp said. “This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments.”

Huc is a “natural battery” that produces a sustained electrical current from air or added hydrogen. While this research is at an early stage, the discovery of Huc has considerable potential to develop small air-powered devices, for example as an alternative to solar-powered devices.

The bacteria that produce enzymes like Huc are common and can be grown in large quantities, meaning we have access to a sustainable source of the enzyme. Dr Grinter says that a key objective for future work is to scale up Huc production. “Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy.””

Selling Air; a Hoax or a New Business Model?

I have been pondering the topic of air as a new market for a few years. It seems to me that “scarcity of breathable air” is a new monetization frontier. For example, up until a certain point, no sane person would seriously consider paying for still bottled water, and yet today, we often do that (even though the quality of bottled water can be debated). I think that air is next.

And besides, scarcity of breathable air can work very nicely with smart masks that would also have an in-built air purification filter, monitor your air intake in the name of watching your breathing privilege, and of course, send your biometric data back to the mothership.

Not to mention the fact that the transhumanist crazies view the entire planet as their sandbox and are itching to play with things like the planetary processes and the composition of the atmosphere — and don’t get me started on the carbon removal, including with asbestos!

And selling air IS the next frontier, we are just not quite there yet. Air is the new bottled water.

— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots (@TessaMakesLove) February 18, 2021

I'm going to leave a seemingly controversial tweet here and see how it unfolds. I posit that certain measures, which are forced upon us with lots of anger and frothing at the mouth, have nothing to do with health but rather with Big Tech's upcoming major push for face wearables.

— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots (@TessaMakesLove) September 24, 2020

However, I was kind of surprised to find this 2016 story by the CNN titled, “The smell of success? $115 bottles of British air sold to Chinese buyers.” Evidently, a few companies are now selling literal air in jars.

British entrepreneur Leo De Watts, 27, has made thousands of dollars selling bottles of British country air to Chinese buyers, but the price alone — £80 ($115) per bottle — could knock the wind out of many customers.

De Watts says the 580 ml (about 20 oz) glass jars have been flying out the door, many headed for pollution-plagued Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Since launching late last year [2105], his air farming company Aethaer has sold hundreds of containers of clean breeze from windswept locations across Britain — including Dorset, Somerset, and Wales. […]

De Watts, originally from Dorset on the southern coast of England, now lives in Hong Kong where he can be found selling his bottles of fresh air at local street markets. The businessman appears to have chosen his market wisely. In December, Beijing issued its first ever red alert because of poor air quality, closing schools and restricting traffic.

Back in Britain, De Watts’ team of air farmers continue harvesting away from roads which might pollute the precious produce. Hoping to cash in on Chinese New Year festivities, the company is now promoting a 15-jar gift set for — take a deep breath — the discounted cost of £888 ($1,200).

Funnily enough, for those dismissing the unusual business model as just a bunch of hot air, it is in fact Britain’s “cool air” which gives buyers the most bang for their buck. “The colder air means we can fit more in the container,” De Watts said. “When it’s warmer, we can’t fit quite as much in.”

Aethaer follows in the footsteps of the Canadian company Vitality Air, which recently started selling canisters of fresh air from the Rocky Mountains to Chinese buyers. Though at between $14 and $20 per canister, Canadian air seemingly costs a fraction of British breeze.

Now, personally, I think that selling air in small glass jars has a Theranos vibe to it in many ways. However, while I am very seriously doubting the viability of a product like this, I am not doubting the notion that there will be an attempt to turn our breathing into a commercial affair. Somehow, even the canned air companies got … wait for it, air time in the mainstream news (BBC, CNBC, etc.).

Plus, to be fair to the creative air merchants, the world has been not very sane for a while, and I would take canned air from the mountains (geoengineering be damned) over shady experimental therapies any time!

Smart Masks

In the meanwhile, the desire to stick smart face wearables on us is palpable. The World Economic Forum, for example, has been excited about a reusable mask that “can filter and kill off COVID-19.”

“This is a completely new mask concept in that it doesn’t primarily block the virus. It actually lets the virus go through the mask [ha, ha], but slows and inactivates it,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Btw before this whole thing unfolded, I joked that selling air was the next frontier, and soon we'd need wearable air purifiers to stay healthy (exactly how billionaires want us). Today, I believe that creating a habit for smart wearables is a big factor.https://t.co/DzjBUpLsjO

— Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots (@TessaMakesLove) February 18, 2021

Tokenization of Nature and Transfer of Value

And, if you had any doubt about why I expressed a concern about air as an energy-making resource (as opposed to something we simply breathe), this is what we are up against.

To the crazy ones, nothing is sacred. Life is not sacred. The spirit is not sacred. Nature is not sacred. Our bodies are not sacred. To the crazy ones, the only thing that matters is their dead-eyed power. To the crazy ones, everything is a resource. They would gladly make energy for sale using GM bacteria, and they would also gladly make batteries out of human bangs.

And any time they can, they hurry to “tokenize” what doesn’t belong to them and “transfer” the profits into their pockets. What we are up against is the Midas touch.

Michael Sheren, #UNDP Senior Advisor, G20 Chair:

"… because the #Southern part of the world has value far greater than large elements of the Northern []. And we start thinking about & putting prices on water, on trees, on #biodiversity, we find, where does that sit?"#COP15 pic.twitter.com/rcQm3DrDOx

— Cory Morningstar (@elleprovocateur) December 15, 2022

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

• Censorship of private communications is knocking on the door, and the first signs are here
• Companies like Google are known for censoring incoming email and their cloud storage, too
• New development: Outgoing private email not related to Google may have to pass the blackbox “spam” check before it can be sent
• In a 2018 lawsuit, T-Mobile claimed their right to use “discretion” over certain types of SMS communication over their networks
• In 2021, Biden allied groups, including the DNC, said that they “planned to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages”

In 1917, as a part of their successful military coup in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks famously made sure to, first and foremost, take control of the railway stations, the bridges, the postal office, the telephone service, and the telegraph. Taking over the communications was a critical piece of the coup.

As a Soviet kid learning history at school, I had that statement (“postal office, telephone, telegraph”) practically drilled into my head. It was supposed to demonstrate the genius strategic thinking of the Bolsheviks.

The point about taking over the communications came to my mind the other day when I was trying to send a private email, from my own domain, and it just wouldn’t even send because my server perceived it as “spam.” I had to make a few guesses and edit the text of the email in order for the server allow it to go through.

We already know that Google censors their incoming Gmail email as well as their Google Drive. And many of us have been dealing with our private emails from “politically incorrect” domains getting rejected by recipient servers, occasionally disappearing without trace, etc.

But the outgoing mail on my own domain (it’s a small hosting company, not any of those giants)? I thought it was crazy. It was a private email, not a newsletter, not a “BCC,” just a regular private email that I wrote in response to something a reader had sent. And it wasn’t rejected by the recipient — it was rejected by my own hosting company’s mail server! How crazy is that?

It wasn’t an isolated occasion, either. Recently, it started happening more often, sometimes, a couple of times a day. And I want to discuss it now, while censoring private communications still a nascent trend. It is important to be aware of this trend to and object to it in real time, or else we’ll end up living with it, which can barely be called “life.”

In my case, to figure out the issue, I wrote to my hosting company, and the explanation that I got from the technical team was that the server automatically assigns a “spam score” to each outgoing email — and if the score is high, the server won’t send it so as not to compromise the hosting company’s reputation and not to land them on the “spammer” list.

“These security rules are crucial to ensure that compromised email accounts from you or any of the other users sharing the mail server are not sending spam (or mail that is interpreted as spam by the recipients system) which will get the mail server on an RBL / Reputation list resulting in none of your email being accepted.”

“This means either there is an issue with the specific syntax or content of the email you are sending or there is something within your system environment (old software, excessive links in signature, virus, attachment mime type, link to phishing or malware site, connecting IP is on an RBL or Reputation list and any of these factors could increase the spam score of the email you are attempting to send causing it to be refused.”

“These systems are automated and work very reliably but there can always be an edge case where an email you think should go through will still trigger the filter due to the total score of the email.”

What a fascinating domino effect! And what a way to influence people’s thought! I, a sovereign citizen, had to paraphrase my private email (that, by the way, didn’t contain anything particularly outrageous in the first place but it shouldn’t even matter) in order for me to have the “privilege” of actually sending it.

Siri, what does this do to the neuronal pathways of the people who are forced to even privately talk in ways that please robots? And, Siri, do you know who controls the algorithm? And what will happen if the centrally managed “outgoing mail” algorithm starts banning certain medical information in private communications? Or flirting? Or swearing? Or any contrarian discussions about “climate”? Or anything else?

The Influence of Big Tech Algorithms on Journalism

I remember how it started — or rather, continued — in the media back in the day, in addition to the separate topic of direct media influence by the alphabets, which is also a thing. When Google and Facebook became the dominant dispatchers of traffic and the self-appointed kings of “page views,” writing in a “SEO-friendly” manner became a must if you worked in journalism.

If you worked for a media outlet, you couldn’t just pour your heart out and write like a normal human being. You had write both for the people and for the robots. You had to write as if a robot has possessed you, or else your story would get no views. And it’s not such a hard skill to learn but after you do it for some time, it eats your soul.

To add insult to injury, both traffic kings, Google and Facebook, kept changing their algorithms randomly — and the journalists had to keep up in order to ensure that their companies stayed afloat, and they kept their jobs.

And yet, by the extra crazy “new normal” standards of 2022, “back in the day” wasn’t even a bad time! At least we could more or less say things we thought. No, not all things, of course — but most things. Wow, that says something about where we are right now.

“The Healthy Apologize to the Sick”

A couple of years before COVID showed up, I wrote this innocent poem and also this, by today’s standards, very timid, warning against social media censorship. At the time, I was looking at the trends and worried that we would be rendered helpless by the algorithm, and driven increasingly crazy by irrational rules impacting our sanity and our ability to eat.

Back then, criticizing Big Tech was a lonely and unpopular affair — but booooy, did all the warming come true in the past three years — and more!

The healthy apologize to the sick,
The ones with a heart
Dance for the robots.
What is this?
Certainly, not the world I live in,
No.

Censorship of Private Texts: The T-Mobile Claim

In 2022, the news about social media censorship is no longer news. But how about the censorship of what we say to each privately, via traditionally “uncensored” media like text messages or email? Here is Wired article from 2018 that looks at a legal case in which T-Mobile claimed that they had the right to use discretion over a particular kind of text messages:

“T-Mobile told a federal judge Wednesday it may pick and choose which text messages to deliver on its network in a case weighing whether wireless carriers have the same “must carry” obligations as wire-line telephone providers.”

“The Bellevue, Washington-based wireless service is being sued by a texting service claiming T-Mobile stopped servicing its ‘short code’ clients after it signed up a California medical marijuana dispensary. In a court filing, T-Mobile said it had the right to pre-approve EZ Texting’s clientele, which it said the New York-based texting service failed to submit for approval.”

“T-Mobile, the company wrote in a filing (.pdf) in New York federal court, ‘has discretion to require pre-approval for any short-code marketing campaigns run on its network, and to enforce its guidelines by terminating programs for which a content provider failed to obtain the necessary approval.’”

“’Such approval is necessary, T-Mobile added, ‘to protect the carrier and its customers from potentially illegal, fraudulent, or offensive marketing campaigns conducted on its network.’ It’s the first federal case testing whether wireless providers may block text messages they don’t like.”

According to JUSTIA, the most recent update on the case is that “the plaintiff(s) and or their counsel(s), hereby give notice that the above-captioned action is voluntarily dismissed.” Was the precedent set?

“Fact — Checking” Our Private Text Messages

Most recently, in July 2021, Politico reported a call for censoring private text messages, causing an uproar:

“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages [emphasis mine].

The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.”

“’We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”

It seems it didn’t go very far, and a year after that outrageous claim, we can still text more or less freely (thank you, dear masters, you are very kind).

But I think that censoring our private communications is where it is going — and fast — unless we object to all censorship in real time, and keep objecting to it loud and clear, now and until it goes away. Life under the “new normal” isn’t fun.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.