Have you ever had this experience? You're sitting somewhere, maybe at home or maybe out somewhere, and you're talking to a friend about some particular topic. Then moments later you open your phone and there are new ads which are directly influenced by the thing you'd just been talking about.

If you do a Google search on this topic you'll find innumerable articles all basically saying that this doesn't happen. But if you look hard enough you'll also find this story from last December:

It’s been a long-held suspicion by many people: that smartphones and smart speakers are listening in on their private conversations for various reasons.

Now one company — Atlanta-based Cox Media Group — has revealed that yes, your devices are listening to you. Indeed, CMG touted its ability to identify “relevant conversations via smartphones, smart TVs and other devices” using AI to let local businesses target ads to those people.

“It’s True. Your Devices Are Listening to You,” said a page on the CMG Local Solutions site, which has since been pulled down. “With Active Listening, CMG can now use voice data to target your advertising to the EXACT people you are looking for.”

In a Nov. 28 blog post (which also has been deleted), CMG Local Solutions said its “Active Listening” technology can pick up conversations to provide local advertisers a weekly list of consumers who are in the market for a given product or service. Example it cited of what Active Listening can detect included “Do we need a bigger vehicle?”; “I feel like my lawyer is screwing me”; and “It’s time for us to get serious about buying a house.”

Whether this has actually happened in a widespread way or not, it should be obvious that it could happen and that there is a clear financial motivation to make it happen. But even in a worst case scenario there are probably ways you could fight back. For instance, you could limit apps that want access to your phone's microphone. Or if you were really concerned you could even turn the phone off or keep it in a drawer. You have options.

But what if you didn't have options. What if the government was monitoring the phone and anything you posted on social media. And what if every time you left your house there were an endless number of cameras tracking your movements. That's basically the situation in China right now. And that was the subject of Dr. Jordan Peterson's testimony before Congress last week. 

There are now 700 million CCTV cameras in Communist China. Those electronic eyes are attached to the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined. It has the ability not only to recognise faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured...

The demented, naïve engineers who so enthusiastically helped build this system call it “SkyNet”, after the rogue and all-seeing technology that take such a dreadful wrong turn in the science fiction Terminator series, where artificially-intelligent robot minds hell-bent on protecting themselves end up destroying humanity as a consequence. The name also references a well-known Chinese phrase describing the reach of the divine itself – “the net of heaven is vast, yet it misses nothing” – which aptly describes the capabilities of the new state apparatus. 

This system is integrated with the so-called Chinese Social Credit System which awards its involuntary participants with a score indicating their compliance with the dictates of the Party, allowing for full control over access to everything they possess electronically – most ominously their savings and access to travel, including, as more electronic gates appear, walking.

The even more worrisome aspect of all of this, according to Peterson, is that the west seems to be drifting in the same general direction, with nationwide lockdowns that were far less severe than in China but not necessarily different in principle. The appeal to "bend the curve" to avoid overwhelming hospitals quickly mutated into closed schools and restaurants, locked parks, cloth masks and social distancing circles on the floor of every store. The next step is to use a combination of state and corporate power to punish violators, something that Peterson pointed out had already happened in Canada.

In my country, Canada, the most egregious over-reach of the superstate occurred in the aftermath of a working-class protest against – ironically – state over-reach during the Covid lockdowns, when our increasingly delusional and totalitarian federal government determined that it was appropriate to suspend the access of protestors and their supporters, however minor, to their own assets, in collusion with Canada’s big banks...

It was recently determined in Canada that such a move was literally unconstitutional. But that has not stopped the over-reach of the state. New legislation proposed by the same government mandates the generation of a soon-to-be giant bureaucracy to monitor and punish in an extra-judicial manner so-called “crimes of hate”, soon defined as any speech or act that the bureaucrats and corporations in charge of the definition themselves object to.

What happens when artificial intelligence is used to augment these systems to the point that there is literally no limit to how many people can be monitored at once? It will certainly be a nightmare in China where failure to show proper communist sentiment is already a crime worthy of prison and long stints of ideological rehabilitation in Xinjiang.

But it could happen here too. At least I worry that it could. We already have plenty of extremists on college campuses and in newsrooms and major corporations who seem eager to instantiate their own brand of cultural revolution, one which emphasizes the ritual humiliation and punishment of anyone who dares to oppose them. How long before we're all expected to kowtow? How long before the digital public square is working with the government to deal with troublemakers? Some of that is already happening but it could get a lot worse here as we know it already has in places like China, Russia, etc.

Here's video of Peterson delivering his full remarks. I have this cued up to his answers to questions after those remarks but you can scroll back if you want.