Latest / Man in America Podcast / How the U.S. Military Built A.I. And Pointed It at You | America Hijacked EP04

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How the U.S. Military Built A.I. And Pointed It at You | America Hijacked EP04 · Man in America Podcast

• 0:13
  Speaker 1: The AI your child used at school today was designed in a Pentagon office. No one else tells you that because the real history of artificial intelligence is not what you were taught and not what the powerful people want you to know. So this is the military AI history that they never put in school textbooks, and it all started on a college campus in 1956. At the center of this is a young math professor named John McCarthy. And look, this guy's probably brilliant, but he was also deeply and genuinely frustrated.
• 0:49
  Because for years, he'd been trying to get people to take seriously the idea that a machine could one day imitate the human mind. And in 1956, when computers were still the size of a room and could barely play tic tac toe, most of his colleagues thought that he was out of his mind. But that's where the story begins. But here's where it gets interesting. Because a few years later, a completely different kind of person showed up.
• 1:15
  A guy who isn't a technical person nor a military person. He's a psychologist named Lick. And he walked into a Pentagon office with nearly $10,000,000 and basically a permission slip to build something the world had never seen before. It's not for you or your family, it's for the military. This is the history story that you wish you had in school and we're gonna connect the dots together from then all the way up to the phone in your pocket today.
• 1:54
  Welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. This is my America Hijacked series. It's an investigative history. We're digging through the archives.
• 2:07
  We're pulling the original documents and presenting the receipts, specific decisions, specific people, specific money. We go back to the exact moments when things change, find out who made the call and why, and then we follow the money until the bigger plan comes into focus. So I'm gonna take you on a journey today. And by the time that we're done, you're gonna look at every piece of technology in your home differently, your phone, your smart TV, the AI tool that your kids are using at school right now, all of it. Because here's the thing I want you to understand before we dive in.
• 2:37
  There's a pattern to how power works in this country. And once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere. The government identifies what they consider a threat. Then they pour money into a technology to fight that threat. That technology gets proven inside of a military or university lab, and then at exactly the right moment, they hand it over to the private sector.
• 3:01
  They put some friendly name on it. They run some ads, and they make it feel like it came from a garage startup in Palo Alto. But here's what they never tell you. When the threat fades, the technology doesn't go away. It just gets pointed somewhere else.
• 3:16
  It happened with the Internet. It happened with GPS, and it happened with artificial intelligence. So today, we're gonna trace that pattern all the way from a college campus in 1956 to a $500,000,000,000 project that was announced on day two of Donald Trump's second term. So let's start at the beginning. Picture this.
• 3:41
  It's summer of nineteen fifty six, Hanover, New Hampshire, a beautiful green college campus with beautiful lawns, old brick buildings. But arriving on this campus is a small group of men who genuinely believe, like, really truly believe that a machine can be made to think. And it's not even that many people. It's maybe 10. Actually, more like eight or nine showing up at any given point.
• 4:05
  So this isn't some grand conference with hundreds of attendees and name patches and a keynote speech. It's more like a summer camp for the smartest people in the room. And the room happened to be Dartmouth College. Now McCarthy knows he has a problem. Nobody outside this room takes the idea seriously.
• 4:22
  The academic world just isn't really interested. The public doesn't know it exists. So he does something really clever, something that looking back was possibly one of the most consequential branding decisions in American history. He picks a new name for the field that he's trying to build. He doesn't choose names that already exist like cybernetics or automata theory.
• 4:44
  They've got baggage. He picks something new, artificial intelligence. It sounds neutral. It's clean. It's unthreatening.
• 4:53
  He wants the idea to travel. He wants it to survive long enough to become real. So he gives it a name that won't scare anyone away. It's smart, isn't it? Now here's the part that they leave out of every textbook.
• 5:05
  So when McCarthy goes looking for the money to fund this gathering, he goes to the Rockefeller Foundation. Imagine that. And the Rockefeller Foundation greenlit it with a grant of $7,500. That's it. $7,500.
• 5:21
  That was the seed money for the field that is now worth trillions. But here's what's even more important than that. In the years that followed Dartmouth, it was the Office of Naval Research and the US Defense Department that became the primary funders of artificial intelligence research in America. The National Academies of Science put it in writing. From the nineteen sixties through the nineteen nineties, the Pentagon's own research arm, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, provided the bulk of the nation's support for AI research.
• 5:57
  They spent over a billion dollars on a single AI program between 1983 and 1993 alone. Receipts that these exist publicly, you can look at them. We have them. So the military was bankrolling this field from day one. So hold on to that thought because that's the very first thread in a really long string.
• 6:19
  Okay. So now let's back up a few years. Before Dartmouth, before anyone's even using this new label of artificial intelligence, The government was already building something, and it's something big. So in 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. For four years, since the end of World War two, The United States had been the only country on Earth with a nuclear weapon.
• 6:43
  It was seen as the most powerful military force in human history. And then one morning, in August '49, that all changed. And suddenly, the Soviets have the bomb, and now the question everyone is asking isn't whether there's going to be another war. The question is how much warning you're gonna have before the first bombs start falling. Because Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons are now a real possibility, and The United States needs a way to see them coming.
• 7:10
  They don't have hours. They have to see them in minutes. So the government called MIT and MIT called IBM. And together, they built something that had never existed before, a real time nationwide radar network powered by the most powerful computers on Earth. They called it SAGE.
• 7:28
  It stands for semiautomatic ground environment.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Seemingly unresistible. To protect the future of America, the defense techniques of tomorrow had to be discovered now. They were discovered in electronics. That is how SAGE and computers into military service.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Now here's what SAGE actually was. Hundreds of radar stations spread across the entire North American continent, all feeding data in real time into a central network of massive computers. So each direction center had two of these computers, and this was before microchips or nanotechnology, so each computer filled an entire building. Like, we're talking about machines that took up as much space as a large warehouse. They ran on vacuum tubes, so tens of thousands of vacuum tubes.
• 8:28
  And there were so many of them generating so much heat that the machines basically functioned as the heating system for the entire building throughout the frigid New England winter. And inside these buildings, you've got operators sitting in dim rooms in front of glowing screens watching little blips of light, and every blip is an aircraft. The system's tracking them, identifying them, processing the data in real time, and helping the commanders decide which ones are threats. And this is all happening automatically. So for its time, this was the most ambitious computing project in the history of the world.
• 9:02
  And here's the key number I want you to remember. Between 1952 and 1955, 80% of IBM's entire computing revenue came from Sage alone. So think about that. 80%. IBM, one of the most powerful technology companies in American history, became what it is today because the government needed a machine to watch the sky for Soviet bombers.
• 9:29
  The government didn't just fund this technology. They were the entire market. So now think about what Sage actually is. Strip away the nineteen fifties context. It's a network of sensors pulling data from across an entire continent.
• 9:44
  Real time processing, a central system that builds one unified picture of everything it's moving, a command layer that decides what to do with that information. Does it sound like anything you use today? Because it should. That's your phone. That's your smart home.
• 10:00
  That's the AI camera system watching your city's intersections right now. The technology got smaller, got a lot smaller, but the architecture never changed. So now we meet Lick properly. His full name was Joseph Carl Robinette Licklider. Everyone just called him Lick.
• 10:21
  So he was a psychologist by training, and he'd spent time working on the human side of Sage, studying how those operators interacted with the glowing screens, how their minds processed the information, how the machine and the human could work together more effectively. And what he saw convinced him of something that almost nobody else believed at the time. He became genuinely convinced that computers weren't just calculators. They weren't just fast adding machines. He believed that one day, a computer would be a real partner to human thought, like an extension of the mind itself.
• 10:55
  So in 1960, two years before he even set foot in the Pentagon, Lick published a paper, and he called it Man Computer Symbiosis. And in it, he describes a future so specific and so detailed and so accurate about what we now live inside of that reading it today is honestly, it's a little unsettling. He's describing a machine that would anticipate what you needed before you asked for it. A machine so tightly coupled to your thinking that the line between your mind and the machine would start to blur. He used the word symbiosis on purpose, like two organisms so dependent on each other, they can't survive apart.
• 11:39
  So he called it a partnership, and he said it was beautiful. But what he didn't say though, at least not in that paper, is who was gonna fund this vision into existence? In the fall of nineteen sixty two, Lick walked into a small office inside of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. So this was Pentagon's research arm created by president Eisenhower in 1958. So you may know it today as DARPA.
• 12:04
  They added the d for defense in '72. It's the same agency, same mission. It's just a little more of an honest name now. And inside that agency, Lick took over something called information processing techniques office, the IPTO. He had nearly $10,000,000 of Department of Defense money, and a mandate so vague basically gave him permission to do whatever he wanted to.
• 12:28
  So he starts flying across the nation. MIT in Cambridge, Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Berkeley, UCLA, Carnegie Tech. He's just crisscrossing the country, showing up at university labs and research centers. He's meeting the smartest people in compute in computing, and he's giving them money, government money, defense department money with almost no strings attached. And he calls this network of people that he was funding with a sense of humor that probably only a psychologist could pull off.
• 12:58
  He calls it the members and affiliates of the intergalactic computer network, which I think is hilarious. So the network didn't exist yet. The computers he was visiting couldn't talk to each other yet, but Lick understood something really important about how movements get built. You name the thing before it exists. You build the community before the infrastructure, and then you fund it into reality.
• 13:23
  And out of his IPTO office came the research that eventually became time sharing computers, which is the technology that lets one computer serve, many people at once. It sounds basic now, but in 1962, it was revolutionary. It's the reason that your phone can run 10 apps at the same time right now. It also gave us interactive screens, speech recognition, and most importantly, the network of connected computers that would eventually become the Internet. So here's the question I want you to think about.
• 13:52
  Lick's paper described a machine that would know you, that would model your thinking, that would anticipate your needs, that would be so woven into your life that you couldn't function without it. And the institution that took that vision and funded it into reality was The United States Department Of Defense. The purpose was never a partnership with you. It was always about command and control. It was about building a nervous system for the military, a digital nervous system, a way for commanders to have real time awareness of everything and everyone they needed to watch.
• 14:27
  And here's the question nobody asked. Who decides who they need to watch? So now jump forward. 01/21/2025, day two of Donald Trump's second term. So Trump's standing in the White House.
• 14:43
  On his left is Sam Altman, the man who runs OpenAI. On his right is Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. And alongside them is Maya Yoshi's son, the founder of SoftBank. And they announced a project they're calling Stargate, up to $500,000,000,000, half $1,000,000,000,000, to build AI data centers across America. It's the largest single technology investment in American history.
• 15:09
  And then Sam Altman looks at the president and says directly, we wouldn't be able to do this without you, mister president. The president, the military, the biggest AI companies in the world, all in the same room working toward the same goal. And you've heard this story before. You heard it in 1958 when Eisenhower created ARPA. You heard it when the government called MIT and IBM to build SAGE.
• 15:34
  You heard it when Lick was flying city to city handing out Pentagon money to university researchers. It was the same partnership. It was the same urgency, the same direction of money, and the same question. What are they really building, and who's it really for? Now the answer they give you is China.
• 15:53
  And look. I know that the threat is real. China's AI computing capacity jumped 74% in a single year. Beijing has invested $1,400,000,000,000 into its tech sector this decade. They're building data centers across the developing world right now, installing a Chinese technology stack inside other countries, governments, hospitals, and schools.
• 16:15
  So The US China AI race is real. It's serious. I'm not dismissing that. And here's what the real history of artificial intelligence shows us if you're willing to look at it clearly. Every single time America runs a major technology race in the name of a foreign threat, the infrastructure it builds always ends up pointed inward.
• 16:36
  SAGE was built to watch Soviet bombers. Its architecture became the foundation of the commercial computing industry that now runs your daily life. Then came ARPANET, Advanced Research Projects Agency's network. That's the government network that eventually became the Internet. So it was built to keep America's military communications alive in the event of a nuclear attack, and its architecture became the Internet that tracks every search you make and every message you send.
• 17:07
  And now Stargate is being built, $500,000,000,000 announced on day two of Trump's second term, officially to keep America ahead of China in the AI race. So what do you think that architecture is gonna be used for? They always have an enemy to point to, but the technology they build to fight that enemy never goes away. It just gets turned towards you. So now I wanna show you the pattern one more time because it's the same pattern every single time, and once you see it, you can't just unsee it.
• 17:41
  DARPA funds the research, AI research, computing research, the kind of research that's too expensive, too risky, and too long term for any private company to fund on its own. They fund it inside military labs and university research centers. They prove the concept. They build the architecture. And then at the right moment, they hand it to the private sector.
• 18:01
  They put a friendly name on it. They build a nice logo. They run some commercials, and they make it feel like it came out from a garage in Palo Alto or a dorm room at Harvard. Sage set the foundation for the commercial computing infrastructure that made IBM a global empire. ARPANET begat the Internet.
• 18:20
  Lick's IPTO research begat time sharing computers, interactive screens, speech recognition, and the networked world that we now live inside of completely. And by the time any of it reaches your living room, nobody remembers where it came from. Nobody connects the blinking cursor on your screen to a dim room full of operators watching Soviet aircraft blips in nineteen fifties. The tech changed, but the mission didn't. So when your child opens an AI app at school this week, I want you to actually understand what that is.
• 18:52
  It's a system built on an architecture that was designed at its origin to model human behavior for military command and control purposes. It was funded by the Department of Defense. It was proven in military applications. Then it was handed to a technology company, given a friendly interface, and placed in your child's classroom. You didn't consent to that.
• 19:16
  The school board didn't consent to that. It wasn't put to a vote. Heck, no one even knew it. Right? It just arrived.
• 19:23
  They built the infrastructure, then they moved in. Now I want you to remember that this is way bigger than politics, like way way bigger. What Lick described in 1960 paper was a machine that would know what you needed before you asked. It would know what you wanted before you knew you wanted it yourself. It was a machine that would model your behavior so accurately that it could predict your next move.
• 19:51
  And then and it would be woven so far into your thinking and your daily life and your decisions that you couldn't function without it. You would be dependent on it. So he called it a partnership and said that it was beautiful. But I want you to think a bit deeper about that because this goes deeper than even just trying to hijack America. The Bible and basically every religion or faith describes a being that's all knowing, that sees and knows everything you do, even before you know it yourself.
• 20:20
  A greater presence that is everywhere at once, that knows your thoughts before you can think of them, that you can't escape and you can't hide from. Now you know that greater being is not a technology. It's not a technology company. There's only one being who can actually be those things. What they're building is a counterfeit, a mechanical, digital imitation of something that only God could actually be, an all seeing, all knowing presence woven into every corner of your life.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: So it's moving in the direction that God has been described as having these qualities without limit. And so I think evolution is a spiritual process that makes us more God like.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: And the dangerous thing isn't the machine itself. The dangerous thing is how many people will just accept the counterfeit without ever stopping to ask what they gave up in return, what they stopped praying to, what they stopped trusting, what they replaced. They're not just trying to hijack America, they're trying to build a replacement for God. And I don't think that ends the way they think it does. So let me bring this back to your life right now in a practical way.
• 21:35
  If you've got a child or a grandchild in school today, that child's almost certainly using an AI tool built on a military architecture funded at some level by the government without your knowledge and without your consent. Your electric bill is going up to help power a geopolitical arms race that nobody asked you to fund. And the same institutional logic that built SAGE to watch Soviet bombers in the fifties is now watching your habits, your locations, your purchases, your associations, and your beliefs. It's even watching your car, your street, your front porch. You didn't sign up for that.
• 22:10
  But here's what I want you to hear. Knowing this isn't the same as surrendering to it. Seeing the system clearly is the first step to stepping outside of it. And there are actually things that you can do, like right now today. Stop feeding the machine wherever you can.
• 22:25
  Make intentional choices about which tools you use and which ones you hand to your kids. Build community with people who see what you see because isolation is how they win, but human connection is how we win. And that's what I'm doing. So I'm building the ARC community. That's a big part of this.
• 22:42
  It's about being resilient together, not retreating. Build yourself a group of people who want something better than a system of control. And if you wanna join me and my family in the community, you can go to buildthearc.com. Also, make sure you hit that like button on whatever platform you're watching. It genuinely helps this information to reach more people who need to hear it.
• 23:02
  And share this with someone that you care about. That's how this truth travels from one person to the next. Never underestimate the power of you and your connections. But remember, don't worry. The thing about counterfeits and how they work, they only work on people who've forgotten what the real thing looks like.
• 23:19
  And you, me, and everyone watching this information right now, we haven't forgotten, so we can't be fooled. Then And no matter what counterfeits are being built, the real thing can never be replaced. So thanks for joining me today, and I'll see you next week for the next episode of America Hijacked.