(LifeSiteNews) — On June 1, a co-worker of mine, whom I’ve come to know as a wise, experienced, and discerning man of God, wrote the first part of a series evaluating Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI. In it, Bruce Sabalaskey states that “AI is not like a better calculator or a faster filing cabinet. AI systems are increasingly tied to communication, commerce, education, warfare, employment, media, government services, surveillance, and social life.” Further on in Part I, he reiterates how AI can “attack work and family stability.” While I will leave it in Bruce’s very capable hands to explain just how we should respond to AI as followers of Jesus Christ, I want to take you on a side quest into the dangers of Age Verification Laws (AVLs) — nay, their evils.
Like Bruce, I’ve been a software engineer for multiple decades. Not quite as long as him, but I did survive Y2K and the dot-com bubble burst. I witnessed the launch of DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. In fact, it was with the launch of Windows XP and its “online activation” that I experienced my first twinge of insight into where I saw all of this going. Yes, I was young and inexperienced when I got that first bad taste in my mouth with “online activation,” but it didn’t sit well with me in ways I didn’t fully understand until 2019. Microsoft had planted the seeds of distrust in me that have guided my view of technology for nearly 30 years.
It was in 2019 that I first heard, in the now infamous World Economic Forum (WEF) video advertisement, that I would “own nothing and be happy.” It was in that moment that I started piecing everything together, all the way back to Windows XP’s age verif… I’m sorry, I mean online activation. As far back as 2001, we can see the first degree of temperature increase to get you to “own nothing and be happy.” While I don’t like to use the example of the often-cited boiling frog, because in that experiment they had to remove part of the frog’s brain for them to actually stay in the water to be boiled, I believe it is fitting here. As Bruce warned in his piece, AI effectively removes part of the human brain and makes humanity dumber if not used properly.
For nearly 30 years, there has been a steady decline in your rights to property ownership, independence, and privacy, with the ultimate goal to make you a digital slave of the state. From the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to increasingly hostile EULA (End User License Agreements) that tell you that you don’t own what you purchased and that the seller can revoke your “privilege” of use if you tick them off, or for any reason at all really, without financial redress of any kind. As an only slightly exaggerated example, let us say you bought a banana. With the current EULA trends, you could be told that you can only eat it with a fork and knife. If you bake it into a banana cream pie, they will seize your house like you agreed to in the EULA, because pie violates the agreed-upon banana usage in your monthly banana subscription. I’m being a bit facetious, but Disney did try to claim that a man could not sue over the negligent death of his wife at a Disney park because the EULA of his Disney+ Subscription he allegedly agreed to said he could never sue them for any reason.
Currently, there is a U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regulation that requires all vehicles manufactured in 2027 and after to include a state-controlled remote kill switch on your personally purchased motor vehicle. There is a whole other piece that could be written about that. There are states that have thermostats in your home that will lock you out of control if they don’t like the temperature you set, or if you have used what they consider to be too much electricity. As bad as that is, the ultimate destruction of your right to privacy, independence, and sovereignty over your own person and family is yet to come and is going to be trojaned into every aspect of your life via AVLs. You will be forced to accept the system or be cast out of it. Unable to buy or sell without them. This is not hyperbole or alarmism. This is fact. You need only look at China’s social credit system.
What are AVLs? AVLs were sold to the public as protection of children from social media or “predators,” but, in reality, they provide no protection to children, and in fact make it easier for predators to get hold of your or your children’s date of birth, biometrics, and location. Most unbelievable of all, AVLs are, in Canada at least, being pushed and supported by the porn industry because they do not wish to police themselves or accept the costs or the liability. They instead want to push the liability onto parents and the government.
READ: Pope Leo’s AI encyclical falls short because its horizon is too earthly
Many jurisdictions worldwide are in the process of introducing AVLs, with a similar solution to what was proposed to the Canadian senate by “Ethical Capital Partners,” the major porn conglomerate cited above. That is, “device level authentication.” Many jurisdictions have already passed legislation, while others are being debated in legislatures. Some examples include Brazil, the UK, the EU, Canada, California, Colorado, Illinois, and now U.S. federal bill H.R.8250, which calls it “operating system providers,” not “device level authentication.”
Just what is an operating system (OS)? An OS is a piece of programmed software that makes any digital device go. And I mean any. Washing machines, refrigerators, TVs, even some toasters have OSes, and, of course, every computer on the planet has an OS. This sudden push to “save the children” from evil computers is not a coincidence or is it out of the blue. I’m old enough to remember when governments were yelling at each other to put a computer in every home, school, and office. Now they are yelling at each other about how to control all those computers. This isn’t to save your kids, but to dictate your home life, track your every movement, and decide what you or your family is allowed to participate in in society. This is the social credit system on steroids with malevolence at its core.
The way an OS AVL works is that every “user,” when they are set up on the OS, will have to provide a digital ID verifying their age. That data will be fed into a massive global AI database, which will “phone” your device periodically to make sure you are “old enough” to do whatever you are doing. This also effectively makes offline devices no longer feasible, as every device will need an internet connection to communicate with the AI and application developers. Every program or application on that OS will have to communicate with the AI database and your device to verify that you are legally allowed to do whatever you are trying to do on that device. Depending on any violation the AI may discover, the penalties can vary. Your car may not start. Maybe your bank account gets frozen, or they take your kids away for allowing them to use your account to use Discord, or X, or play a game on Steam. Maybe you get mandated re-education or are sent to an internment camp. Every example I just gave is taken from a real–life situation that has already occurred in malevolent states already, and that is without OS-level AVLs.
Computers already have the means to lock you out of your devices with TPM modules. In use since 2003, TPM modules are capable of completely locking you out of your device permanently, effectively making it no better than a paper weight. Originally only needed in high security environments or to keep track of corporate hardware, Microsoft made them a mandatory component of any computer running Windows 11. Right around the time they were moving to subscription based “services.” Services where you own nothing.
If you combine TPMs with NHTSA-regulated kill switches and OS-level AVLs, you create the perfect storm for total and absolute control by the state, via AI, of every aspect of your lives from thermostats to toasters and grant them authority to determine what is appropriate to believe say or do in your home or expose your children to. AVLs are not necessary. Protecting your children is as simple as educating yourself on the tools that already exist to block and filter harmful content, and sitting down and talking with your children. There are many other possibilities that could or should have been implemented to protect your children from pornography or predators at the state level, but legislators are not interested in those solutions because they give power to the people not the state, whereas AVLs grant all the power to the state.
Less than 10 years ago, “experts” were considering showing pornography in schools as part of a “pornography literacy class.” Schools across the West incorporated sex clubs and called them “Gay-Straight Alliances” or similar euphemisms. Do not buy the lie that they care about your children. They don’t. The single purpose of AVLs is to digitally control and enslave you.
Jeremy Williamson is LifeSiteNews’ director of IT & Engineering.