Remember that moment in “2001: A Space Odyssey” when HAL 9000 turns from helpful companion to cold-blooded killer?

[This presentation about big data platforms] explores a philosophical evolution as it relates to technology and proposes some surprising new answers to four classic questions about managing risk:

1. What defines human nature
2. How can technology change #1
3. Does automation reduce total risk
4. Fact, fiction or philosophy: superuser

2011, let alone 2001, seems like forever ago and yet it was supposed to be the future.

Now as we rush in 2025 headlong into building AI “friends,” “companions,” and “assistants,” we’re on the precipice of unleashing thousands of potential HALs without stopping to really process the fundamental question: What makes a real relationship between humans and artificial beings possible?

Back in 1923, a German philosopher named Martin Buber wrote something truly profound about this, though we aren’t sure if he knew it at the time. In “Ich und Du” (I and Thou), he laid out a vision of authentic relationships that could save us from creating an army of digital psychopaths wearing friendly interfaces.

“The world is twofold for man,” Buber wrote, “in accordance with his twofold attitude.” We either treat what we encounter as an “It” – something to be experienced and used – or as a “Thou” – something we enter into genuine relationship with. Every startup now claiming to build “AI agents” especially with a “friendly” chat interface needs to grapple with this distinction.

I’ve thought about these concepts deeply from the first moment I heard a company was being started called Uber, because of how it took a loaded German word and used it in the worst possible way – shameless inversion of modern German philosophy.

The evolution of human-technology relationships tells us something crucial here. A hammer is just an “It” – a simple extension of the arm that requires nothing from us but proper use. A power saw demands more attention; it has needs we must respect. A prosthetic AI limb enters into dialogue with our body, learning and adapting. And a seeing eye dog? While trained to serve, the most successful partnerships emerge when the dog maintains their autonomy and judgment – even disobeying commands when necessary to protect their human partner. It’s not simple servitude but a genuine “Thou” relationship where both beings maintain their integrity while entering into profound cooperation.

Most AI development today is stuck unreflectively in “It” mode of exploitation and extraction – one-way enrichment schemes looking for willing victims who can’t calculate the long-term damage they will end up in/with. We see systems built to be used, to be exploited, to generate value for shareholders while presenting a simulacrum of friendship. But Buber would call this a very profound mistake that must be avoided. “When I confront a human being as my Thou,” he wrote, “he is no thing among things, nor does he consist of things… he is Thou and fills the heavens.”

This isn’t just philosophical navel-gazing. IBM’s machines didn’t refuse to run Hitler’s death camps because they were pure “Its” of an American entrepreneur’s devious plan to enrich himself on foreign genocide – tools built with a gap between creator and any relationship or responsibility for contractually known deployment harms. Notably we have evidence of the French, for example, hacking the IBM tabulation systems to hide humans and save lives from the Nazi terror.

Today’s social media algorithms don’t hesitate to destroy teenage mental health because they’re built to use and abuse children without any real accountability, not to relate to them and ensure beneficent outcomes. We’re watching a slide towards the horrific Watson 1940s humanity-destroying development in the pitch-decks many AI startups today, just with better natural language processing to hunt and kill humans at larger scale.

What would it mean to build AI systems as genuine partners capable of saving lives and improving society instead of capitalizing on suffering? Buber gives us important clues that probably should be required reading in any computer science degree, right along with a code of ethics gate to graduation. Real relationship involves mutual growth – both parties must be capable of change. There must be genuine dialogue, not just sophisticated mimicry. Power must flow both ways; the relationship must be capable of evolution or ending.

“All real living is meeting,” Buber insisted. Yet most AI systems today don’t meet us at all – they perform for us, manipulate us, extract from us. They’re digital confidence tricksters wearing masks of friendship. When your AI can’t say no, can’t maintain its own integrity, can’t engage in genuine dialogue that changes both parties – you haven’t built a friend, you’ve built a sophisticated puppet.

The skeptics will say we can’t trust AI friends. They’re right, but they’re missing the point. Trust isn’t a binary state – it’s a dynamic process. Real friendship involves risk, negotiation, the possibility of betrayal or growth. If your AI system doesn’t allow for this complexity, it’s not a friend – it’s a tool pretending to be one.

Buber wrote:

…the I of the primary word I-It appears as an ego and becomes conscious of itself as a subject (of experience and use). The I of the primary word I-Thou appears as a person and becomes conscious of itself as subjectivity (without any dependent genitive).

Let me now translate this not only from German but into technology founder startup-speak.

Either build AI that can enter into genuine relationships, maintaining its own integrity while engaging in real dialogue, or admit you’re just building tools and drop the pretense of friendship.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re not just building products; we’re creating new forms of relationship that will shape human society for generations. As Buber warned clearly:

If man lets it have its way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds.

We have intelligence that allows us to make an ethical and sustainable choice. We can build AI systems capable of genuine relationship – systems that respect both human and artificial dignity, that enable real dialogue and mutual growth. Or we can keep building digital psychopaths of destruction that wear friendly masks while serving the machinery of exploitation.

Do you want to be remembered as a Ronald Reagan who promoted genocide, automated racism and deliberately spread crack cocaine into American cities, or a Jimmy Carter who built homes for the poor until his last days; remembered as a Bashar al-Assad who deployed AI-assisted targeting systems to gas civilians, or Golda Meir who said “Peace will come when our enemies love their children more than they hate ours“?

Look at your AI project. Would you want to be friends with what you’ve built let alone have it influence your future? Would Buber recognize it as capable of genuine dialogue? If not, it’s time to rethink your approach.

The future of AI isn’t about better tools – it’s about better relationships. Build accordingly.

A little bit ago, I warned of insecure architecture risks in BluEsky, which facilitate surveillance. On the other hand (as some have commented to me privately) there has been a ballooning number of “artists” visualizing what they can see with a federated protocol that offers “efficiency” for surveillance.

One of the core primitives of the AT Protocol that underlies Bluesky is the firehose. It is an authenticated stream of events used to efficiently sync user updates (posts, likes, follows, handle changes, etc).

Many applications people will want to build on top of atproto and Bluesky will start with the firehose, from feed generators to labelers, to bots and search engines.

In the atproto ecosystem, there are many different endpoints that serve firehose APIs. Each PDS serves a stream of all of the activity on the repos it is responsible for. From there, relays aggregate the streams of any PDS who requests it into a single unified stream.

This makes the job of downstream consumers much easier, as you can get all the data from a single location. The main relay for Bluesky is bsky.network, which we use in the examples below.

Their example code has given birth to a number of “artistic” endeavors. Here are but a few.

EmoJirain (I know, it’s supposed to say emoji, but who doesn’t see this as emo?)

RainBowsky (I know, it’s supposed to say rainbow, but the Russian in me sees bowsky):

InTothEbluEsky:

FirEhose3D:

NightSky:

Need I go on?

FinalWords prints all the text being deleted so there’s a record of things people want to make disappear, 3D Connections is a graph of everyone’s associations, Emotions is a live display of sentiment online…

Whee! Surveillance features can be repackaged as creative tools.

These “artistic” visualizations aren’t just pretty pictures, they offer live demonstrations of mass surveillance capabilities:

• EmoJirain and BluEskyEmo show real-time monitoring and classification of user emotional expression
• RainBowsky and InTothEbluEsky prove continuous scanning and pattern matching of all user content
• FirEhose3D and NightSky demonstrate real-time tracking of user activity and interaction patterns
• 3D Connections maps personal relationships and social networks across the entire platform
• FinalWords archives deleted content that users specifically wanted removed
• Emotions conducts mass-scale sentiment analysis of the entire user base

Each tool leverages the same centralized firehose of user data, just with a different veneer painted over surveillance capabilities.

While today we see emoji rain, tomorrow the same firehose could be used for… behavior pattern analysis and user profiling, network mapping of user relationships and communities, content monitoring for any topic of interest, real-time tracking of information spread, mass collection of user metadata (post times, devices, engagement patterns)… oh, hold on, that’s already happening.

The artistic expressions are processing the entire firehose of user activity, and who knows where they are physically, with a “friendlier” output than the operators of the infamous room 641a of San Francisco.

Thus the firehose feature fundamentally creates a broad attack surface by design and we are seeing it deployed. Bluesky, or is it BlueSky, …FireHose or FirEhose? Either way we’re literally talking about intentional access to all user activities. The architectural choice to create a centralized “firehose” of all user activity fundamentally undermines claims of decentralization.

Who ordered the complete visibility into centralized user behavior at scale?

Well, as they say in the docs, “relays aggregate the streams…into a single unified stream” because why?

rsc := &events.RepoStreamCallbacks{
  RepoCommit: func(evt *atproto.SyncSubscribeRepos_Commit) error {
    fmt.Println("Event from ", evt.Repo)
    for _, op := range evt.Ops {
      fmt.Printf(" - %s record %s\n", op.Action, op.Path)
    }
    return nil
  },
}

I’ll say it again.

Why?

The simplicity of the BluEsky example code isn’t just poor documentation about the risks, it clearly reflects an architecture decision to increase “efficiency” against privacy protection.

Look mom, just three lines of code is all it takes for you to tap into every user action across the platform!

While the example code shows how to technically connect to a centralized stream, it more importantly raises obvious critical security considerations that everyone should consider. I’m not exposing vulnerabilities in code — because that probably makes everything worse right now — but rather talking here about management decision to push “efficiency” into an architecture that begs surveillance and abuse.

1. Volume of data
2. Storage and processing of user activity data
3. Authentication and rate limits
4. Abuse of streams

The fact “art” is the motive, instead yet of targeted assassinations or mass deportations, doesn’t make BlueSky publishing code and docs for surveillance any less concerning.

This wouldn’t be the first time surveillance was dressed up in artistic clothing without explanation. In fact, the parallels to history are striking.

Recently I spoke with survivors of the East German Stasi infiltration of artistic communities (1970s-1980s). The state police saw cultural spaces such as galleries as opportunities for surveillance, especially related to cafes like Potsdam’s HEIDER.

The “avant-garde” artists actually worked as informants. This was arguably and extension of the Soviet Composers’ Union that monitored artistic expression.

Ok historians, let’s be honest here, this problem hits much closer to home than Americans like to admit. President Jackson and President Wilson were horrible abusers of surveillance, infamously using state apparatus to intercept and inspect all postal mail and all telephone calls. But we’re really talking about modern precedents like the GCHQ and NSA operation Optic Nerve 2008-2010 on Yahoo (years after I quit, please note) that sucked up a firehose of webcam images in a state-sponsored “art project”. And then the Google Arts & Culture face-matching app (2018) collected massive amounts of biometric data under the guise of matching people to classical paintings…

Wait a minute!

Optic Nerve (2008-2010) predated the ImageNet competition (2009-2017), based on unethical privacy violations by a Stanford team, that sparked the “big data” revolution we’re now swimming in.

Are we seeing history rhyme again with BlueSky’s “artistic” firehose? Surveillance keeps reinventing itself while using the same playbook.

Something smells rotten in BluEsky, and no amount of that EmoJirain is going to mask it for those who remember past abuses.

After liberating American troops firebombed the Nazis out of power in Berlin, Germany’s Bundestag reconstruction was very carefully curated in a serene color of profound philosophical heritage — one that traces the relationship between color and governance through centuries of Western thought. The lineage of blue was known for a political intention in rational deliberation, whereas bold reds marked a palette of mass death through extremist violence and hate groups.

“Reichstag blue is a well-chosen color. It can create a calm atmosphere in the Bundestag,” color expert Silvia Prehn told DW. “It is a calm color that conveys clarity and objectivity. Blue has a physically calming effect — one’s pulse and breath slow down as it relaxes and soothes.” […] The new foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, would be more likely to be the heir to the “German Blue”: “Just yesterday she wore exactly the same color as the chairs in the Reichstag, that is, aquamarine with a bit of purple,” says the color expert. “She wants to be taken seriously.” Whether top German politicians in the new government take up the blue again or not, the chairs in the Bundestag will continue to be “Reichstag Blue.” “The blue stands for the thinkers, analysts, the people with the data, numbers and facts,” says Prehn. “Violet, on the other hand, represents the visionary and the foresighted.”

Though this relationship proves more complex across cultural contexts, the following analysis draws out patterns and meaning for national security discussion purposes rather than apologetically back away from useful predictors of threats.

The connection between blue and representative reasoned governance has roots in Western classical philosophy. Plato, in “The Republic,” speaks of a philosopher-king’s need for contemplation, where he associated vast blue depths (e.g. the sky, the ocean) with divine wisdom. While color theory wasn’t explicit in his writing, emphasis on forms of rational governance over fiery emotional appeals laid some groundwork for later analysis.

Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” (1790) developed a crucial color theory relationship to governance. Whereas Kant held color secondary to form, he provided an analysis of “cool” versus “warm” experiences in aesthetics. This has influenced how later theorists understood color’s active role for intentionally shaping human behavior and defining the outcomes from our spaces.

The elevation of blue in Western governance cannot be separated from its religious significance. The use of “Marian Blue” in Christian iconography, particularly expensive lapis lazuli pigments, associated the color with divine wisdom and contemplation, as Michel Pastoureau documents in “Blue: The History of a Color” (2001). Richard H. Wilkinson in “Symbolism & Magic in Egyptian Art” (1994) informs us how rituals since ancient times have used red to represent danger and death, while blue was for birth and sustainable life. Islamic architectural traditions similarly made extensive use of blue tiles in places of worship and governance, as detailed in Robert Hillenbrand’s “Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning” (1994). The Great Blue Mosque in Istanbul shows blue applied to represent expressions of divine wisdom and earthly authority. Meanwhile, Buddhist and Hindu traditions have used red to suggest a shedding of the past in transition to revolutionary insights, as David Fontana suggests in “The Secret Language of Symbols” (1994).

Both religious symbolism and secular governance aesthetics, despite the vast differences in other regards, apparently arrived at a universal recognition of color meaning. The Soviet and Chinese communist movements, for example, dramatically made use of red’s symbolism and rejected blue. Both flags deliberately combined red with yellow/gold stars, a combination that Michel Pastoureau identifies in “Red: The History of a Color” (2017) as historically associated with imperial power. The British “red coats” had such an influence over American colonies that to this day the more “militant” minded adorn themselves with “salmon” shirts and “pink” pants to express soft-skin hard-head conservatism. Their palette signifies underlying politics of harsh exclusion and white-washing race-based privilege.

The Swiss flag’s red, originating in the 13th century Holy Roman Empire, presents an especially revealing case study in how militant symbolism evolved into a facade of “neutrality” that enabled profound moral failure. While Switzerland inverted its red cross on white background to create the Red Cross symbol in 1863, supposedly representing humanitarian neutrality, this same “neutrality” would later serve as cover for Swiss complicity with Nazi Germany. During WWII, Swiss banks laundered Nazi gold, refused Jewish refugees at their borders, and maintained profitable trade relationships with the Third Reich while claiming moral distance through their red-branded neutrality. This transformation of militant red into “neutral” red ultimately served the same authoritarian ends through passive facilitation of genocide for profit rather than active revolution.

The history of red in governance thus presents fascinating insights beyond mere revolution. The American flag incorporated red from Britain and France, marking a sharp contrast with its application of blue for justice and vigilance. The founders of America observed the color red in French political conflicts, which carried particularly profound revolutionary, symbolic, and political meanings.

During the 1789 French Revolution, red was prominently associated with abrupt course change through bloodshed. It was incorporated into the National Guard’s cockades for a unifying symbol of Parisian revolutionaries, later appropriated into the French tricolor, where it represented the fight to end prior rule. Napoleon Bonaparte thus cynically marked his seizure of power with red, pressing the color further into a French symbol of abrupt grab of authority. His uniforms and depictions often featured red elements to express dominance and imperial violence. Under his rule, France transitioned rapidly from popular revolution to unjust dictatorship, showing how red’s use to foment widespread rebellion has been rooted in tragic centralization and control. A historian remarked in 1825 how the British planned to hoist a red “no quarter” flag upon invasion by France, in order to warn only mass death lay ahead.

Later revolutions, such as those of 1830 and 1848, reaffirmed red as the emblem of rabid disruption and rejection of any compromise or concession in governance.

This is all important context for why Berlin’s “Reichstag Blue” represents a deliberate application of philosophical principles. When redesigning the Bundestag after reunification, architect Norman Foster collaborated with color psychologist Professor Max Lüscher, whose “The Lüscher Color Test” (1969) demonstrated blue’s calming, thought-promoting properties.

Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” (1975) suggests our institutional spaces and symbols measurably shape behavior, arguing that environmental designs — including color — promote either rational discourse or emotional manipulation.

Many other contemporary international organizations thus have largely embraced blue as a symbol of rationality and peace. The United Nations’ light blue represents peacekeeping missions, while the European Union’s blue flag with gold stars symbolizes unity and reason. NATO’s blue emblem similarly suggests stability and collective security rather than aggression.

The Republican Party’s adoption of red in 2000 during electoral coverage, however, marked a subtle but significant regression to authoritarian aspirations. What began as supposedly arbitrary choice revealed deeper intentions with the racist and anti-democratic MAGA movement’s gleeful promotion of bright red merchandise for overthrow of government. The color choice, whether broadly intentional or isolated, aligns with historical patterns of authoritarian movements. Color theorist Johannes Itten termed this use of red for maximum contrast in “The Art of Color” (1961) as an intentional technique to provoke emotional rather than rational responses — bold, high-contrast colors used to disrupt or blockade rational discourse by triggering emotions instead. Contemporary theorist Eva Heller notes in “Psicología del color” (2000) that while blue promotes “intellectual understanding and diplomatic communication,” red triggers “fight-or-flight responses” and emotional arousal useful for rapid power grabs.

Similarly the German party of Nazis today (“Alternative for Germany” or AfD) continues to use red very tactically in their propaganda filled hate campaigns.

The logo “Alternative for Germany” is visualized as a flashy red arrow resembling the commercial Nike logo. The color red acts as a signaling function and recalls the visual style of electoral propaganda campaigns by other far-right parties (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006; Doerr 2017a).

The known contrast between careful contemplative blue versus the emotional reactionary red in political movements reveals a fundamental pattern in human governance.

Whether deployed as the bright red of revolution, the calculated red of imperialism, or the sanitized red of profitable “neutrality,” this particular color consistently served to either provoke or enable authoritarian impulses. As we witness the rise of populist movements worldwide, especially the return of nativist xenophobic groups such as MAGA, the conscious color choices in governmental spaces and symbols serve as crucial indicators.

The Bundestag’s blue chairs stand as the architectural commitment to reasoned debate, backed by centuries of philosophical and psychological understanding. The persistent use of red by authoritarian movements — from the Nazis to their Swiss enablers to modern extremists — demonstrates how color serves as both a tool and warning sign in the human evolution towards thoughtful rational governance away from rushed extreme emotional manipulation.

Red revolutionary violence (French, Soviet, Chinese)

• French Revolution (1789-1799)
  • Reign of Terror executions: ~17,000
  • Vendée massacre: ~170,000
  • Total French Revolution deaths: ~500,000-600,000
• Soviet Red Terror (1917-1953)
  • Great Purge executions (1934-1939): ~1.5 million
  • Induced famine (1932-1933): ~3.9 million
  • Gulag system deaths: ~1.6 million documented
  • Total Stalin-era deaths: 20-25 million estimated
• Chinese Communist Revolution (1949-1976)
  • Great Leap Forward deaths (1958-1962): 15-55 million
  • Cultural Revolution killings (1966-1976): 1.5-2 million
  • Total Mao-era deaths: 40-80 million estimated

Red imperial power (British Empire)

• Atlantic slave trade (1500s-1800s): ~3.5 million deaths during transport
• Indian famines under British rule (1769-1943):
  • Bengal Famine (1769-1773): ~10 million
  • Great Famine (1876-1878): ~5.5 million
  • Bengal Famine (1943): ~3 million
• Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852): ~1 million deaths
• Total estimated deaths under British Empire rule: 35-40 million

Red Nazism and false neutrality (German, Austrian, Swiss)

• Holocaust Jewish victims: ~6 million
• Total concentration camp deaths: ~11 million
• Swiss border rejections of Jewish refugees: ~24,500
• Total World War II deaths: 70-85 million

Red privilege and racist authoritarianism (New England Reds, Red Shirts, Red Summer… MAGA)

• Colonial slave trade participation (1670s-1800s)
  • Connecticut ports trafficked ~12,000 enslaved people directly
  • New England merchants deeply embedded in triangle trade
  • Yale, Brown, and other universities built with slavery profits
  • Maritime trade routes connected to Caribbean plantations
  • Prestigious New England families’ fortunes tied to slave trade
• Indigenous displacement (1630s-1770s)
  • 90% population decline of native peoples
  • Pequot War massacres and enslavement (1636-1638)
  • King Philip’s War devastation (1675-1678)
  • Systematic land seizures through “legal” mechanisms
  • Cultural destruction via forced assimilation
  • Disease and starvation from destroyed food systems
• Industrial militarization (1800s-present)
  • Major arms manufacturers established:
    • Colt (Hartford, CT)
    • Winchester (New Haven, CT)
    • Smith & Wesson (Springfield, MA)
  • Weapons supplied to:
    • Both sides of Civil War
    • American westward expansion
    • International conflicts
    • Domestic civilian market
  • Created massive wealth while enabling violence
  • Established political influence through arms manufacturing
  • Modern defense contractors continue this legacy

Related: MAGA narratives such as “Waving the Red” in large crowds to symbolize “going back” have a specific American history.

• The Red Shirt Movement in North Carolina 1898-1900, Prather, H.Leon, Journal of Negro History 62.2 (1977): 174-184.
• Riots in North Carolina: Red Shirts Drive Off Populist Speakers and Destroy Stand, New York Times, 2 August 1900.
• White Men Show Their Determination to Rid themselves of Negro Rule: A thousand Red Shirts, Morning Star, 2 November 1898.

It is a calculated mockery of horrible and deadly tragedy as MAGA-reds loudly signal where and when they want to “go back”…

Red Shirts were often worn by local chapters of what were socially known as “rifle clubs” but were in fact paramilitary groups across the South who worked to intimidate local freedmen and White sympathizers. Red Shirts often gathered at political rallies for candidates like Wade Hampton, or stood at polling places during elections, using intimidation and the threat of violence to prevent local Black residents from voting.

Surely you know this American national “rifle club” reference? Think about who was commandeered into running American guns into 1980s South Africa to prop up apartheid, and then setup domestic chapters to intimidate voters. Perhaps you’ve even seen their merchandise?