Bilderberg Tech: Information Elite Comes of Age

By Terry Melanson (4/10/2018)

It pays to look closely at how Silicon Valley, Bilderberg, and AI fit together. On a practical level, AI offers enormous opportunities for everything from the commercial exploitation of data, the profiling of citizens/shoppers, and political control, so it obviously flutters the skirts of the Bilderberg bigwigs, whether they run HSBC, BP, the NSA, or Her Majesty’s Treasury. But the AI/Bilderberg symbiosis rests upon something deeper: the shared ideology of globalization—an ideology that resembles nothing less than a spiritual quest.

— Charlie Skelton, “Silicon Assets”

The general trend at Bilderberg in the last decade has been an increasing focus upon science, technology and cyberspace, reflected by those attending and the topics chosen for debate. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google/Alphabet and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, first attended in 2007 (31 May-3 June 2007 Istanbul, Turkey). One of the topics for that year—a first—was “Information Technology: Globalising or Tribalising Force?” Both Schmidt and Thiel, having ascended to the Bilderberg Group’s Steering Committee, are now directly responsible for proposing the agenda and selecting/approving participants: Thiel since 2010, and Schmidt since December 2015.

A more worrying development, especially in the age of the Snowden revelations, was initiated at the conference in Chantilly, Virginia, U.S.A., 5-8 June, 2008. General Keith B. Alexander, then-Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), attended—the first time a sitting NSA director had participated. Previously, only William E. Odom (Former Director, National Security Agency, 1985-1988) had attended in 1993

Just as Thiel and Schmidt shared their insight on information technology the previous year, the NSA director was there in 2008 to opine on the subject of “Cyber-terrorism.” (The head of the most secret intelligence agency in the world deemed it appropriate to brief—in secret—a cadre of elite Atlanticists. Did General Keith Alexander share classified information? No one knows, because the Bilderberg group, themselves, operate in total secrecy.)

Alexander was invited back in 2009 for an expanded keynote address titled “Cyber-terrorism: Strategy and Policy.” He didn’t make it the next year, however—too busy after being appointed Commander of the newly-instituted United States Cyber Command on May 21, 2010.

Bilderberg do not disclose who participated in the various sessions. Yet, obviously, the following participants in 2010 surely contributed substantially in the talks:

Topic: “The Growing Influence of Cyber Technology”

• Robert S. Prichard, President and CEO of Metrolinx, a malware security expert; and Sonia Arrison, former director at the Center for Technology Studies at Pacific Research Institute.

Topic: “Promises of Medical Science”

• Eric S. Lander, molecular biologist, geneticist and the principle leader of the Genome Project.
• Bill Gates too, as co-chairman of the Gates Foundation, contributes sizable sums to medical and genetic research, vaccinations and population control/reduction.
• Perhaps Peter Thiel took part in these sessions as well, and expounded upon life extension advances and the coming transhumanist revolution.
• And of course Sonia Arrison, a prominent life extension advocate and associate of Thiel, no doubt had much to say.

Topic: “Social Networking: From the Obama Campaign to the Iranian Revolution”

• Sean Parker was obviously uniquely suited to this topic, having foresaw the potential of Facebook from the beginning, was briefly the company’s President, and still owns substantial stock in the company. While attending Bilderberg he was the Managing Partner of Founders Fund (organized by Thiel), a venture capital firm that has invested in Facebook, SpaceX and Palantir among others.

Keith Alexander again attended the 2011 Bilderberg meeting in St. Moritz, Switzerland in his official capacity as Commander of USCYBERCOM and NSA Director. “Economic and National Security in a Digital Age” was up for discussion. The NSA chief was joined by such tech luminaries as Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com and Chris R. Hughes, Co‐founder of Facebook and Reid Hoffman, Co‐founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn. “Technological Innovation in Western Economies: Stagnation or Promise?” was yet another subject up for discussion. Also present were Google’s Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation, who, with the exception of 2005, had attended every year since 2003, taking his seat on the Bilderberg Steering Committee in 2011.

At the 2012 Meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, USA, only one session (“How Do Sovereign States Collaborate in Cyber Space?”) was devoted to tech and/or cyberspace. The following participants could have contributed insight or expertise:

• Keith B. Alexander, Commander, USCYBERCOM; Director, National Security Agency
• Reid Hoffman, Co‐founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn
• Craig J. Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation
• Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google Inc.
• Neelie Kroes, Vice President, European Commission; Commissioner for Digital Agenda
• Alexander Karp, CEO, Palantir Technologies

Palantir had already procured numerous government and military contracts at the time of Karp’s first attendance at Bilderberg in 2012. But less than a year later, Palantir would boast of clients such as “CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED-defeat organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” according to TechCrunch, who managed to obtain an internal document on Palantir’s history.

Karp and Thiel are cofounders of the company, whose software is a godsend to the national security apparatus. Initial funding for Palantir came from Thiel himself ($30 million) and the CIA’s venture capitalist arm, In-Q-Tel ($2 million). Palantir takes previously siloed information from government agency legacy databases—including filesystem data such as spreadsheets, images, documents, reports, etc.—integrating them seamlessly on the back end, with a slick, modern interface. Analysts can then effortlessly make connections, predict and monitor threats. It’s the killer app Big Data enthusiasts of the national security state had been dreaming about for years.

“Palantir’s name refers to the ‘seeing stones’ in Lord of the Rings that provide a window into other parts of Middle‐earth,” Bloomberg wrote in 2011.

They’re magical tools created by elves that can serve both good and evil. Bad wizards use them to keep in touch with the overlord in Mordor; good wizards can peer into them to check up on the peaceful, innocent Hobbits of the Shire. As Karp explains with a straight face, his company’s grand, patriotic mission is to “protect the Shire.”

Karp too, like his buddy Thiel, subsequently ascended to the Bilderberg Steering Committee (Dec 2014).

And speaking of “Big Data,” one of the topics at the 2013 Bilderberg conference in Hertfordshire, England, was “How Big Data is Changing Almost Everything”—initiated, no doubt, by team Thiel and Karp.

Also noteworthy in the context of “Bilderberg Tech,” topics such as:

• “Major Trends in Medical Research”
• “Online Education: Promise and Impacts”
• “Cyberwarfare and the Proliferation of Asymmetric Threats”
• Not to mention “Nationalism and Populism,” which Bilderberg were obviously worried about even in 2013 (about which Thiel, in particular, probably defended and tried desperately to find recruits).

Other tech, science, cyber and security luminaries at the 2013 Bilderberg meeting, were:

• John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine, University of Oxford
• Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
• Sherard Cowper‐Coles, Business Development Director, International, BAE Systems plc
• Robert D. Kaplan, Chief Geopolitical Analyst, Stratfor
• Alex Karp, Founder and CEO, Palantir Technologies
• André Kudelski, Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group
• Andrew Y. Ng, former professor and director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab; founder and director of Google Brain Deep Learning Project; co‐founder of Coursera in 2012

Three sessions at the 2014 Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark were tech related. Surely, first time attendee Viviane Reding (Vice President and Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, European Commission) was the main presenter for the talk called “Does Privacy Exist?” Others, such as Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, no doubt weighed in on the nay side, along with the intelligence heavyweights in attendance.

Charlie Skelton, reporting for The Guardian, had the following to say about the above photo:

This is the transatlantic privacy debate in action. On the right, EU commissioner Viviane Reding, probably the most important privacy negotiator in Europe. In the middle, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google – a company which has been widely criticised for its aggressive lobbying in Europe in the hope of less stringent privacy regulation. And on the left, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, which specialises in spyware and big data analytics.

They’re in private, discussing how much privacy should be afforded the public, while having their privacy paid for (at least in part) by the public.

Other sessions included (along with those who may have contributed):

Topic: “How Special is the Relationship in Intelligence Sharing?”

• Keith B. Alexander, Former Commander, U.S. Cyber Command; Former Director, National Security Agency
• Philip M. Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe
• David H. Petraeus, Chairman, KKR Global Institute (former director of CIA)
• John Sawers, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
• Peter A. Thiel, President, Thiel Capital
• Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir Technologies

Topic: “Big Shifts in Technology and Jobs”

• Matti Alahuhta, Member of the Board, KONE; Chairman, Aalto University Foundation
• Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The 2015 Bilderberg Meeting in Telfs-Buchen, Austria, was a turning point for Bilderberg elder Henry Kissinger. Both Demis Hassabis, Vice President of Engineering at Google DeepMind, and Kissinger were in attendance. Hassabis was at Bilderberg to discuss “Artificial Intelligence.”

As recounted by Kissinger in a 2018 article (“How the Enlightenment Ends”) published in the The Atlantic:

Three years ago, at a conference on transatlantic issues, the subject of artificial intelligence appeared on the agenda. I was on the verge of skipping that session—it lay outside my usual concerns—but the beginning of the presentation held me in my seat.

The speaker described the workings of a computer program that would soon challenge international champions in the game Go. I was amazed that a computer could master Go, which is more complex than chess. In it, each player deploys 180 or 181 pieces (depending on which color he or she chooses), placed alternately on an initially empty board; victory goes to the side that, by making better strategic decisions, immobilizes his or her opponent by more effectively controlling territory.

The speaker insisted that this ability could not be preprogrammed. His machine, he said, learned to master Go by training itself through practice. Given Go’s basic rules, the computer played innumerable games against itself, learning from its mistakes and refining its algorithms accordingly. In the process, it exceeded the skills of its human mentors. And indeed, in the months following the speech, an AI program named AlphaGo would decisively defeat the world’s greatest Go players.

As I listened to the speaker celebrate this technical progress, my experience as a historian and occasional practicing statesman gave me pause. What would be the impact on history of self-learning machines—machines that acquired knowledge by processes particular to themselves, and applied that knowledge to ends for which there may be no category of human understanding? Would these machines learn to communicate with one another? How would choices be made among emerging options? Was it possible that human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them? Were we at the edge of a new phase of human history?

Kissinger goes on to write that he subsequently organized “a number of informal dialogues on the subject, with the advice and cooperation of acquaintances in technology and the humanities. These discussions have caused my concerns to grow.” Similar to warnings from Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking, Kissinger is quite worried about the possibilities of this technology.

Putting aside the subject of AI for a moment, Kissinger’s article demonstrates use of the Chatham House Rule, a guideline adopted by Bilderberg and other secretive elite confabs such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Demis Hassabis’ name isn’t mentioned, his affiliation with DeepMind, nor the name of the conference. According to Chatham House Rule:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

Only those aware of the list of participants for the 2015 Bilderberg Meeting could piece together the ‘what’ to which Kissinger was alluding, however Hassabis is clearly identifiable by the mere mention of AlphaGo.

According to Maureen Dowd, in a 2017 article titled “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade To Stop The A.I. Apocalypse,” Hassabis is regarded as “the Merlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children.” Kissinger certainly was persuaded by Hassabis’ research and AI’s ubiquitous importance for the future of tech and science.

Dowd further recounts:

Some in Silicon Valley were intrigued to learn that Hassabis, a skilled chess player and former video-game designer, once came up with a game called Evil Genius, featuring a malevolent scientist who creates a doomsday device to achieve world domination. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and Donald Trump adviser who co-founded PayPal with Musk and others—and who in December helped gather skeptical Silicon Valley titans, including Musk, for a meeting with the president-elect—told me a story about an investor in DeepMind who joked as he left a meeting that he ought to shoot Hassabis on the spot, because it was the last chance to save the human race (my emphasis).

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was the largest shareholder of DeepMind when it was acquired by Google, in January 2014, more “than all three of the startup’s cofounders … 4,490,487 of DeepMind’s 16,406,358 overall shares.”

Other 2015 Bilderberg participants who might have contributed to the topic of Artificial Intelligence, are:

• Ann Dowling, President, Royal Academy of Engineering
• Regina Dugan, Vice President for Engineering, Advanced Technology and Projects, Google

In 2012 Regina Dugan joined Google’s Motorola division which segued in early 2014 into the Advanced Technology and Projects, a DARPA-like internal skunkworks for the company. Dugan had previously been director of DARPA from 2009 to 2012. DARPA has long been involved in state-of-the-art robotics and has funded the work of Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, LittleDog, LS3, RiSE, Sandflea, and Atlas.

Cybersecurity was also up for discussion at the 2015 Bilderberg conference. The following participants—and Dugan as well—were surely involved in the session:

• Zoë Baird, CEO and President, Markle Foundation
• Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman, Munich Security Conference
• John Kerr, Deputy Chairman, Scottish Power
• David H. Petraeus, Chairman, KKR Global Institute

Former CIA director Petraeus attended as Chairman of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’ new Global Institute. Global private equity firm KKR and co. (aka “Merchants of Debt” aka “Barbarians at the Gate”) was co-founded by Bilderberger Henry R. Kravis who’s been attending since 1982. His third wife, Marie-Josée Kravis, has been attending since 1998 and a Steering Committee member since at least 2010, according to their website. Since her first appearance, they’ve faithfully attended every year as a husband and wife team. As of 2014, Marie-Josée Kravis is President/Director of American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc., the umbrella ‘tax exempt’ organization that finances and directs Bilderberg in America.

Petraeus was back for the 2016 Bilderberg conference, 9‐12 June, in Dresden, Germany, presumably to discuss “Cybersecurity” which was again on the agenda. (For laughs, here’s footage of Petraeus running from alternative media.) André Kudelski, too, was suited for the task, and had attended in 2015 as well. Kudelski has been a Bilderberg regular since 2002 and ascended to the Steering Committee in 2013.

“Technological innovation” was also one of the topics up for discussion in 2016, and despite the vagueness and wide-ranging possibilities, the following participants definitely had expertise in this area:

• Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator
• Yoshua Bengio, Professor in Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal
• Emmanuelle Charpentier, Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
• Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and CEO, DeepMind
• Richard Levin, CEO, Coursera
• Carlo Ratti, Director, MIT Senseable City Lab

Sam Altman, one of the youngest attendees up to that time, was invited by Peter Thiel. Altman and Thiel were intercepted at the Bilderberg venue during a break in sessions. Questioned by Luke Rudkowski about his libertarian beliefs and whether it conflicted with attending Bilderberg, Thiel actually responded (see video below), and almost made sense for a moment until he equated the Stasi with radical transparency!

Altman’s Y Combinator is something straight out of the tv series Silicon Valley—and then some. In an assembly line fashion, they throw money and expertise at tech and science startups in return for a 7% stake. According to their website:

• 1,900 startups since 2005
• A community of over 4,000 founders
• A combined valuation of over $100 billion: Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Twitch, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, Cruise, Soylent … etc.

Bilderbergers were probably treated to a first look of the upcoming announcement about Y Combinator’s ambitious project about “building cities,” announced July 27, 2016. A blank slate, so to speak. Smart grids, autonomous vehicles, everything connected—AI as its backbone, of course. “We’re seriously interested in building new cities,” said Y Combinator partner Adora Cheung, “and we think we know how to finance it if everything else makes sense.”

In December 2015 Sam Altman and Elon Musk formed OpenAI, “a research effort aimed at ensuring that advances in artificial intelligence don’t lead to killer robots that destroy human civilization,” as Bloomberg described it. According to the OpenAI blog post launch:

Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.

We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

OpenAI’s research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning. Our CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe. The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group. OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI. In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years.

Well, I hope chumming with the Bilderberg elite doesn’t compromise the original intent. But even without Bilderberg help—presumably—Altman’s solution to AI is an all-too familiar fatalistic, scientistic one. In The New Yorker piece “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” published five months after his Bilderberg appearance, in response to the simulation hypothesis Altman said that our smartphones are already in control:

“The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I’d love that,” he said. “We need to level up humans, because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!”

Sam Altman is also a big advocate of basic income, something the elite globalists have given a lot of thought to once they were made aware that AI has the potential to disrupt everything and put millions or billions out of work. In January 2016 he announced a basic income study project to last 5 years with Oakland, California as a testing ground. “[W]e’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense,” he told The New Yorker. “Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.” It took a while, but the pilot project in Oakland is now slated to begin in 2019.

Guy Standing—Co-President, BIEN (Basic Income World Network); Research Professor, University of London—was at the 2016 Bilderberg conference as well, to discuss the “Precariat and middle class.” Standing is a world expert on universal, unconditional basic income as a solution to the ever-growing insecure class, the so-called “precariat.” According to Standing, “a new global class structure has been emerging. At the top is an elite of billionaires and such like.”

Below them is a salariat, comfortable but limited in numbers, with employment security and an array of non-wage benefits. Then there is a growing body of what could be called proficians – professionals and technicians usually receiving high incomes, but without employment security. Below them in terms of income is the old core, a shrinking industrial working class, not yet dead, but dying. Those in the core are fearful of dropping into the next and rapidly growing class fragment, what should be seen as the global precariat. Below the precariat are the chronically unemployed and a lumpenised minority of socially wretched people.

This is from a transcript of a talk he put up on his site in 2015. No doubt this was similar to his remarks at Bilderberg, addressing the very same elite as mentioned in the speech. The “elite of billionaires” are all-too willing to entertain such a notion as unconditional basic income. For one, it may prevent a revolution much more far reaching than Trump and the cult of MAGA, or Brexit; two, the funds will come from government coffers confiscated through taxes anyway. A win-win for the superclass and labor radicals. They’re both using each other as a means to an end—and know it.

Another participant discussing “Technological innovation” at Bilderberg 2016 was Yoshua Bengio, Professor in Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal. Bengio is a deep learning and artificial neural network godfather. According to techemergence.com, who interviewed Bengio, by 2015 he was cited 22,000 times in academic papers and had an H-index of 60 —“20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.” Together with cohorts Geoffrey Hinton (now working at Google Brain) and Yann LeCun (leading Facebook’s AI efforts), Bengio is part of the “Canadian Mafia” “AI conspiracy.” Their students and disciples are scattered throughout every major AI, Deep Learning center in business, academia and government.

Demis Hassabis attended again in 2016. Combined with Bengio, Bilderberg had the chance to pick the brains of the most knowledgeable AI duo on the planet.

Another ‘technological innovator’ attending the 2016 Bilderberg meeting was Emmanuelle Charpentier, the main discoverer of the gene editing breakthrough CRISPR–Cas9. All the end of the world scenarios written about in science fiction for decades are within reach because of this one technique. Her research partner, Jennifer Doudna, literally had nightmares after publishing their work and wrote a book that warns of the dangers: A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution.

We finish off the 2016 conference with the last two ‘technological innovators’ on the list: Richard Levin, CEO, Coursera and Carlo Ratti, Director, MIT Senseable City Lab. Major universities have embraced Coursera; it’s great stuff: you can now get a PhD sitting at home collecting your basic income while working on gene splicing and AI in your spare time for kicks. And as an expert on smart cities and the internet of things, architect and engineer Carlo Ratti must have been talking up a storm with Altman. Perhaps they intend to collaborate in the future to build the perfect technocratic, utopian city.

No explicit tech related sessions were revealed in the press release for the 1‐4 June, 2017 Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, USA. In the wake of Trump’s victory and rising populism in Europe, re-emphasizing its original Atlanticist character was the order of the day. The official topic list read:

1. The Trump Administration: A progress report
2. Trans-Atlantic relations: options and scenarios
3. The Trans-Atlantic defence alliance: bullets, bytes and bucks
4. The direction of the EU
5. Can globalisation be slowed down?
6. Jobs, income and unrealised expectations
7. The war on information
8. Why is populism growing?
9. Russia in the international order
10. The Near East
11. Nuclear proliferation
12. China
13. Current events

Topics seven and eight, “The war on information” and “Why is populism growing?,” was basically a free-for-all on the dangers of “fake news” and what they should do about those pesky conspiracists. To help suss out solutions, Bilderberg invited an unprecedented number of journalists (and at least one regulatory representative) to participate—off the record, of course, as is Bilderberg’s m.o.:

• Kjetil B. Alstadheim (NOR), Political Editor, Dagens Næringsliv
• Cansu Çamlibel (TUR), Washington DC Bureau Chief, Hürriyet Newspaper
• Lilli Gruber (ITA), Editor-in-Chief and Anchor “Otto e mezzo”, La7 TV
• François Lenglet (FRA), Chief Economics Commentator, France 2
• John Micklethwait (INT), Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg LP
• Zanny Minton Beddoes (INT), Editor-in-Chief, The Economist
• Maurizio Molinari (ITA), Editor-in-Chief, La Stampa
• Peggy Noonan (USA), Author and Columnist, The Wall Street Journal
• George Osborne (GBR), Editor, London Evening Standard
• Alexis Papahelas (GRC), Executive Editor, Kathimerini Newspaper
• Gideon Rachman (GBR), Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator, The Financial Times
• Beppe Severgnini (ITA), Editor-in-Chief, 7-Corriere della Sera
• Amy Walter (USA), Editor, The Cook Political Report
• Sharon White (GBR), Chief Executive, Ofcom
• Martin H. Wolf (INT), Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times

Under the vague rubric of “current events,” the following were also invited to Bilderberg 2017:

• Fabiola Gianotti (ITA), Director General, CERN
• Johanna Rosén (SWE), Professor in Materials Physics, Linköping University
• Boyan Slat (NLD), CEO and Founder, The Ocean Cleanup

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was certainly in the news in 2017 and Bilderberg were treated to Gianotti’s recounting of its successes so far and future CERN plans for an even large collider up to 100 km in circumference. Another physicist, Johanna Rosén, was also in the news for a few years before she attended Bilderberg in 2017. Her advanced research into superconducting boride materials has received funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The Swedish Wallenberg family just so happen to have been Bilderberg stalwarts from 1957 to the present. Boyan Slat was definitely the youngest (age 22, going on 23) Bilderberg participant ever in its history. His Ocean Cleanup non-profit is fascinating and promising and we all should—need to—be rooting for him to succeed. (Luke Rudkowski managed to catch up with him and Boyan agreed to an interview.)

Tech and science related sessions for the 2018 Bilderberg Meeting, 7-10 June, in Turin, Italy, include the following (and those likely to have presented).

“Current events”

• Elena Cattaneo (ITA), Director, Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology, University of Milan. Cattaneo was in the news in 2018 for her work on potential treatment for Huntington’s disease.

“The ‘post-truth’ world”

• Jared Cohen (USA), Founder and CEO, Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc. Cohen’s Jigsaw is using AI to sort through mountains of internet comments and delete them before they have a chance to offend the perpetually offended. The New York Times uses Jigsaw to sanitize their comments. “I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight,” says Jigsaw founder and president Jared Cohen. “To do everything we can to level the playing field.” As reported by Wired, Conversation AI is another one of their tools, protecting “some of the web’s most repressed voices” by shutting others up. It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so nefarious: Jigsaw’s mission is at once to stop censorship while at the same time effortlessly enabling it.

“The future of work”

• Benjamin Pring (USA), Co-Founder and Managing Director, Center for the Future of Work. He’s the author of What To Do When Machines Do Everything: How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data (2017); Bilderberg desperately want to get a handle on this issue.

“Artificial intelligence”

• Demis Hassabis (GBR), Co-Founder and CEO, DeepMind
• Tim Hwang (USA), Director, Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative
• Danica Kragic (SWE), Professor, School of Computer Science and Communication, KTH

“Quantum computing”

• Hartmut Neven (USA), Director of Engineering, Google Inc.

As is obvious by now, it’s no longer a trend. Supertech is as entrenched within Bilderberg as banking, investment, military, government and manufacturing was for decades. And after Eric Schmidt became a Steering Committee member in 2015, he can’t help himself but to invite more and more Google employees every year. Demis Hassabis, in particular, is a regular; soon enough he’ll be a Steering Committee member as well, joining the ranks of Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and Craig Mundie. AI, Neural Networks, Quantum Computing, Cyberwarfare, Genetic Engineering, Big Data, Surveillance—Bilderberg are in on it. Silicon Valley demigods rub shoulders with Rockefeller, Kissinger and minions, Goldman Sachs, Lazard, IMF, EU technocrats, current and former spooks, implementing a Big Brother techno dystopia.