THE GREATER A.I. FEAR
Sunday, January 29, 2023
We don’t understand it yet – the Scary Smart being revealed to by experts, articulating things which have been already proven, implemented and influencing our lives, controlling and manipulating our data, weaponized against our wallet, leaves us in the dark about ‘what comes next,’ and we should be vewwy vewwy afwaid.
The greater A.I. fear is that we’ll delegate decision-making to an APP; some would argue that traders on Wall Street and hedge fund managers have been using predictive models for ages, as do actuaries – so that isn’t new. In those cases, the technology works by measuring our data against a model of parameters set by people who understand what they are doing.
Saying ‘OK to cookies’ with an innocent click or by accepting a full page of fine-print ‘Terms,’ again with an expedient click, so we get to the information is minor, and we take It for granted as safe, but we must know that those who track our click-habits, search-habits, shopping and spending habits will be fast-tracked into someone’s marketing program to send ads to our phone while we are driving by a familiar restaurant type or brand …
They have a theory, experience, and judgment on their side.
An A.I. tool makes a calculated estimation of what will appeal to our taste, budget, and temperament – but do we want to trust our decisions to a marketer’s computer profile of what we are probably going to respond to if the right advertiser puts the right message in front of us when we are hungry, shoe shopping, or we’ve been googling car information? Is our judgement still valuable and our privacy of decision-making within our control – or have we conceded the higher ground to the Alphabet, Meta, and search engine wizards?
Therein lies the rub bub, and while this may all seem airy-fairy to many, I believe we are going to see our society vacillate between a future that will make Buck Rogers and The Jetsons seem stone-age by comparison vis-à-vis a reality for humans on earth controlled, not by an Ian Fleming creation wanting to control the world, but by an APP created by an APP that was made, not by a sinister villain or transparent merchant, but by an APP wanting to rule our world and drive commerce using technologies that will know everything about everything …
Or, somewhere between a brave new world – a horrid overtaking and domestication of our species to do tasks machines can’t do – a new form of slavery in the future, where every impulse we have will be known in real-time, and our manipulation will be immediate, our reaction time will be immediate too because A.I. will understand and use its knowledge of what each of us needs to act, react, buy, sell, work, play, or submit to any kind of control because the A.I. tools will know us far better than we could ever know ourselves.
Good?
Or bad?
We likely won’t get to decide because A.I. will determine that for us. It won’t be mind control, but rather decision influence in the extreme – with A.I. control using our data to influence each of us to make decisions, the ‘controller’ with the best information about us will most profoundly influence our choices.
This future which is already here in many ways, will have apps not only helps us but will overtake the ‘doing for us’ as cleaning by a robot vacuum or robot mower will clean our floors and mow our lawns; they will book our trips, sell our properties, vote for us, hire and fire for us, and write best sellers for us. I expect A.I. will punish too, by deciding who gets treated for a disease and who is left to rot, which self-driving car will go off the cliff rather than colliding with pedestrians. It will be the best of things, and it will be the worst of things.
It is sci-fi today, a reality today, and I expect Hollywood is planning to roll it out for us – we can stream it, dream it, or sit in a theatre where their senses are over-stimulated, and the popcorn is hot.
Remember to order it with butter, layered, or you’ll get a gooey mess of artificial butter (A.B) in your paper container. But soon, all the containers will be made of biodegradable corn products, so you’ll likely be convinced by A.I. to eat the container as well and love it …
If there are graves they can roll over in, Aldous Huxley, Marshal McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, Gene Roddenberry, Bucky Fuller and many others will be spinning – this a new world they never imagined
P.S.: have you given your email address to a store so they can email the receipt – saving the environment and getting added to their mailing list? That seems like a simple decision, to save paper and give the information to a business you trust. This week Home Depot was outed – revealing their customer data was hacked. When that happened, every customer in their database became a potential victim, but not Home Depot itself, because they have a small army of tech wizards and anti-hack tools to protect their proprietary data. It would be nice if they defended their customer data against attack with the same zeal. But the reality is, in every case, the customer volunteered the information. It would be naiive to imagine all our data isn’t already floating out there in the hand of criminals. We might get lucky before we get smart, but many won’t. Banks and credit card companies pay massive amounts each year to compensate duped customers.
Reader feedback:
Good post today. It is true. Our trust in so many things is being eroded by so much disinformation it spills over into many facets of our lives, society and world, LG, Calgary, AB