AI: Splitting the Seams of Privacy

AI is the future. Beginning as a concept of science fiction as a way to create a better society often resulting in the AI going crazy and killing people. In reality AI is a tool just like a computer or a hammer. It is up to the individual using it to accomplish tasks and objectives. As stated in the video AI over the last few years has developed into a “driving force of Inequality”. In the video In the Age of AI The wealthy can utilize AI to prefer capital over labor with AI being able to accomplish many tasks making thousands of jobs obsolete. 

If the world continues to follow this path of automation the gap between the rich and the poor will only continue to grow leaving less and less room for growth among lower class individuals. AI un-evens the playing field between bigger and smaller companies, with large companies like Meta being capable of targeting what a client is interested in supplying it. The major thing about this that frightens me is the organizations shaping what you see does not have your best interest at mind but rather the idea of making money. 

The lack of privacy stands out as one of the largest detriments of artificial intelligence, through data mining and companies learning about you. In turn, according to Shoshana Zuboff “whenever we search or whenever we browse we leave behind digital traces of our information.” Google with this technology they could fine tune to predict what people want. By taking uncertainty out of the equation we give up a lot of our indepence to technology on the premise it was good for us even if that isn’t the intention of the company. 

The social contagion experiment where Facebook through online messaging attempted to discover if they could influence real world decisions. Goal was to get people to the polls in the 2010 election through the ”I voted” icon collectively getting 300,000 people to vote. They learned they could influence emotion and change real world behavior without them knowing. Products like Google Home or Alexa put AI inside the home to learn more about you and grow overtime. Personally, this is very frightening to me. This brings us back to what we see of AI in those science fiction movies like “2001 A Space Odyssey”. This leads to anyone with enough money can get this data and use it to sway opinion to wherever they want it to go. For example with enough effort a politician can utilize this data to win a presidential election by using the data of people to give them what they want.