I am not sure about you, but there is a big problem that we aren’t addressing more frequently then we should be. There is a major problem with the US’s greed. We can’t quite kick this sense of wanting everything we can get our hands on rather than asking if the means of getting them are not only morally right, but also to stop and think if this will impact more than just the person that owns the company. This is to all set up my point of why I think that the way we are going in terms of AI and robotics, can potentially ruin the lives of many. Now I know what you’re thinking, “How could the improvement of AI possibly affecting how I live my life in the future in the slightest?” AI is a very complex thing to think/talk about, so I don’t blame people for not knowing how AI is already affecting their lives. Even just listening to music there is an AI working in the background trying new things like seeing if you skip a certain song multiple times or if there are songs that can be added to your playlist. For example, in Spotify they do this exact thing. They analyze what you are listening to, how long and if you skip that song.
(https://towardsdatascience.com/uncovering-how-the-spotify-algorithm-works-4d3c021ebc0)
But this is pretty tame so let’s move onto the one that everyone likes to argue about, marketing AI. There is a lot of talk about this type of AI for a couple of reasons. One reason being that it is considered pretty scummy to some degree. Your data is being kept somewhere and used against you to target adverts and things that the website thinks that you’d like. The other reason is because not only are these websites using your data against you, but they are also selling your data to other sites in order to keep those ads coming. What do I mean by this, well there is a certain amount of data is usually assumed to be collected while using a browser, but as an example, google goes way too far.
In this graphic, it shows what is collected from various browsers and as you can see, google is taking up to 63.5% of all data that you are searching including your location. What browser needs to know that nearly 24/7.
To some people still, this seems like it isn’t the worst possible thing that could happen to them, it could even make their life a little easier. Well, I want to paint a picture for you of what the future could look 30, 20, maybe even 10 years into the future. In this future, recommendation algorithms have been upgraded dramatically to what we have now and is only amplified by new technologies. A constant flow of information and advertisement is rampant. This is the point that I am trying to get to. With the increase of advertisement there will be less and less choice in our life and everything will be forcefully given to us even if we don’t want it. In an interview with a co-owner of a tech company that works with AI said, “‘Broadly speaking, we tend to find that as soon as people are using [technology] like this in a context where it helps them get things done faster, they adjust to that convenience very quickly,’ she says. ‘What we see is that it is a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ with AI. But it will happen bit by bit. A lot of the things we worry about will just gently recede as we get used to being better humans’” (Quoirin). Companies are more worried about what can AI be rather than asking what AI change about our every life will. This is possible future is essentially stripping free will from the internet, where we all flee to seek free will. Now let me explain that last phrase. We all seek to be our own person on the internet to express our creative or more personal side, but this is essentially stripping us of our free will by putting what an AI thinks we want to see based off of what we have looked at before. We won’t get to “explore” the internet anymore looking for new things since we are just going to be constantly things that a corporations thinks we want to see so they can monetize us.
Something to also keep in mind when thinking about the future of AI is the acronym itself. AI (artificial intelligence) is constantly learning from new trials it undergoes and it will eventually learn specific trends and search the internet to find more and more specific topics to send to the consumer. The way these engines works are just taking what you look at which are categorized which allows it to show you more things from those categories. As it is currently, these categories are pretty broad for the most part unless they were generated by the community rather than the creators making them, but as we get further on with AI, it can be seen that the AI will make its own categories according to trends and analysis of trends on the given sites. This isn’t something that is outright thought about when it comes to these kinds of topics, but when you start to put it into the grander scheme of things, you start to realize how much this can affect our lives.
Now as the title describes, this is all the machination of a capitalistic society of which we are built upon. Most of the reasons why it would get to this point where companies have too much control where the government needs to step in but at this point these big companies won’t need to listen because they already have too much control over all markets and shares that if they wanted to, then they can crumble the entire stock market or create another depression. I genuinely fear of what these big companies will do if we allow them to grow at the rate they are if they aren’t moderated or contained. Amazingly this hasn’t been addressed since this is already kind of being taken into action. Something called horizontal shareholding is monopolizing shares. As it says in this Harvard business review article “For example, there is substantial common ownership among U.S. airlines. Between 2013 and 2015, the seven shareholders who controlled 60% of United Airlines also controlled 28% of Delta, 27% of JetBlue, and 23% of Southwest. Together these airlines have over half of domestic market share. Theory and evidence suggest that horizontal shareholding harms competition, consumers, and the economy” (Greenspon). A larger percent of the stock market is being controlled by six individuals gives them too much control. Now this is an example of six companies owning this huge share but imagine this is one of our leading tech brands. They can easily take out the stock they want as easily as they can buy it.
Now this all seems very, very stressful and scary to think about but do not fret, there is ways to prevent some of this data collecting and smuggling. One way to prevent this if you are attached to the hip with google is to go to your privacy settings and not allowing to take any data. Another way to solve this if you aren’t too attached to google is to get rid of the browser and evacuate to a different one like Firefox or DuckDuckGo. The distant future isn’t too far from us if you think about it so if I were you I would make these preparations now rather than later.
