Smoke, Mirrors, and the Great Puppeteer
In the late 20th century, as the world slowly began to turn online, consolidating information, power, and resources into the unbelievably powerful Pandora’s box of the internet, companies began to find a new way to create riches. Their most recent money machine: you. The most incredible part of the internet is both its greatest strength and its greatest shortcoming. This being the fact that all of the internets are both open-source and free. On the upside, it has made room for incredible tools, and public access to knowledge and education never before seen by any generation. People today can speak to someone thousands of miles away as if they stood next to each other, all fulled on this open-source platform. But nothing in this world is truly free, so when there is no upfront cost, you will often pay without ever even knowing it. This unseen unheard payment comes in the form of your data. What sites you visit, for how long, if you buy something, where it’s shipped, how much, reviews, posts, likes, comments, retweets, and subscriptions. All seem to be meaningless tasks performed without a second thought but are bottled and sold as the world’s newest precious resource.
As of right now, the Internet at large is a great unknowable sand storm, constantly moving, changing, and evolving. But in a few years, when the dust begins to settle, it is of extreme importance to the entire world to make sure it’s not the billion-dollar corporations who sit on top with a monopoly on every internet user’s entire life.
This issue is all-encompassing, and if you’ve ever been on the internet, it has affected you. Whether it be falling down a YouTube rabbit hole, or catching up with your friends on Facebook, your data has been seen, collected, organized, and used to understand exactly who you are, what you want, and what they can make you want.
The way this construction of a clone in the user’s image is done is by taking all this data which the user unknowingly gives to the company, and forcing an AI to take this data, attempt to recognize patterns in it, then give out predictions made on these patterns. And with every passing day, these systems become more accurate and advanced in both what they can tell about you, and what they can figure out.
As of right now, we stand at a dangerous crossroads, where if drastic action isn’t taken soon, we may be set on an irreversible course for the rest of the human race. In my next blog post, I will take a deeper dive into the largest offenders, those in government who are taking action against this crisis, and what you as an individual can do to help.
George Wintriss is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.
