Blog Post #10

 In the Age of AI

“Oh, you would be horrified if you knew how much we knew about you.” This was said to Alastair Mactaggart about the new surveillance businesses when talking to an engineer who worked for Google. After watching this video, this was the one thing that really stuck with me. Knowing someone’s entire business is about finding out as much as they can about you is frightening. Mactaggart’s explanation about how they can know your friends, your desires, and your thoughts, including your private thoughts, is true power, and that is the perfect way to put it into perspective, from privacy concerns to economic impacts. 

I was surprised to hear about larger companies buying smaller successful companies and attempting to replace their workers with machinery and other technologies. I understand both sides of this problem as it can make processes more efficient and will cost less. But in today’s day and age, employment has become rather tricky, and the loss of thousands of jobs like this could affect a severe amount of our population. 

Going back to privacy, I understand the pros and cons. Starting with the good, companies being able to understand what you want and what you like based on the data they have on you would be better to help those companies profit and sell to consumers. Even the police forces help find suspects and perpetrators of crime. But the bad is our loss of privacy. I myself would not want companies to know everything about me. It disrupts what our country was built on. Which is our First Amendment and our Fourth Amendment right. Considering that under the 14th amendment, a corporation is made up of people and, therefore, is treated as a person. Our data privacy and the First Amendment conflict because then the government would have to create restrictions that would be unconstitutional to speech. Due to this being from corporations and not the government, it cannot be unconstitutional. Which leads to the question of what can we do to protect our privacy? 

In this generation, technology has taken over everything. It is easy to find out everything about a person. We are usually told to use stronger passwords to have a “fake email” and not overshare on social media. But in reality, the information will be found from other companies buying the companies that you are using data. However, this data being sold and used by other companies can lead to more significant issues if there is a data leak or if it is given to a bad company. 

Overall, some parts that come with artificial intelligence and machine learning will be good and can lead to endless possibilities, but when is enough enough? How can we deter from the risks of a de-humanizing downside? The scariest part is we will not know until it’s too late.