( Twenty minute read)

ADVANCING MORE RAPIDLY THAN ANY OTHER INNOVATION IN OUR HISTORY THE PROBLEMS WITH TECHOLOGY ARE BECOMING CLEARER BY THE DAY.  

The sociological/psychological fallout of AI is not decades away: right here, right now, we are watching in slow-motion the major meltdown of our shared sense of reality.

The discovery that AI can treat language as probability, and from there on, most anything as a “language” of sorts:

DNA sequences, yep, robotics and motoric learning, yes actually, music, definitively, generation and recognition of images and sounds, yes, hacking and cryptography, also yes, persuasion, yes of course…

It is that’s term or concept of Augmented Intelligence which implies a replacement of human intelligence that is becoming less threatening than the admittedly ominous-sounding ‘artificial intelligence’.  It will be increasingly hard to know what is real and what is not. It will be hard to resist manipulation and persuasion. It will be hard to know where we begin and the agency of the machine ends.

It will be increasingly hard not to lose our minds as our shared sense of self and reality (our sociality, which we rely upon for our sanity) fractures. The scale and effect of this fact, in its sociological and psychological ramifications (not to mention economic and political ones) is in itself a rollercoaster ride of Nietzschean proportions.

Even if we remain agnostic about Nick Bostrom’s existential risk superintelligence general AI, we can be fairly certain that we have a sociological moment of impact starting more or less yesterday.

There’s just no way new capacities of this magnitude come about with this kind of speed, and then everything just goes back to normal. For all we know, normal might never happen again.

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By definition, the word symbiosis is a term commonly used in biology to describe the relationship between two different organisms that live together in close association, and both partners benefit from the relationship.

TO A CERTAIN EXTENT THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE APPLICATION OF TECHNOLOGY TO OUR LIVES, AS MANY PROBLEMS SIMPLY CANNOT BE FROMULATED OR RESOLVED WITHOUT THE HELP OF COMPUTERS.

AN OTHER WORDS:

The computers should be acting as a “serving agent,” providing the human with the information they needed to make informed decisions.

Recognized that the human mind have limitations, such as limited memory capacity and the inability to perform complex calculations quickly. Computers, on the other hand, have almost unlimited memory capacity and perform calculations at incredible speeds. By working together, humans and computers could overcome each other’s limitations and achieve a level of productivity that was not possible before.

Computers are now responsible for performing complex computations and storing vast amounts of information, while humans are be removed from making judgements and decisions based on the information provided by the computer.

One of the main objectives with the growing scale and complexity of information processing tasks of human-computer symbiosis is to bring the computer effectively into the formative parts of technical problems.

‘The question is not ‘What is the answer?’ The question is ‘What is the question?

THAT QUESTION BECOMES.   CAN WE LIVE DIGTILIZED LIVES?

Nowadays, many intelligent systems work in a symbiotic relationship with humans.

For example,

Every time we rate a movie on Netflix, we are helping artificial intelligence understand our behaviour and in the future recommend movies based on our preferences.

In the financial industry, computers are widely used to process large amounts of data in real-time, identify trading patterns, and make accurate predictions. Financial analysts rely on computational analysis to buy and sell stocks or make risky financial moves.

The market place, and its movements, which affect global economies are run by Algorithms for profit.

In the e-commerce sites we use, AI can make inferences and anticipate some tasks based on our shopping lists and recommend products. This is also a symbiotic and collaborative relationship.

Grammarly is another example of how the symbiosis between humans and computers is being utilized in the writing field. Through its AI technology, the tool is capable of suggesting real-time grammatical and spelling corrections, and the user’s experience when using it can contribute to the evolution of their ability to improve their vocabulary, as the tool offers suggestions for synonyms and more suitable word choices.

There are hundreds of other examples, but in order to build computational systems that adapt to human needs, we also need to understand how these intelligent systems work and execute tasks, and this is increasingly becoming impossible with machine learning.

Looking at the current context, the human-computer symbiosis becomes increasingly important as interactions between humans and machines become more frequent and complex, enabling users to interact with technology in a natural way.

As our interaction with intelligent systems increases every day, the principles of human-computer symbiosis are also central to living a life.

Defining the term “Augmented Intelligence” can be quite challenging since there are many definitions.

Different researchers and practitioners tend to define it in their own unique way.

I define it as the erosion of our ability to reason for ourselves.

AI-enabled frontier technologies are helping to save lives, diagnose diseases and extend life expectancy. In education, virtual learning environments and distance learning have opened up programmes to students who would otherwise be excluded. Public services are also becoming more accessible and accountable through blockchain-powered systems, and less bureaucratically burdensome as a result of AI assistance. Big data can also support more responsive and accurate policies and programmes.

The use of algorithms can replicate and even amplify human and systemic bias where they function on the basis of data which is not adequately diverse. Lack of diversity in the technology sector can mean that this challenge is not adequately addressed.

Today, digital technologies such as data pooling and AI are used to track and diagnose issues in agriculture, health, and the environment, or to perform daily tasks such as navigating traffic or paying a bill.

They can be used to defend and exercise human rights – but they can also be used to violate them, for example, by monitoring our movements, purchases, conversations and behaviours. Governments and businesses increasingly have the tools to mine and exploit data for financial and other purposes.

Data-powered technology has the potential to empower individuals, improve human welfare, and promote universal rights, depending on the type of protections put in place.

Social media connects almost half of the entire global population.

It enables people to make their voices heard and to talk to people across the world in real time. However, it can also reinforce prejudices and sow discord, by giving hate speech and misinformation a platform, or by amplifying echo chambers.

How to manage these developments is the subject of much discussion – nationally and internationally – at a time when geopolitical tensions are on the rise. This war of information is becoming so important that it can influence democracy and the opinion of people before the vote in an election for instance.

We’re now on the verge, as a society, of appropriately recognizing the need to respect privacy in our Web 2.0 world.

In a world where everyone has an opinion and, more importantly, where everyone has the ability, if they choose, to share it with the rest of the world, one person’s hate speech can sometimes be another’s right to free speech.

Social media companies need to take “more responsibility” for what is on their platforms. There has to be a reckoning for what social media is making available [online].

IRELAND IS THE FIRST COUNTRY TO ADDRESS THE ABOVE.

As things stand in Ireland, hate speech is defined as any communication in public intended or likely to be threatening or abusive, and likely to stir up hatred against a person due to their race, colour, nationality, religion, ethnicity, Traveller origins, and/or sexual orientation. The proposed law will also make it an offence to deny or trivialise genocide. It will define a hate crime as any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim, or any other person, to have been motivated by prejudice.

The new legislation will criminalise any intentional or reckless communication or behaviour that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or persons because they are associated with a protected characteristic. The penalty for this offence will be up to five years’ imprisonment.

The provisions of the new legislation have been crafted to ensure that they will capture hate speech in an online context.

THIS IS THE FIRST SMALL STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION TO COMBAT UNREGULATED TECHNOLOGY.

For most of the past decade, public concerns about digital technology have focused on the potential abuse of personal data.

This debate is NOW entering a new phase.

As companies increasingly embed artificial intelligence in their products, services, processes, and decision-making, attention is shifting to how data is used by the software—particularly by complex, evolving algorithms that might diagnose a cancer, drive a car, or approve a loan.

The problem crops up in many other guises:

For instance, in ubiquitous online advertisement algorithms, which may target viewers by race, religion, or gender.

Software used by leading hospitals exhibit significant racial bias to prioritize recipients of kidney transplants discriminated against Black patients.

In dealing with biased outcomes, regulators have mostly fallen back on standard antidiscrimination legislation.

That’s workable as long as there are people who can be held responsible for problematic decisions. But with AI increasingly in the mix, individual accountability is undermined.

Some algorithms make or affect decisions with direct and important consequences on people’s lives.

They diagnose medical conditions, for instance, screen candidates for jobs, approve home loans, or recommend jail sentences. In such circumstances it may be wise to avoid using AI or at least subordinate it to human judgment. Using AI could therefore increase human decision-makers’ accountability, which might make people likely to defer to the algorithms more often than they should.

The degree of trust in AI varies with the kind of decisions it’s used for. When a task is perceived as relatively mechanical and bounded—think optimizing a timetable or analysing images—software is regarded as at least as trustworthy as humans.

But when decisions are thought to be subjective or the variables change (as in legal sentencing, where offenders’ extenuating circumstances may differ), human judgment is trusted more, in part because of people’s capacity for empathy. This suggests that companies need to communicate very carefully about the specific nature and scope of decisions they’re applying AI to and why it’s preferable to human judgment in those situations. For example, in machine diagnoses of medical scans, people can easily accept the advantage that software trained on billions of well-defined data points has over humans, who can process only a few thousand.

On the other hand, applying AI to make a diagnosis regarding mental health, where factors may be behavioural, hard to define, and case-specific, would probably be inappropriate. It’s difficult for people to accept that machines can process highly contextual situations. And even when the critical variables have been accurately identified, the way they differ across populations often isn’t fully understood—which brings us to the next factor.

An algorithm may not be fair across all geographies and markets.

Just like human judgment, AI isn’t infallible. Algorithms will inevitably make some unfair—or even unsafe—decisions.

The right…to obtain an explanation of the decision reached” by algorithms, MUST BE ENSHRINNED IN LAW.

But what does it mean to get an explanation for automated decisions, for which our knowledge of cause and effect is often incomplete?

Should we require—and can we even expect—AI to explain its decisions?

However, most people lack the advanced skills in mathematics or computer science needed to understand, let alone determine whether the relationships specified in it are appropriate. And in the case of machine learning—where AI software creates algorithms to describe apparent relationships between variables in the training data—flaws or biases in that data, not the algorithm, may be the ultimate cause of any problem.

If AI starts to listen to us and adapt to our every move, we can only “win” by mirroring it, and being equally attentive to it, even to the point of treating this wild piece of silicon clockwork as though it were alive.

Because, in the end, when we don’t know where we begin and AI ends, then AI is essentially as alive as anything.

AI can only exist because it feeds on human civilization and knowledge coded into text and other digestible data — but humans are in turn subjected to the power of AI, and thus deeply reshaped by it, because AI coordinates more data than we can and knows, well, us. The AI soon knows us better than we can know it, or even know ourselves.

If we seek relational proportionality and resonance across the AI-humanity axis, we must of course also feed this intra-action with socially proportional perspectives, i.e. with social justice.

Our very civilizational sanity and survival depend upon balancing the informational diet of the AI, so that it can itself produce emergent patterns that resonate through and across societies… But the Internet is roughly as skewed and distorted as the power relations of global humanity at large.

It acts on the whole with great efficiency and speed, but it cannot speak for the whole.

What you can expect is increasing dissonance, a spiralling insanity, as the “human-AI-AI-human intra-action” system disconnects from the rest of reality, from the larger scheme that contains the actual multiplicity of the world’s perspectives.

If we don’t want to spiral into virtual madness with real social consequences, we need to balance out the reality projected into the digital realm: the encoded information. It mean’s that AI itself must be used to more proportionally and correctly represent the lives, experiences, and embodied — or intellectual — knowledge of the world.

In short, if we apply the AI to balancing out human-perspectives-as-projected-onto-the-web-as-data, not only can we get a more just and sane society; we can also help to retain an AI that remains on the sane and just side in the first place.

Or, yet more succinctly: A sane AI is also a social justice AI, but one that dodges the traps of present-day social justice and intersectionality discourses.

Let me underscore: If we fail to do this, we instead unleash AI powers that widen social gaps and fracture knowledge systems into different continents where people become entirely unable to comprehend one another, leading to social and psychological decay.

If we want a world that is not driven by digitalization ,THE TIME IS NOW TO DO SOME THING ABOUT IT.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

( Twenty minute read)

It would be fair to say that up to now Casinos Capitalism has had an adverse and positive history, because of its understanding of the science of reward and reinforcement, but beneath this past history, our current problems lie.

It, along with colonialism, the brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples created the world of consumerism.

(The concept of colonialism is closely linked to that of imperialism, which is the policy or ethos of using power and influence to control another nation or people that underlies colonialism.)

The result is the planet was divided into a world of North and the South.

The North consumerism and the South cheap slave production to serve the North.

A perpetual Growth system of consumption for products that are not essential to life.

Over centuries and more so in recent decades this is the reason we see inequality growing, with the environment on the verge of collapse due to the exploration of natural resources to fuel profits at all costs – GDP before the people.

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One only has to look at the attempts to turn our economic system into green sustainability production and one see, that we now have a market place claiming,  buy this or that because its Bio/ Save energy.

Most of these items still have a built in replacement in order to ensure market growth.  –  Vehicles, Electrical Items, Smartphone, TVs, the list is endless, all fuelled by an advertising industry promoting their use behind unaccountable technology of algorithms the new looming menace.

Profit seeking  Algorithms hidden beneath the surface of the web.

They are the invisible nonhuman workforce that powers the web—and they’re foreshadows the true future of world.

There are no labour laws to govern this kind of work. 

The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems.

Regulatory efforts so far focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labour practices are dim to the affects on society as a whole. While many of us hear about the latest and greatest breakthrough in AI technology, what we hear less about is its environmental impact .

In fact, much of AI’s recent progress has required ever-increasing amounts of data and computing power. And this all comes at a cost — while currently cloud computing represents roughly 0.5% of the world’s energy consumption, that percentage is projected to grow beyond 2% in the coming years .

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are in a phase of rapid development, and are being adopted widely.

While the concept of artificial intelligence has existed for over sixty years, real-world applications have only accelerated in the last decade due to three concurrent developments: Better algorithms, Increases in networked computing power and the tech
industry’s ability to capture and store massive amounts of data.

Data discrimination is a real social problem.

As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.

We need when we using AI to combat online problems and urging policymakers to exercise “great caution” about relying on it as a policy solution.

For Example:

Facebook’s algorithm amplified misinformation” and “it consistently chose to maximize its growth rather than implement safeguards on its platforms.

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We all know Climate Change is the last thing that the world now needs, but there is a deeper crisis:

A lack of imagination.

The global response to the pandemic was in a sense a testing ground for the international community’s capacity to deal with the biggest and most complex international challenge of all – climate change.

While we’re at it, we should think about the question of scale, not just at global and national levels but at community levels.

WHAT’S IS NEEDED IS A REDUCTION IN PRODUCTIVITY OF NON ESSENTIALS ITEMS.

MORE OF AN EMBRACMENT OF PROGRAMS THAT ARE FOCUSED ON TURNING IDEAS AND THEIR IMPACT.ON LOCAL COMMUNITIES.

Let’s not beat around the bush — we all want something from someone. And while the importance of networking and asking for help is undeniable, why aren’t we taking a more human approach to the process?

We need transformation not just in our economies but across the whole of our societies – from the economy and our politics, to our family structures and media and communications systems – as all these social spheres are interlinked and all are fundamental to our well-being. We need to transform the structures of our societies so that changes which put the brakes on climate disaster become, not just verbal ambitions but real actions.

With 57% of people worldwide say  “Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world, we all know by our nature we are selfish and greedy, that we have insatiable needs.

THE TIME HAS COME FOR LOCAL COLLECTIVE SOCIALISM.

A sort of confederalism where small-scale communities manage their own provisioning systems, working in partnership with other communities where necessary. Social norms are when you help a friend without expecting payment. Market norms are when you base your actions on how much money people will pay or cost you. When people act on social norms — that is, when they do things because they want to.

In short: people are much more likely to go above and beyond for tasks that they’re emotionally (rather than financially) invested in.

With this insight in mind, consider tapping into social norms to create situations where both parties walk away with more value than they anticipated. How can you use value exchanges to get what you want, give others what they want, and nurture a relationship in the process?

This doesn’t mean replacing capitalism with state socialism. It means diversified ‘ecologies of ownership’, where co-operatives and community owned enterprises sit beside publicly owned initiatives.

For example.

Councils should be able to make available non repayable grants to set up village gardens, to produce for their community’s.

It doesn’t have to be huge. It can be as simple. Lead with value: Start the interaction by offering something that’s need.

Every village has retired gardening people, why not pay four or five of them to run a garden/ polytunnel/garden shop.

Another example.

Why not create combination of local energy co-operatives and regional public energy companies in the framework of a cap on energy prices and a publicly owned national grid – all based on renewable energy.

( The average home in the UK would need around 9.2m² of solar panels to satisfy its yearly electricity demands, estimated at 2,900kWh, costing an estimated £2,588.  A five-bedroom house will usually need 14 panels. The return on a solar panel takes between 10 to 25 years, depending on the cost of the installation, the power produced, the amount resold and where you live.

If you divide your annual electricity usage by 265, you’ll end up with roughly the right number of solar panels for your home .Most countries in Europe would be able to satisfy their electricity needs with less than 1% of their total land area being devoted to solar power.

The world would need around 85,894km² of solar panels.

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While we may think of capitalism more as the absence of the state in favour of the market, in reality, the domination of the market is impossible without a domineering state to impose it.

The state institutionalised hierarchy, and with capitalism, state domination and bureaucracy reached into every corner of society, resources, or what we call the ‘means of life’ should not be owned by anyone, they form a commons based on the principle of ‘usufruct’ – everyone is free to use them as long as they do not damage or deplete them.

The principle of the ‘irreducible minimum’ means that everybody is entitled to the means of life no matter what they contribute – an even more generous maxim than Marx’ famous ‘from each according to his [sic] ability to each according to his needs!’

The sentiments behind these slogans are not confined to the ash heaps of history, rather, many of the policies from the political left today fit under this simple slogan.

“From each according to ability” is what underlies a concern for the common good and a conception of society as a cooperative venture, with mandatory public service as a matching policy proposal. Overall, the phrase from each according to his abilities is a phrase associated with socialist and communist ethics, but with the arrival of AI it is transferring people into digitalized citizens, with ownership of natural resources such as fresh water, fresh air becoming the exclusive ownership of profit seeking algorithms.

Why is this happing?

Because, most of our institutions set up after world War 11 are not working.

Because,  western capitalism is not irretrievably bound to fail; but it does need to be rethought like the return of public ownership.

The key principle in all this is removing profit from a significant portion of economic activity, and bringing democracy in.

Indeed, if you judge by measures such as inequality and environmental damage, “the performance of Western Capitalism in recent decades has been deeply problematic..

Perhaps most significantly, in many developed nations late-20th Century capitalism has contributed to a significant gap between the wealth of the richest and poorest people. The richest billionaires in the word have amassed staggering fortunes.

So, will capitalism as we know it continue in its current form – or might it have another future ahead?

The inequality gap may matter more than some politicians and corporate leaders would like to believe.

Why?

Because, to build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.

Because, While industrial capitalism exploited and controlled nature with devastating consequences, surveillance capitalism exploits and controls human nature with a totalitarian order as the endpoint of the development. This leaves surveillance capitalism as an exceptionally useful tool for businesses, but also an invasion of privacy to users who do not want their private experience to be owned by a company.

Because, as a result of rising inequality, the ever-rising cost of living, people have less trust in institutions.

Because, economies will with AI, become completely divorced from the demands of people, who seek jobs, affordable housing, education, healthcare and a clean environment.

Because, there is ample evidence that social and environmental impacts are relevant and need to be incorporated into development models.

Because, the desire to earn profits from business activity, is the driving force of capitalism. It’ flaws as with any system are numerous, but the one that stands out is the trickle down aspiration.

Because, it is obvious that these issues must also be considered within the social contract underpinning capitalism, so that it is more inclusive, holistic and integrated with basic human values.

Because, capitalist growth is driven by profit expectations, it fluctuates with the changes in technological, climate change, or social opportunities for capital accumulation. It is held accountable only to the test of profitability.

Because, government must stop ignoring the needs of ordinary citizens and companies must do more than deliver profits to their shareholders.

Because, if we don’t seize this opportunity to build back better – to reset and reinvent rather than ‘return to normal’ – systemic risks and vulnerabilities will continue to accumulate, making future shocks both more likely and more dangerous.

Because, the shift toward greater individual liberty changed the social contract.

Because, technology will have an important role to play, but the principle has to be that the technologies we develop will enhance rather than harm our relationship with nature. What is certain is that technology won’t save us while the current drivers of the economy – capital accumulation and the profit motive – remain in place. Unfortunately as people increasingly asserted their right to individual liberty, they are being exploited by AI.

While one response to the downsides of capitalism in its current form is for nations to take a defensive posture, seeking to protect themselves by minimising external ties, protectionism is short-sighted, particularly when it comes to trade, – Brexit.

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Will capitalism as we know it evolve into something new?

With  artificial intelligence capitalism, lifting a substantive number of people out of absolute poverty people expected less from governing authorities, in exchange for greater civil liberties, including individual, political and economic freedom. But at the same time, critics argue that its tenets of lowering taxes and deregulating business has done little to support political investment in public services.

This newer strain of capitalism has NOT led to increased economic growth worldwide.

Previously, many resources were provided by those in power (land, food and protection) in exchange for significant contributions from citizens (for instance, from slave labour to hard labour with little pay, high taxes and unquestioning loyalty).

The economic system of Capitalist is characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

Capitalism has fuelled the industrial, technological and green revolutions, reshaped the natural world and transformed the role of the state in relation to society.

However, the story is not universally positive.

In recent years, capitalism’s shortcomings have become ever-more apparent. COVID-19 has exposed the fragility and societally negative outcomes of contemporary capitalist economies. The virus has highlighted many vulnerabilities – within businesses, supply chains, economies, health systems and political institutions – that will need to be addressed in the post-crisis world.

Functionally, capitalism instead of planning economic decisions through centralized political methods, as with socialism or feudalism, economic planning under capitalism occurs via decentralized, competitive, and voluntary decisions.

The profit motive, an indispensable, if regrettable, by product of capitalism, is being exposed daily, with social media, climate change, the environmental dangers of the free market and profit seeking algorithms.

Capital is wealth—that is, money and goods—that’s used to produce more wealth with underpaid work for profits.

Governments and regulators must intervene to ensure the costs of environmental and social damage are internalized by the companies responsible:

Profits cannot come at the expense of long-term societal resilience.

The green recovery is vital if we are to create more resilient economies and a world in which business can thrive, not just now but long into the future.

Reach out to people with a genuine intention to connect and add value to their lives, and you’ll see how much more you’ll be able to get from the interaction than if you just treated it like a transaction.

What can be done to change the inequality that is the main feature of capitalism?

Just-in-time” may be superseded by “just-in-case” as the mantra of procurement. 

The case for ‘green’ stimulus measures is clear: they are likely to deliver more jobs and higher (equitable) growth in the short-term, while reducing longer-term risks linked to climate change and biodiversity loss – crises that, if unaddressed, will cause a level of disruption to our economies and societies orders of magnitude greater than COVID-19.

Now, more than ever, integrating climate goals into business strategy will be a vital driver of long-term success.

Ultimately, it is worth remembering that citizens in a capitalist, liberal democracy are not powerless.

So it follows that we might be similarly blind to what capitalism could look like in another two centuries. However, that does not mean we should not ask how it might evolve into something better in the nearer term.

The future of capitalism and our planet depend on it.

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To destroy democratic capitalism and replace it with authoritarian socialism is not the solution.

Communism, socialism, capitalism, and democracy are all among our top all-time lookups, and user comments suggest that this is because they are complex, abstract terms often used in opaque ways. They’re frequently compared and contrasted, with communism sometimes equated with socialism, and democracy and capitalism frequently linked.

I believe that  beneath the political, and driving it, is a justified, if poorly articulated differences.

Communism referred to an economic and political theory that advocated the elimination of private property and the common sharing of all resources among a group of people

Revolutionary socialism, which advocates a proletariat overthrow of capitalist structures within a society; societal and communal ownership and governance of the means of production; and the eventual establishment of a classless society.

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Why should our life chances be so far determined by the accident of where we are born?

Why would we want to live in societies that benefit some people in some places at the expense of other people in other places?

The good societies that we build now, during the ‘great pause’, need to work for everyone in the world.

There’s a tension when we’re thinking about scale – when formulating alternatives, should we be thinking global or local? The universal or particular?

Our current capitalist economy is certainly global – there probably isn’t a person in the world whose life isn’t integrated into it somehow, though in different ways in different places. So it makes sense to start there.

We know the dangers involved with huge corporations sucking up data on the most intimate aspects of our lives – how they collaborate with governments to enable wholesale spying, crackdowns on democratic freedoms, and dystopian predictive policing and facial recognition practices; how voters are manipulated during elections; how discrimination is built into algorithms; how the data-based business model encourages fake news, polarisation and hate; and how these companies resolutely dodge tax.

The data frenzy is also wreaking havoc on the environment – a 2015 report found that data centres are responsible for about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, putting them on par with the aviation industry. And it’s exacerbating global inequality.

It is China and the US who are set to reap the biggest rewards from AI, while Africa and Latin America will see the lowest gains. It is unlikely that the profits accrued to multinationals based in the US or China from data mined in lower-income countries will ‘trickle down’ to those supplying that data.

The concept of cultural imperialism has been around for decades. Now we can also speak of data imperialism. Again, it is the profit motive that’s at the bottom of all this.

In our attempts to understand the new from the old and the unknown from the known, we risk either stripping away too much truth or adding too much falsehood so that our inquiries inevitably become futile.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gail.com.