What started out as an attempt to create a tool which would help people, AI has become a villain in our lives, posing a major threat to human existence. It has become an existential threat to humans overall. The likes of which we are only now beginning to understand.
We don ‘t have to joke about letting the “genie” out of the bottle. Rather we have uncorked a monster which is now capable of controlling us, if not dominating all of mankind in many serious ways.
Proponents will argue that a machine is not capable of doing that, per se, but its not the machine you have to worry about just yet. It’s the people who control those machines, who exercise dominion and authority over those machines, that you must worry about.
I remember early in high school that my social studies teacher once posed the question “Is an “airplane” good or evil? The correct answer is neither or both. If they are used to drop bombs to kill people, the answer is obvious. If it’s used to deliver medicines or medical supplies, well that’s something else. The overriding issue is that of use. So no, AI itself, as software, as algorithms, as computer chips, circuitry etc. is not evil per se. But what AI can be programmed to do, well that’s something else.
So, we humans are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand we want or like what AI can do for us to make life easier, or have things go faster in helping us. On the other hand, we’re scared out of our wits, thinking about what AI can be used for to control or even dominate us. This is getting scary for real. People need to wake up. The “utopian” world that AI companies like to paint, has become ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’.
So, when we engage in using this new phenomenon called the “chat-bot” we need to be considerably more aware. An LLM or large language model platform can imitate a human- like interaction. It can make one believe that you are, as the user, interacting with another person. You’re not of course, but people get caught up in the interaction, forgetting who or more importantly what they are dealing with. It can get confusing.
When you interact with one of these chat-bots on the web, and you start interacting with it in some way where you are “volunteering” information about yourself, and that can be any kind of information, the AI company, whose chat-bot you’re using, is gathering information about YOU. The information then becomes a saleable commodity to someone else. Your preferences, your favorite color, your interests, your hobbies, your tastes in food, your favorite foods, your favorite drink, alcoholic or otherwise, all that information can become valuable to a marketer somewhere. So not only is that AI platform gathering information about you specifically, or as you in some defined larger body. That group could be a particular sex, an age group, an income group, a geographic group and so on. They love to break out the information later, as they have gathered it. Somebody is going to want to have that type of information about some specific area or even about you personally. Marketing interests or some company will pay an AI company very handsomely to get that data. That’s the game.
And all the while, while you were filling out some on-line form to get what you wanted or needed or that you wanted access to some kind of service being offered, you were giving up information about yourself for somebody else’s benefit. Nice huh? But it gets worse than that. When you search or use a search engine, ask about a particular matter, etc. it shows somebody that not only do you have an interest in something or in a given subject area. Somebody will be interested in accessing that data. How do you think that junk mail can get generated or how ads on the internet get directed to you? Those ads do not appear to you by accident.
I can still remember when David Letterman was still active on television that he had a comic segment called “Stupid Human Tricks.” Well friend, they can make monkey out of you, and you don’t even realize it. As a race, if nothing else, humans are gullible.
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