Living in the Age of AI

The creation of AI or artificial intelligence dates back to 1956 when classical philosophers attempted to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. Over time the creation of artificial intelligence has evolved and can now preform human like tasks (such as self driving cars) and makes it possible for machines to learn from experience. 

Some positives in the evolution of AI is that now computers are able to personalize everything to you. This means if you often search things about dogs, dog advertisements are now going to pop up when scrolling through websites and social media. A good example of this is how personalized our TikTok feeds are to us. TikTok personalizes your feed what you like to see so say if you are a republican, no videos that share democratic views pop up on your feed. 

Some negatives of the invention of AI is everything that you do produces data. We thought that we are users of social media but really social media uses us. We thought that we search google but really google searches us. This also creates the danger of identity theft since all of this information is kept on us.   Something I learned in the video that is most frightening to me is that Alexa now tracks if we are sad by the tone of our voice when we ask her a question. 

AI knows everything about us including what are interests are, if we are male or female, if we are gullible, if you are racist, etc. Though it can be helpful for the internet to know all these things to help personalize things to us, it is scary that this information can be found and kept. 

The bigger issue is most of us don't really care if AI is tracking us and keeping all this information on us. Although some care a lot and a citizen in California got a law passed that states that anyone can go to any company and ask what information have you gathered on me and the company has to tell you. They call this the right to know. They also created the law that on any website there has to be a checkbox that the user can click that says "do not sell my information." It also created a third party opt-out that after you check this "do not sell my information" box it tells all the websites that you browse on to not sell your information. 

This video opened my eyes on how evolutionary artificial intelligence really is, how we don't have any privacy, and informed me on how much us as citizens are tracked and how much information is kept on us.