Several companies like Google, Facebook and Spotify are using AI. I personally think we still have to understand why these companies use this kind of technology and who benefits from it. After reading several articles about how AI is helping to cure cancer, combat terrorism and solve many other problems. I want to show the other side of the medal of the usage of AI.
Facebook, for example, is currently using AI for several purposes. After successes such as facial recognition and DeepText (a text understanding engine), Facebook is currently developing a system which can generate recommended responses for Facebook messenger (Kaput, 2017). These great AI functions can save time for consumers and optimize their experiences. But on the other hand, Facebook uses AI to control the content you get to see, and they use this ability to keep your attention to their website (Higginbotham, 2016).
One of the things we have to keep in mind is that Facebook is a commercial organisation which has maximizing profits as the main goal. Facebook is making money by selling advertising space on their platform. The advertisers want people to see their advertisements and to click on them. Thus, Facebook wants people to spend as much time as possible on their website. To achieve this Facebook uses AI which generates exactly the content you want to see. As a result of this, you spent plenty of time at their website and they earn money by mostly wasting your time. Facebook is competing with others for people’s attention, YouTube for example.
The competition for people’s attention resulted in a new economic phenomenon; ‘the attention economy’. The attention economy treats human attention as a scarce commodity. This means many companies will compete for your attention. With this attention, companies try to persuade you to buy or do things they gain from. People like Tristan Harris –an entrepreneur who sold his company to Google- think that tech companies can almost design your life in the nearby future.
This made me (and people like Tristan Harris) think about the true purpose of technology. Because when I think about the purpose of technology I think we need technology to help us to do the things we want to do, but just in a better/easier way. In other words, technology needs to help us to achieve things and not slow us down or steer us in a direction we don’t want to go. So, for what kind of purposes would you use technology in your professional career?
Kaput, M. (2017, February 7). How Facebook uses artificial intelligence and what it means for marketers. Retrieved September 20, 2017 from: https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/how-facebook-uses-artificial-intelligence-and-what-it-means-for-marketers
Higginbotham, S. (2016, April 13). Inside Facebook’s biggest artificial intelligence project ever. Retrieved September 20, 2017 from: http://fortune.com/facebook-machine-learning/
This is a very interesting topic. Especially the way Facebook can filter certain post out of your news feed causes for attention. It is argued that Facebook can alter the outcome of an election by filtering certain posts away. This was heard a lot around the American elections of last year and I think this is a really dangerous development. By filtering posts, Facebook shows people what they want to see. Politically right-minded people see articles that agree with their ideas, but articles that voice a different opinion are filtered away. As a consequence, people get to see only one side of the story. According to certain people this is the reason Trump won the American elections. I don’t say this is true, but in my opinion the chance is real that it could happen. It is therefore good to talk about the ‘darker’ side of artificial intelligence, just to make people aware of the possible dangers of AI.
A.I. will be used more and more to capture and retain people’s attention on a product or a service thus increasing the profit of the corporation that uses it/owns it. I believe that we live in the most dynamic time in history. A.I. can bring things that were previously considered impossible. However, there are many things to be worried about in case of A.I. going rogue at a certain point in time. As the computing power gets exponentially higher, A.I. will have more and more resources and at certain point could mimmic the neural connections in the human brain. We are on the verge of something either incredible or terrifying and we can hope that the corporations (such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc.) are able to prevent A.I from going rogue.