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*Spoiler alert: this article discusses the plot of “Free Guy”, a 2021 movie*

With movie theaters reopening, blockbuster hits such as Free Guy, starring Ryan Reynolds have been highly anticipated by fans. The movie follows Guy, a non-playable character in a videogame that follows the exact same routine each day. An NPC is a character whose actions are not directly controlled by the player, instead their actions and choices are based on a set of predetermined conditions. However, at some point Guy’s self-awareness is triggered and his actions are no longer solely dependent on these conditions. He can now make his own decisions, including some irrational ones. He essentially becomes a conscious piece of artificial intelligence (Pierce, 2021).

While the movie was received with great praise from fans, its technological accuracy might have been fairly cringeworthy to tech and game development professionals. At this point in time, technology has not yet reached a level in which artificially intelligent beings can be fully conscious and self-aware (Kelly, 2021).

The self-awareness of AI is called artificial consciousness. In recent years, more and more research has been done in this field (Chatila et al, 2018). SELFception is a project that involved three different robots in an experiment to see whether they could distinguish their own ‘bodies’ from others, which is a skill that humans develop when they are around the age of two. Being able to make this distinction is a sign of self-awareness (Wild, 2020).

The growing interest in artificial consciousness is a very interesting phenomenon, as it seems we have come full circle. Artificial intelligence was initially partially developed to remove human error and irrationality. Now, many years later we find ourselves wanting that these artificially intelligent beings become more human-like. The possibility of this happening, however, is still very far away in time. Simply because we do not know enough about human creativity, consciousness and emotions to be able to copy with actual meaning. It is interesting to think about the fact that human emotion and irrationality is something that possibly can never be taught or programmed, and even more so the question: should we even want to?

References

Chatila, R., Renaudo, E., Andries, M., Chavez-Garcia, R.-O., Luce-Vayrac, P., Gottstein, R., Alami, R., Clodic, A., Devin, S., Girard, B. and Khamassi, M. (2018). Toward Self-Aware Robots. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, [online] 5. Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.00088/full [Accessed 2 Dec. 2019].

Kelly, S. (2021). Free Guy: Why video game AI will always be stupid. [online] Sciencefocus.com. Available at: https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/free-guy-artificial-intelligence-npc/.

Pierce, R.J. (2021). “Free Guy” Artificial Intelligence: Can An AI Be Actually Self-Aware? [online] Tech Times. Available at: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/266396/20211008/free-guy-artificial-intelligence-is-it-possible.htm [Accessed 10 Oct. 2021].

Wild, S. (2020). Why robots are being trained in self-awareness. [online] Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/why-robots-are-being-trained-self-awareness.

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On October fourth the Facebook network experienced a six-hour long outage on its main social media platform and its subsidiaries, such as Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram. This global outage, most likely caused by a human error had a substantial impact on its users and other online actors (Heah, 2021). Instances like these present us with a harsh truth: daily lives are largely influenced by the power of the Facebook network.

Facebook and Instagram over the years have opened up new doors for small business owners and in turn offered them a platform to elevate their business to a new level. The other side of the coin is that this group was impacted most severely by the outage, since they rely on the platforms to run their businesses. On the other hand, other social networking sites experienced a surge in their traffic as a result of this outage (Martinho, 2021).

It is no secret that Facebook’s power stretches to great lengths, but users usually end up accepting this as a byproduct in the trade-off between convenience and giving up part of their autonomy. Previous employee Frances Haugan brought to light that Facebook has often made choices where profits prevailed over public health and safety (The Guardian, 2021).

While Facebook has often been accused of monopolizing the industry in which it operates, it does not fit the text-book definition of a monopoly. The US Federal Trade Commission must meet a two-part test in its antitrust case against Facebook, to prove their monopoly power. They must first identify the industry correctly and consecutively prove that Facebook dominates 60% of this industry (Liss, 2021). However, this two-part test may not be most suitable for establishing whether a monopoly exists in a social networking and messaging industry, since it completely neglects a crucial contributor to Facebook’s power: network effects.

A network effect is a phenomenon whereby the value of a good or service is embedded in and increased by the number of users (Banton, 2021). This exactly highlights why users have become growingly dependent on Facebook and explains why they often settle for giving up part of their autonomy. This factor should not be brushed off too easily by the court when ruling in the case of Facebook and the FTC.


References

Banton, C. (2021). Understanding the Network Effect. [online] Investopedia.com. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/network-effect.asp#:~:text=The%20network%20effect%20is%20a,of%20a%20good%20or%20service.&text=Initially%2C%20there%20were%20few%20users,military%20and%20some%20research%20scientists..

Heah, A. (2021). Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram Outage Could’ve Been Due To Human Error. [online] designtaxi.com. Available at: https://designtaxi.com/news/416048/Facebook-WhatsApp-Instagram-Outage-Could-ve-Been-Due-To-Human-Error/.

Liss, D. (2021). Today’s real story: The Facebook monopoly. [online] Techcrunch.com. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/todays-real-story-the-facebook-monopoly/.

Martinho, C. (2021). What happened on the Internet during the Facebook outage. [online] Cloudflare.com. Available at: https://blog.cloudflare.com/during-the-facebook-outage/.

the Guardian. (2021). Facebook putting profit before public good, says whistleblower Frances Haugen. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/03/former-facebook-employee-frances-haugen-identifies-herself-as-whistleblower.