5/5 (3)

You have probably experienced this before; right after talking with a friend or family member about a certain topic (let’s say the iPhone 12) you almost immediately get an ad on your phone about the iPhone 12 with a nice discount.

I experienced this phenomenom myself before as well. My colleagues were talking about visiting the Dolfinarium (an aquatic zoo in the Netherlands), right after this conversation I checked my weather app and there was an ad about tickets of the Dolfinarium. Experiencing this felt like I was being spied on and I didn’t like it. The internet is full of other people with the same kind of experiences, but is our phone really listening to us in order to provide highly personalized ads?

Many people believe that this is true, but according to the Washington post (Tatum Hunter, 2021) your phone is not listening to you in order to provide personalized ads, Mark Zuckerberg even denied this under oath during his senate hearing in 2018 (Bloomberg, 2018). It appears that the big tech companies are already aware of our interests with the use of our past transactions, search history, and online profiles. It is also possible that after your conversation, you look up the price of the product that your talking about, which gives a reason for the platforms to offer ads about this product (Caitlin Dewey, 2016). But this explanation still doesn’t explain the fact that I received an ad about the Dolfinarium when I wasn’t even interested in going there. In fact, I’ve only been to the Dolfinarium once (when I was eight years old).

WWLTV did an experiment to test if our phones are really listening and eventually came to the same conclusion, it appears that while browsing the internet and using apps on our phone we provide the companies behind those apps a tremendous amount of information on our own interests and for example location data that they can provide these highly personalized ads in real time. In case you would like to watch the YouTube video by WWLTV use the following link: YouTubeVideo.

Do you think that our mobile phones are listening to us?

References

Bloomberg. (2018, April 10). Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s senate hearing. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/

Caitlin Dewey. (2016, June 6). No, Facebook doesn’t eavesdrop on your phone. But it does spy on you. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/06/06/no-facebook-doesnt-eavesdrop-on-your-phone-but-it-does-spy-on-you/

Tatum Hunter. (2021, November 12). Ask Help Desk: No, your phone isn’t listening to your conversations. Seriously. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/12/phone-audio-targeting-privacy/

5/5 (1)

Artificial intelligence is a technology that is used in a tremendous amount of modern day products. It is used for creating your TikTok and Instagram feed, but it is also used for healthcare problems like helping completely paralyzed people communicate again by using implants and AI. With electrodes implanted into the brain of a completely paralyzed patient, he was then able to handwrite characters by just thinking about writing them with his own hand. An AI program was trained with the use of these commands and was eventually able to correctly read out 95% of the words the patient was writing (Servick, 2019).

Except from the ability to handwrite with one’s own mind there are more developments within this trend, there are multiple start-ups trying to come up with practical use-cases for AI implanted into the brain of a patient. The most remarkable start-up is probably Elon Musk’s Neuralink. The company was co-founded by Musk in 2016 and made quite some progress in creating the microchips necessary to connect a person’s brain with AI. The company already implanted the device in a pig and a chimpanzee, which was able to play a computer game with just its thoughts. According to Elon Musk, Neuralink will provide disabled people the possibility to walk again and even cure Alzheimer’s. (Hamilton, 2022).

Many researchers are however skeptical towards the Neuralink company as there have been a lot of promises by Elon Musk which didn’t come true. In 2019, Musk said that the Neuralink device would be implanted into a human skull by 2020, he made the statement again in 2021 and currently the planned date is somewhere in 2022 (which is almost at its end already).

A working Neuralink with all the possibilities mentioned by Elon Musk can be lifechanging for the world and especially disabled people. It is however still unclear if the technology will meet up with Musk’s dreamworld as there have been plenty of empty promises by the billionaire. The future will show what promises hold ground.

Regardless of the outcome of Neuralink, the presence of Elon Musk in the development of products like these bring a lot of attention to the possibilities, which probably lead to quicker innovation and more possibilities for the patients who eventually profit from this.

Do you think Elon Musk’s Neuralink will succeed in its plans?

References

Hamilton, I. A. (2022, July 4). The story of Neuralink: Elon Musk’s AI brain chip company where he had twins with a top executive. Retrieved September 14, 2022 from https://www.businessinsider.com/neuralink-elon-musk-microchips-brains-ai-2021-2?international=true&r=US&IR=T#one-neuroscientist-told-insider-there-are-big-ethical-problems-with-the-idea-of-performing-brain-surgery-for-anything-other-than-essential-treatme

Neuralink. (2022). From https://neuralink.com/

Servick, K. (2019, October 23). AI allows paralyzed person to ‘handwrite’ with his mind. Retrieved September 14, 2022 from https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-allows-paralyzed-person-handwrite-his-mind