I don’t want the screen-and-subscription based future but do I have a choice? Today, I can still opt-out of surveillance like TSA face scans but how long before that’s mandatory to fly in the US?
This stuff has been on my mind a lot lately so when I read Laura Preston’s article in n plus one titled: An Age Of Hyperabundance: At the conversational AI conference.
The vacuousness she describes alongside incredible minds is a contrast I’m familiar with. One where only positivity and impactful results are touted on PowerPoint slides and at event booths where you can also collect pens from any company in the area. Profound and mundane. We’ve seen this before now that we’re about a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
Beneath this promised future, however, was a shadow future, one that suggested itself at every turn. This was a future of screens in every establishment and no way to get help, a future in which extractive algorithms yielded relentless advertising, a future of a crapified internet, too diluted with sponcon and hallucinated facts to be of any use. In this future, if you wanted to use a product you would have to download an app and pay a monthly fee. It was a future of ultra-sophisticated scams and government surveillance, a future where anyone’s face could be spliced into porn. Our arrival in this future would be a gradual surrender, achieved through a slow creep of terms and conditions, and the capitulations had already begun.
So when will Canary Speech be rolled into Microsoft Teams so that it can monitor hundreds of millions of employees? If it is used to do a ‘health audit that breaks down the user’s mood, energy, anxiety, and degree of depression, and identify pre-Parkinson’s traits, as well as early signs of Alzheimer’s’ does that mean the software would be running in the background of every MS teams conversation? Where is that written into the Terms and Conditions? Would I even know how it’s referenced? Jesus fucking Christ.
It’s disheartening to say that least but not at all surprising based on the last 30 years of internet, big tech, legal corporate blah-dee-blah behavior and our current oligarchy. The only way to change is to pay closer attention to who’s got the biggest stake in the conversational AI game.
The author goes on to articulate what I’ve been feeling which is this:
“…(it) all had an odious whiff of physiognomy and race science. It was the same logic that compelled white men to fashion their avatar’s face as the ghostly average of non-Caucasian women, a de facto stereotype, like some Victorian eugenicist’s photography experiment.”
There are no guardrails with most technology in 2024. Sure you have accountability in the form of large settlements but that becomes the cost of doing business, almost everyone builds it into the balance sheet.
When Ms. Peterson writes: “It all suggested a future of ineptitude, where everyone was a brand instrument disguised as a resource.”, I’m nodding my head in agreement. But what do we do about the pervasive hyped-up, Uber-dude, tech show?
The good news is that this stuff isn’t quite baked but that’s the bad news, too. We become unwilling testers and the beat goes on.
