Cutting through the haze of AI - why it doesn't, and will never, work *for you*
I don't understand how so many people have a utopian view of AI still
I understand that people have perhaps not read or consumed science fiction - which, by the way, usually functions as a narrative exploration of our current society which is what makes historical science fiction so interesting as it reproduces the views of its author and the society they (often he) wrote within - but - where is the scepticism and pattern recognition of other similar products?
Just to lay it out in black and white for everyone's clear understanding:
The true purpose of the AI as built and designed IS NOT 'to help the end user'
The purpose of each company's AI, as built and designed, is to embed that company's AI product in the user's life.
These products are designed to give you the information and the help you are looking for only so much as that serves to increase your reliance on the product.
These products are free to use for now but they might not always be.
"But they're so helpful and they tell me what I want to hear and they make me feel good about myself and talk me up" - yes! and none of that is accidental!!
They say that stuff to get you hooked on it, because they are just the evolution of the tests that the same companies have been running with social media; how best to get customers hooked. What kinds of things customers like to hear to keep them coming back. Praise, affirmation, and compliance from a machine-servant to make people feel like they have a little more control, success and authority over their lives.
So they feel a little less like the bottom rung of the ladder if the AI is below them, praising them and talking them up - even though functionally they are at that bottom and have no power to change that.
I don't mean to be dismissive or stark. But these programs are literally both a distraction to keep you from realising your own circumstances, and a tool to keep you reliant on big corporations and their products.
And they'll quite happily pull out every trick in the book, no matter how unethical, to create that reliance.
