07-21-2001 | Isabel Alexander

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PERSONAL PORTAL

A website dedicated to answering David Alexander's most common questions and concerns.

This website will operate under one condition:

Although data capture is crucial for personalizing and refining our digital experiences, it also opens the door for surveillance. Most consumers are okay with giving up their data, as long as it can’t be traced back to them. Businesses, after all, claim to be interested in the patterns — not the identities — revealed in customer records. But there is a growing concern that data can be de-aggregated, even if collected anonymously. And because the surveillance economy is slow to apply institutional regulations, informed consent is murky.

In many ways, artificial intelligence enhances our capacity to think and move freely. It facilitates relationships, augments our senses, and frees our time for more meaningful pursuits. But AI also informs targeted feedback loops that can restrict free thought. In their data-gathering and profit-making efforts, many of our devices are designed to make us dependent on them — a manipulation that has profound consequences on our psychological health.

Engineers and software developers want our continued engagement. But what happens when our devices are hijacked to manipulate more serious ideological shifts — ones that compromise democracy? The capabilities of artificial intelligence — centralization of power, claims of neutrality, and the surveillance of populations — happen to be the defining characteristics of authoritarianism, too.

Our digital storage bank comes with good intentions. By collecting information about various populations, we can notice trends, track trends, and make decisions based on those trends. But the black-box nature of these technologies means that people in power can manage certain populations under the guise of standardization and efficiency. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it’s trained on. By replicating past patterns of human decision-making, it may infuse bias into objective-seeming outputs.

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