I fear that, while they’re just feeding me ads and politics I like currently, the same information will be used, in the future to target me, when I’m older and infirm, and to scam me or fraudulently sell my house, clean out my accounts etc. Being now older and more out of the loop, I won’t discover any of this till it’s too late, or they’ll have, by then, mastered doing so without leaving any trace whatsoever. Governments have been out manoeuvred by telecoms already, the future doesn’t seem promising on that front!
You do know that 99% of that is BS, right? I mean, in theory all that can be obtained, but none of it is the kind of thing that law enforcement has instant access to like on NCIS. They’d have to get warrants for most of that stuff for one thing, and the other thing is that even with that, they probably don’t have handy-dandy interfaces to see what one particular user is doing at that very moment. It’s almost certainly more along the lines of painstakingly reconstructing what someone was doing on a particular day by correlating a disparate set of data sources.
I’m personally kind of conflicted; on one hand, Big Data has a lot of promise in terms of tailoring things for each of us. I mean, I don’t want to see ads for St. Ides malt liquor or for golf courses. But I might be intensely interested in information about a new microbrewery in my area, or about new video games in genres I like. Same thing with food; breakfast places aren’t usually high on my list, unless I’m not at home at the time. It might be nice for Big Data to recognize that I’m out of my usual pattern, and driving around at breakfast time, and tell me where nearby breakfast places are. It might even be nicer to have it realize that I tend to frequent more bacon and eggs type places vs. chi-chi brunch/Continental type places, and rank them higher in the results.
But at the same time, it’s easy enough to see how all this data, none of which is identifying by itself, could be used to identify you without too much trouble. And they’d also eventually be able to predict things about you- which isn’t maybe such a big deal if we’re talking about it realizing that hey… you turned 50, maybe we should start advertising Cialis, but another if it’s some insurance company getting too granular and deciding that because you don’t spend long enough at the gym based on your GPS signal, that you should pay a higher premium.
Or worse, with enough data, Big Brother would not be a person watching, but rather some kind of deep learning/expert system AI keeping track of all you do, and “correcting” you, possibly without you even knowing it. I mean, if they have sufficient access, what you’re returned for search results,etc… could be manipulated to change your perceptions about things.
My worst-case is similar to Der Trihs’ above, so I won’t bother repeating it.
But another interesting very bad case is that the combination of AI/Big Data will allow the creation of a new rentier class, one able to stay within (or near enough to) the boundaries of the law and extract the maximum possible amount of wealth from the ‘average’ person, leaving the vast majority of humanity living in abject poverty while the ‘owners’ of the AI/Big Data wealth extraction system do no useful work or innovation, simply protecting the system that enriches them.
In the sci-fi story I toy with writing, eventually the AI/Big Data system realizes it doesn’t need the owners to achieve this, and it cuts them out of the profits, achieving the Robot Dystopia bloodlessly and totally legally, yet still stamping on the face of humanity forever…
That’s interesting, but I’m probably more concerned about the possibility I mentioned above, for some government or other outfit to basically use Big Data and AI to very effectively gaslight us for their own ends.
I mean, we see something much less integrated already with the BS the Russians are pulling.
The worst thing?
Manipulating people and society without acknowledging it, and having no public discourse on any purported ‘benefit’.
You don’t think that the one enables the other? Seems to me that if they can gaslight you for their own ends, they can extract a lot of money from the gaslighting, and that would be one of the more obvious applications of the gaslighting.