The Robots Have Won

Pardon my erratic posting. You'd think with the pandemic lockdown I would've settled into a definite routine but things can get very uncertain with interruptions coming at the last moment. 

The title for this post was inspired by a comment made by Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, and I'll get to that in a bit. Not too long ago, a couple of years maybe but seems like eons in our current conceptual thinking, the big scare was the Robot-apocalypse. Machines would take over and start to push us humans around. Eventually we'd end up in a Terminator world or The Matrix. Now a biological virus has temporarily shelved those fears. 

Back to Scott Adams. He claimed that AI--Artificial Intelligence--is now in charge of human decisions, in other words, the machines have won. His reasoning is that much of what goes online is decided by algorithms administered by AI that can reach across platforms. These algorithms exist for one reason, to maximize profit for the owners of the AI. How this happens is that the AI culls through reactions to what's posted on media--click bait is the most common example. The AI compares what generated the most clicks and delivers reports accordingly to the programmers. AI can now write new algorithms for itself (no need for meat-bag programmers), the measure being what generates the most traffic, not just on social media posts but across the spectrum of electronic content from phones, smart speakers, license plate readers, cash registers, you name it. Powerful computers with enormous banks of memory have you under the microscope. Keep in mind that everything about you is being cataloged--what you wrote, where you go, when were you there, what did you look at, what did you listen to, what did you buy, who was with you? Health monitors and smart watches add your physical vitals. It's possible for AI to track your physiological response to what you look at on Facebook. If you had an intense emotional reaction to a news article, for example, AI knows that, and more importantly, what did you do afterwards? Who did you contact? What did you share? AI has amassed about each of us an extensive glossary of personal trigger words and incorporates them to nudge us toward a desired response. Positive scenario: if we're shopping for a winter coat, the machine knows what styles and colors we prefer and displays the appropriate selections. Negative scenario: if AI, rather its big tech owner, wants us to vote a certain way, then dark trigger words can be used to steer us from the "wrong" decision. 

We've already known people who've been in Facebook jail or demonetized on YouTube because an algorithm decided what they posted was against "community standards." What AI did was read or listen to the content and decide based on certain words that it was inappropriate, regardless of the context. Twitter banned links to the Babylon Bee because the AI didn't understand satire. Sadly, rather than admit the shortcomings of the algorithms, big tech prefers to side with them because in the long term, the gains in massive data harvesting outweigh the occasional stumble.

We've created a symbiotic relationship with AI, which has morphed into a ruthlessly effective parasite because it gives us what we want. We in turn, let it grow and expand and take more and more control. We could unplug from AI but we've become emotionally dependent on its power to provide instant gratification. And every solution we have to the perils of this dependency seem to involve yet a deeper co-dependence. Spending too much time online? Then try this app that monitors your usage and decides when you've had enough.

All this time George Orwell thought we'd have Big Brother forced upon us when instead we willingly climbed into his lap. Little did we suspect that Big Brother would be a robot.

Our deal with the devil

I just received a new Samsung smartphone. It replaces the iPhone I've had for many years and was so out-of-date that I couldn't download the few apps I might've found useful. The new phone is an amazing piece of technology and so pretty. It's got way more capability than I'll ever use. In fact, my first chore was deleting many of the apps that came standard. Years back, when cameras were first installed on a cellphone, I thought, "That's dumb. Who would bother?" So much for that prognostication.

But my use of the Samsung is haloed with trepidation. Everything I do on the phone is tracked and recorded, then fed through computers to build my profile and from that, predict what I'm going to do next. We've all had the experience of searching for something on one platform, our phone for example, and then finding similar search results when we access Facebook on the computer. We know we're being constantly watched but act like we're cool with it. People who opt for smart speakers like Alexa astound me. You're okay letting a corporation put a microphone inside your house? Then again, every new car is a rolling fountain of your personal information. Where you went. When. What you listened to. What you accessed on your phone. With every passing day, privacy means less and less. We've become a society of exhibitionists exploited by professional voyeurs.

Last week I was watching Hitchcock's North by Northwest and I noticed a scene in a hotel where people retreated into phone booths to make calls. Contrast that when a couple of days ago, a young woman passed me by on the sidewalk while she was doing a video chat and discussing her recent trip to the gynecologist.

Our attitude toward technology, more specifically, social media and communication is increasingly bipolar. The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the detrimental effects of this constant exposure to social media (mostly by phone) for young women. The same issue then published a piece about using phone apps to improve romantic relationships. Which is it?

The surveillance Orwell predicted in 1984 is tame compared to what we've willingly accepted. Winston and Julia never carried a pocket device that tracked their every move or recorded every snippet of conversation. At the present, our individual ensnarement in the web seems benign. It's all about convenience. But the dark side looms ahead. You've no doubt heard of doxxing, which is the publication on social media of your private details such as residence, contact information, place of work, family and their addresses for the purpose of harassing you into silence or banishment. In the not too distant future, expect what I hereby coin "idoxxing," meaning the public disclosure of your internet search history. What naughty things have you been looking up? Shame. Shame. Shame.

What interests me more as a crime writer is how all this technology creates the illusion of security and safety. Idoxxing will be used for blackmail. Also, every advance in cyber security only exposes more gaps to be leveraged by the bad guys. Our homes and financial accounts have never been more vulnerable. Once criminals crack into any system, they're free to loot and pillage. Nest eggs will vanish into the electronic ether. You can buy a device that blasts a signal over a broad spectrum to disable cellphones and wifi connections within a perimeter for the purpose of robbery or worse. The victim can't call for help and all the security systems are shut down. Pretty slick gizmo. Watch for it in my next crime novel.

No Spam Calls in the Future

Futurists like to give us a rosy view of tomorrow, mostly because they're funded by technologists with something big to sell, never mind the negative consequences. On the flip side, novels about the future tend to be bleak and the setting is often quite dystopian. Three of the landmark works about this grim future are 1984, Brave New World, and We. Most of us are familiar with George Orwell's 1984 and its oppressive totalitarian theme. In fact, "Big Brother is watching" is synonymous for government and corporate surveillance. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World takes a lighter, though ultimately just as constrictive view of a future society managed through biological engineering. Individuals are brought into this world through a decanting process that determines their station in life. What we consider natural birth is regarded as obscene. People are kept docile through officially sanctioned casual sex, group think (social media, anyone?) and the drug soma. "Don't give a damn, take a gram."

Both of these books draw quite a bit from an earlier Russian novel, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, first published in 1920. In this work, people live in glass houses, literally. They are allowed one hour a day "to lower the shades," meaning time for casual sex. Aside from that, there is no notion of privacy. Although Zamyatin intended this story as a critique of Soviet totalitarianism, read today, it's a fantastic satire of how our online lives have taken mastery of our existence. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon--the Internet sees all, it knows all.

Which brings me to another more modern novel, Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan (Now available on Netflix). It too is a dystopian tale, one that disturbed me when I first read it. The salient premise is that in this future, humans are implanted with an electronic "cordial stack," which downloads your consciousness. As long as the cordial stack remains undamaged, your consciousness can be swapped from body to body, what the book calls "re-sleeving." It's an extraordinary inventive piece of science fiction, and Morgan further delves into the premise by thinking through the consequences of swapping bodies. For example, you can testify at your own murder. In his world, the process is quite expensive--the cost equivalent of a house mortgage--so that "re-sleeving" remains the domain of the government and the wealthy. So the rich have the financial means of switching bodies as casually as the rest of us change clothes and thus the ability to be immortal.

On my second reading of Altered Carbon, years later, I stumbled over a detail that emphasized just how difficult it is now for science fiction to remain ahead of science fact, even for a work as trail blazing as this one. When the protagonist used a fob to summon a flying taxi, I thought, why doesn't he use the app on his mobile phone? Then I realized, his phone was simply that, a phone. But many of us seldom make calls on our phones; we mostly communicate via text, email, and instant messenger, something that's not done in this story. Also, Altered Carbon is a mystery so there's a lot of sleuthing about and looking for people. Again, why would that be necessary? We all know we can be tracked by our phones; why couldn't these future people be easily followed by their cordial stacks?

Smart phones represent a technology whose implications we still have a hard time understanding. Besides compromising privacy, they provide a deeply engaging experience that makes their use addictive. One tragic and unintended consequence is how they've facilitated distracted driving so that in the last two years, traffic fatalities have increased because of cell phones.

And I need to mention, that in those very different futures sans cell phones, people are never bothered by telemarketers.