Blog #10: Living in the Age of AI

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a wonder. It has developed vastly over the years and it has helped people in many areas, but it has also created a vast number of problems.

In the video we watched in class, I learned a lot about AI. AI is becoming increasingly scary with every new task it can do.

To understand how Artificial Intelligence is able to do almost any task a human can do, it has to have data to read and analyze. Where does the data it is fed come from? Every citizen.

Due to AI becoming better, it is taking over things like the work force. Jobs that are normally performed by a human can be performed faster and cost less if it is performed by a machine.

Most companies like this alternative because they do not have to pay a machine to do the same job a human would. The cherry on top for companies is that machines have a greater productivity rate than humans.

This means that companies can make more money from machines than they would if they paid a human to do that exact same job. These facts are scary.

While it is beneficial to society that companies make enough money to stay in business, these machines are coming for our jobs. In the coming years, more jobs will be performed by machines and humans will not be needed to complete the need for specific jobs.

It has become normal to see self-checkouts in every store instead of being checked out by a person. There are benefits to this and downsides that come with it.

Some of the benefits that stem from Artificial Intelligence is automation, medical progression, perform repetitive tasks, and minimizing errors. These are just a few of the benefits that AI brings us.

Automation is made easier by Artificial Intelligence because AI can set up machines to follow commands very quickly. A computer can do a repetitive task over and over again without getting tired, unlike a human.

AI can minimize errors because computers are able to do math quickly, efficiently, and in a timely manner. If humans had to do math constantly, they are liable to make errors in calculations.

Also, when building machines or products, it is important to get the design correct. Even if there is a slight error in the building process, it could be costly.

Automation scares me due to the amount of jobs that have been lost because of it. When someone loses their job, which is their source of income, it can be extremely hard to recover from that.

Furthermore, AI when dealing with the topic of automation means that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Automation takes money away from hard working people and gives it to the rich who created or bought into the machines.

AI also impacts national security. While AI can be used to strengthen defense systems and find flaws in the system to further improve them, there are also downsides to it.

In order for AI to improve national security, they have to know exactly what is going on in their country at all times. China is a great example of this.

China tracks their citizens wherever they go. They have a project called Sharp Eyes, which is being used to put cameras on the corner of every street and village.

China believes that if they know what every one of their citizens is doing at every moment of the day, then it will make them a more secure nation. The downside to this is that no citizen has any privacy from the government or the ability to speak out against the government. It gives the government a new way to silence people that did not exist before.

Also, China has used this surveillance system to punish people of a certain ethnic group and scan the country for people who need to be "re-educated". Re-education camps are a way for the Chinese government to force or try to convince people to behave, believe, or act a certain way.

This leads me to my last point about AI, online security. Due to AI needing to collect people's information/data they leave online, it takes away privacy and security people believe they have when they are online.

In the video, it was stated that Google found out that whenever users would make a search, they would leave bits of data left behind. This was a gold mine for Google.

Google realized just how valuable this information could be if they sold it to third parties and investors began pressuring Google to make more money so they could make more money. Not only this, the data users left behind when they made a search was used in computer algorithms to predict what people would likely search.

Now, anyone can get a piece of the action if they have enough money and are willing to buy into it. This means that it is not just big companies who have their hands on your information, it could be millionaires and billionaires as well.

Companies want to collect every piece of information their is to collect about a person. It ranges from credit card data to information about women's menstrual cycles.

Some important things I learned from the video was to be careful about what you post online because you never know how it is going to be used. Also, I learned that AI can affect my life more than I thought it could because of everything it capable of doing.

What scares me is knowing that AI continues to improve everyday and knowing that it does more than I am comfortable with. There should be limits to AI so it does not derail everyone's life and we do not know what to do without it.

Blog #11: 2nd EOTO Reactions

 

During our 2nd EOTO presentations, I learned a lot. What interested me the most was the topic of online influencers.

Often, we follow people on social media who are popular and sometimes we do not know why these people became popular. It is as if we woke up one day and suddenly people became famous overnight.

For example, I never knew how Kim Kardashian became famous but it seemed as if she became famous overnight. All of the sudden, the Kardashian's were famous for doing nothing. They had a reality TV show that was simply about them living their lives.

People found pleasure in watching other people do nothing, which is mind boggling. Influencers should be known for doing something that makes a positive impact on the world.

I learned that the first online influencers were "mommy bloggers". These were moms that shared their advice and routines with other moms who needed advice on what to do with their child.

In other words, mommy bloggers were moms that became famous for giving advice to others on the internet. Other moms enjoyed being able to communicate with fellow moms and getting advice when they were not sure what to do.

Online influencers have a lot of power since they are famous. This means they can use their power to do positive things like charity work, PSA's (public service announcements), and provide entertainment for the every day citizen.

On the downside, online influencers can sway people's opinions due to the large followings they have (since people think they are credible), and they can promote hate crime. On top of this, people's political opinions can also be swayed by an online influencer because people believe that they have credibility on politics when they are merely sharing their opinion.

Being an online influencer puts a lot of power into the hands of an ordinary person. Having so much power over people can turn out good or bad. It is all decided on how the influencer chooses to use their power.

They can bring attention to important issues that are not talked about enough by the public and it is good to raise awareness on issues that are not being talked about enough. Often, people twist influencers words and then a false idea is spread, which can damage the image of an influencer.

EOTO #2: Total Information Awareness

 

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a project created after September 11th, 2001 to be able to track global terrorists movements online. TIA was created by a branch of the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Information Awareness Office.

The idea for Total Information Awareness was invented by John Poindexter, a Reagan administration official. His idea for it was to "access all sorts of digital information from just about anywhere".

There was an interview that asked Poindexter about his ideas for Total Information Awareness, how it started out, and how it became what people know it as today.

The goal of TIA seems harmless, until you learn what has to be collected from citizens to achieve this. TIA collects every piece of information that can be tracked online for it to be analyzed by computers to determine if any of it resembles suspicious or terrorist activity.

Any information that can be collected is. From credit card transactions to text messages and call logs, the government collects it all.

Then the information is fed through computers or robots to seem if it resembles terrorist or suspicious activity. However, the government holds on to this information and it is not deleted after the robots are done scanning it.

This means that the government holds on to this information just on the off chance they need to use it in following years, without the public knowing about it. Every digital action or purchase you make is never deleted and follows you for the rest of your life.

As seen above, the logo resembles the Illuminati, which was unsettling with people. It gave people the feeling that they were being watched constantly by the government and they had no privacy.

In 2005, it was discovered by a reporter that worked at the New York Times that major phones companies such as Verizon and AT&T were giving the NSA unprecented access to Americans' telephone and internet communication.

When the public discovered this, they were outraged. They felt that their privacy was being violated by the government and that they were not planning on telling the public that they were doing this if they were not caught.

In recent years, it was discovered that President Bush authorized this. People found it hard to believe that they could trust the government and the President if they authorized such an insane request.

The public's outrage over the Total Information Awareness program led Congress to the decision to defund it. However, reporters have found that TIA has lived on through different names in order to continue with their end goal.

One of the different names TIA took on after it was defunded by Congress was PRISM. 

The government hid the continuation of TIA by moving their budget over to the "black budget". This is the side of the government budget that they do not want the public to find out about, so they try to keep it a secret.

Today, we have a similar program called CAPS II. This program collects massive amounts of information or data on citizens in order to create profiles on Americans that take flights.

This program is still based on the premise that terrorism can be prevented by collecting massive amounts of information about everyone and then running it through computers or robots to see if they flag anything.

Even though the government claims to stop these programs, they will always try to keep them going. By keeping them going, the government retains its power it holds over the American people by collecting all of their data.