The human mind is stolen as the age transforms into digital
A brief review of the seminar “restoring the soul of business” with Rishad Tobaccowala
With the advent of high-tech equipment, the human is facing unprecedented work, either offline or online. Data becomes a prevailing subjective in current days as if it controls the central vein in the path of success. However, the debate raises regarding its effectiveness: what is the correlation between data and the business? Is the data undoubtedly decisive to success?
From Risha Tobaccowala, an area covered in his book grabs my attention. The capability to keep everything remain human is the key to achieve success. However, it becomes much responsible for the majority of companies. When thinking data, few people can separate themselves from the world since they heavily rely on mathematics and the algorism while ignoring the meaning of the data, how constructed, and how performed. Two defects exist by neglecting the purpose. For one thing, human produces the data while a human is a bias and subjective. Here is an example of how information is manifested unevenly in a region.
Infranet is a mix of two simulation technologies: artificial life(AL) and artificial intelligence(AI). The trait of AL is dependent on the data collected by AI and then forms the performance. Take an in-depth look at the Infranet. It is a loop that surrounds the city Manhattan as data, a quantified simulation of life, and the level of visibility represents the rate of active users. The fact reveals the structural inequality in a city. The brightest light is on the middle Manhattan in which Broadway and Fifth avenue locate along the Hudson River. However, the lights appear dimmer above the central park, Northern Manhattan to the end where no lights even perform, meaning that no data collected from here and thus no life is active. Indeed, the city itself can’t automatically decide the boundary of artificial life, but the AI system inherently sorts out the data. In this case, we can conclude that in the process of programming to make some AI system, human has implemented their ideology to the system, so there is no authentic of output by looking at the resulted data.
Another challenge is how the human builds relation with an electronic device. Even though approximately 45 % of the world population owns a smartphone and the average Americans spend six hours on the screen, it doesn’t mean that human can share their emotions, mindset, and behavior with the phone. However, the worse situation is that what the phone performs manifests human life. In the book, “World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech,” the author Franklin Foer starts by telling the stories of amazon, how it developed from a bookstore to the largest online retail store, and it changed people’s shopping behavior. He doubts where is the end of these company and how it changes the social principles by collecting tons of data from phone/internet users.
“The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted. Through their accumulation of data, they have constructed a portrait of our minds, which they use to invisibly guide mass behavior (and increasingly individual behavior) to further their financial interests. -Franklin Foer.
The appearance of GAFA triggers anxieties and dangers in this ag, for example, the concerns of data-leaking occurred on Facebook, and the crisis of Cambridge Analytics, which all prove that up-rising technology is controlling the society and changing the rules under its supervision. As a human being, the ability to wisely interpret the data and keep a healthy connection with the electronics are essential while tapping into the digital.
