Big Brother Is Watching You
Few years back Facebook hit the news with their chatbots Alice and Bob making waves. Facebook’s claim was that their chatbots had ‘developed’ a language, that seemed indiscernible to humans, to communicate with each other. The bots were pulled down because they quite did not fit into what Facebook wanted out of them — to communicate more effectively with humans. Worse still, whatever the version of the story is from Facebook, the media did make a fuss about the fear of A.I. taking over.
Let’s sit back and analyze — Did Facebook’s bots really ‘develop’ a new language to communicate amongst themselves?
Facebook uses the same technology that is available to the common man — the same core of microprocessors, the same instruction set, the same firmware, the same application programs. The brands maybe different, but the constructs remain the same. Computers based upon axiomatic systems (digital Boolean logic in our case) cannot mimic consciousness or awareness. Turing’s Insolvability of the Decision Problem, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem are enough arguments to prove this fact as discussed in our previous article.
Alice and Bob never developed a new language — they never could. And Facebook saying bots ‘developed’ a new language would be nothing but sophistry. Whatever be the case, in our daily lives, we forget how much we have allowed the big brands to flood in — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon. We are living in a world where we have been squeezed out of ourselves in order that we can be filled in by what they want. We are slaves.
Technology in our lives
The world has changed dramatically in the past century. With advances in media and communication — the print, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, the personal computer, the internet — Our lives have become what is presented before us. Today, we seldom need to move from our couch to get a bank transaction done, send a mail, buy a burger, almost everything. As we slip more into our comfort zones, what we overlook is how much space we are allowing the agents that offer these. Virtual assistants have almost become an extension of our selves. Misplacing our mobile phones has become the horror of our living. Social media — we invent and maintain our alter selves there. While slowly we allow us to enslave ourselves to technology, we are in the process of encouraging centralized control — the big brands are the Big Brother.
In History
Technology began becoming part of the individual’s life with the telephone — probably the first thing that was personal to us. There was a time when in North America, if you wanted to use a phone, you had to go to AT&T. The strategy was not to share the advanced long-distance network AT&T had, with local independent carriers.
For quite some time, AT&T solely had the luxury of funding pure research projects. The Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey was the Mecca for such projects. Though AT&T held monopoly over the telephone for about a century, the legacy would be cut short by restrictions on AT&T to sell computer systems, just for the fear of AT&T’s monopoly in the computer industry. An offering this situation had in store for the world was an operating system — UNIX, and the free communal development culture that came with it.
The personal computer took over in the 1970s, and by 1980s we had computers that started becoming a household appliance — like an iron box, or a washing machine. These sometimes-had graphical interfaces like the early Macintosh launched in 1984. However, the Volkswagen of computers was to be the IBM-PC/MS-DOS pair. Cheaper and ubiquitous, they took the computer industry by storm. Microsoft simply took its grip on the future, and on people. The operating system became Microsoft’s flagship, maintaining the software proprietary.
Well, there is nothing wrong in keeping things proprietary: but manipulating customers to remain loyal to products is. Your system gets outdated in a couple of years in terms of OS software, in five years in terms of hardware capabilities, and support for old software just get pulled down. We get forced to buy new machines and software. There is control behind the strategy — for Microsoft or for Apple. Our ‘why should I care’ attitude siphons off our pockets to these manufacturers’, one penny at a time. Sure, there is art in Apple’s products — worth every penny you pay, but they too don’t come with extendable hardware, let alone the OS. The same goes for the handheld devices like the iPhone. The best value for money that Apple has given us is the iPod — software upgrade is purely optional. There is also personal signature associated with it — you are your music. And if the standard music formats remain, the iPod runs. Rest of all their products need constant replacements in time.
The Information Bandwagon
We live in the information age, where every move that we make are getting converted into ready-to-read information. We rely too much on information, and technologies and hence products and brands that base upon Information Theory, and they have coupled with our lives indispensably necessarily. Sure, the hopes when the internet was launched way back in was sky-high, but what we see is a state of affairs we have seen in the politics — a maniacal run for power.
The World Wide Web was launched in 1991 with a distributed architecture foreseeing the dangers of centralization of information control.
Social groups were in the manifesto of the World Wide Web, but we have social websites like Facebook breaking all barriers and skewering into our lives, controlling us, deciding for us. Google is a modern day version of the Whole Earth Catalog, that had its roots in the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, with one single object — free guidance to information for all, but with a difference — it is a capitalist venture and with similar motives. But we seldom scroll beyond the first page of search results that Google gives us — or decides to give us. Our lives are slowly getting molded with what we are being fed — not what we are seeking.
Facebook’s and Google’s Machine Learning algorithms decide what we read, whom we associate with, what we buy, when we sleep, even whom we elect to govern us. We are bare naked in the information world. The digital trails we leave every time we go online (offline even) is turned into records on some distant server underground, beneath layers of snow. We are being watched, we are being manipulated, we are ripped of our free will.
We are relying too much on Information — we hope the Information bandwagon is the panacea for anyone. As Shannon once said in an article in IRE Transactions in 1956,
‘It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy do not solve all our problems.’
Well today, in 2020, we need replace the words information, entropy and redundancy with Facebook, Google and Amazon, and quite paint the bog we are wading in knee deep.
The ways of the Big Brother
War mobilizes Science. The World wars were instrumental in lifting the curtains of the Information Age. The first computers were built for accurate predictions of missile trajectories, naval charts, weather charts and the like. Even computers like The Colossus and The Enigma were built for this purpose. The funds form the national treasuries and huge capital establishments like the AT&T or the IBM. The military-academic-commercial trilateral managed our progress. As Shannon mentioned, we are embarked on the Information bandwagon, without an oversight.
We may not have the war along borderlines, yet the establishments hold the reins for research — Google and Stanford, Facebook and Harvard, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon — and directed at one single object of controlling the human course. We are the materials of social engineering. Our psyche is being distorted every moment with what we experience in the digital world. We are the faceless many, every ready to be reshaped. And the heretics amongst us, against the scheme just get sucked in, in a warm embrace by these establishments. And in moves like Facebook’s Alice and Bob, we swallow what is being fed to us.
The Parallel Movement
Did you know that anybody could write their own Operating System?
This may seem like a daunting task because of our conditioning in the digital world. According to Steve Jobs,
”When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
We have a choice — whether to corrode away in the acid rains of these establishments like Google and Facebook and Amazon, or to shield ourselves snug and dry under our own umbrellas. The anti-establishment, distribution of control principle is in effect parallel to our lives. We have the Linux-class operating systems that are free and open source, and a myriad of application software that come along. The world wide web, the Wikipedia foundation is testimony to the truth in humanity.
We urge you donate to Wikipedia and similar open source communities to support such initiatives.
Currently control and access of user data is handled by technological giants — mostly for their profit making. If capture and usage of data is regulated by an authority, then misuse of this information can be avoided.
- Is user data a private property of these companies?
- Should this data be owned by govt. regulatory authority?
- Should the usage of user data by companies be regulated more stringently?
- Should individuals be responsible enough to not expose such personal data to technological giants?
- Should this data be made available to authorized parties who would like to research in the area of AI?
Transparency is Truth. The best brand names we could sport on ourselves is ourselves. We need to be reminded of the efforts of selfless individuals Stewart Brand, Tim-Berners Lee, Richard Stallman, Linux Torvalds, and many of the unsung greats like Nikola Tesla to stop, alight and think where we are treading. Life has more to offer than just ‘likes’ on Facebook and views on YouTube. And as Carl Sagan once said,
‘We are one race; we are one planet.’
Next week: Mind and Matter
Previous week: Turing Machines
First week: Can Machines Think?
