How are we controlled by artificial intelligence?

In an interview with Life magazine in November 1970, Minsky warned: "Once the computer gains control, we may never get it back. We will survive at their expense." In In one of his famous predictions, he posited: "If we're lucky, machines might decide to keep us as pets." great restrictions. Tencent will recommend a new drama that you will definitely like, Douyin will keep you watching, and Taobao will recommend your favorite items, but at what cost? You will never encounter someone in a video store again. A piece of great music, or a misplaced book in a bookstore. Every time you order takeout, you always look for the restaurant with the highest ratings and the most popularity. Unless it is recommended by an algorithm, you will definitely not try a new restaurant. Products that provide entertainment or make our lives easier may come with hidden costs. When we go online every day, every step we take is recorded. Online shopping provides a large amount of information and data. Guess who will get the data in the end. Soon, autonomous cars will decide who lives and dies in an accident, and if you survive, that's great. Maybe one day in the future, we will know when we will die, forcing us to just go to online dating platforms to find a spouse or change jobs on 58.com.

In a New Year’s column published on Edge, a website dedicated to science, technology and philosophy, science historian and author George Dyson believes that we have reached an inflection point. Dyson wrote: "It used to be simple: programmers wrote the instructions given to the machine. Since the machine was controlled by those instructions, the person who wrote the instructions controlled the machine." Today, the code itself has become active: the algorithm Model our personalities and predict our desires through our search history, credit card purchases and geolocation. As a result, a small number of people such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma, and Ma Huateng have become unimaginably rich.

We should be afraid of these giant corporations that currently control the world. Perhaps most prescient is the warning Dyson gives us. "We believe that an individual or individual algorithm is still in control somewhere behind the scenes. We are deluding ourselves," he wrote. “By controlling the flow of information, new gatekeepers rule a growing sector of the world.” However, the companies that truly rule the world no longer control the machines they build and the algorithms that hundreds of thousands of engineers touch. It is no longer possible to control any input or output on the platform.

More than 1 million people work at Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. While many of them are stocking stuff in warehouses or helping you fix your iPhone, thousands of engineers are rewriting code to answer all our questions and wishes. No one engineer, not even thousands, can see from every angle how these platforms have come to dominate our own minds and what they might be used for. Now, however, they are used for everything.

Soon, every aspect of our lives, from the cars outside to the lights in our living rooms, will be dominated by algorithms. The next version of JD.com’s Taobao will not only suggest which book you should buy next time, it will automatically fill your refrigerator with its products, which the algorithm determines you will like or need. Sure, online shopping sounds like a utopia, but it also sounds more like Minsky's prediction in 1970 that we were about to become computers' "pets." Can it be stopped? If we really wanted to, the obvious logic would be to unplug the computer, realize we're going to screw everything up this time, and start over. But as history has repeatedly proved, human beings seem to be irrational. We are inseparable from the use of mobile phones and computers. It has been a long time since we have seen the world and just buried our heads in our mobile phones.

We need fresh air, we can take it into our own hands, reduce the use of network giants as much as possible and try to find alternatives to achieve it. Or better yet, stop using technology as much as we do and return to our analog lives, getting lost and trying new things instead of following the dictates of algorithms. But, we probably won't, and hopefully our new overlords will treat us well enough to let us curl up at the end of the bed to sleep once they've fully taken over.

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