“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” This is the opening remark of the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma”. Thanks to the frank speech by the Tech Company insiders. Their statements explain some of my long-term questions and clearly point out the doomed prospect we face in the coming decades. While we hail to every advancement linked to internet, AI, big data, there is an urgent need for us to think of the other side of this story and find out solutions to the danger.
I first learned about internet around 1998 in my home city Tianjin. Back then, computer and internet were not household devices. My father recognized the importance of World Wide Web. One afternoon, he showed me into a net bar and paid ten RMB to the admin staff and asked them to teach me some basic skills of using internet. Since then, I have witnessed the rapid growth of internet and expereinced the remarkable convenience brought by internet to human life.
Until one day, I began to notice something wrong with the internet. I clicked an ad of a backpack brand. In the next few months, I was bombarded with pop-up ads of this brand and some similar backpack brands. I realized I was likely stalked online. I am right. In the documentary, these gurus said clearly that each user’s any activity on the app is under surveillance, analyses, in doing so, similar promotion ads will be precisely targeting users. The BBC Tech article also talked about this AI-aided business model — AI can make you buy more things. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54522442 Simply put, Tech companies profit from analyzing and selling users’ information.
Sadly, history tells us when the technology grows too fast and regulation can not keep up, disaster occurs, like the atomic bomb in 1940s. The nuclear technology was used to produce weapons to take human lives and destroy our Mother Earth. There is a high correlation between the flourish of these tech companies with worsening mental health in youths. What’s worse, the political extremes grow quickly, too. Civial war? Dystopia? Hope not. Yet it needs these tech compnies to regulate their commercial behaviour and inevitably, sacrifice some commercial benefits. Will it work for capitalism world?