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ACCORDING TO LIZ - As a focus of the WGA labor confrontations last year, the impact of rapidly expanding A.I. on our lives moved front and center in public discourse.
Union negotiators knew the genie could not be stuffed back in the bottle once corporate bosses had been reeled in by this new toy that had rows of dollar signs rolling up in their eyes, but the writers struck for months demanding, at a bare minimum, transparency and consultation.
And in the process brought the dangers of A.I. out of the back room and onto the front pages and lead stories across the country.
Companies and management were busily working behind-the-scenes to promote A.I. solutions that would allow them to reduce and replace costly workers and their grandfathered protections from the workforce. Now Great Oz has had his curtain drawn back.
The easy-peasy one-click solution for executives obscures an important point: even A.I solutions are based on someone doing the work that generates their end products.
Someone does the research, someone builds the goods, someone maintains the systems that track consumer demands. Someone makes the decisions to ensure those workers are paid as little as possible so the executives can maximize company profits and their pay.
Workers in the United States want more pay and better benefits? Build in Bangladesh. Salespeople in American stores want bathroom breaks and might bitch to customers? Shutter brick-and-mortar stores and sell on the internet.
More clicks, more money with less understanding of how the supply chain steals jobs and contributes to climate change.
More clicks. With most consumers unaware of how those clicks dovetail into the monetization of their data, leaving them vulnerable to psychological manipulation by C-suite grandees. Giving rise to a corporate elite who are even more effective at manipulating the courts and elected officials.
Creating large pools of poorly protected, exploitable data collections posing an existential danger for scamming, stalking, tracking, defrauding, and extortion of the innocent by those who would prey on the defenseless. Defenseless because A.I. has vastly amplified their vulnerabilities.
Additionally, the datasets on which A.I. decision-making depends are flawed from the biases and inaccuracies inherent in their input, and will further magnify and reinforce existing discrimination.
Not to mention that too often it is arms of our own government that are in bed with those exacerbating the problem: many recent data-breaches have been traced to the CIA, NSA and their alphabet brethren as they boldly go where no man could go before and seek out new ways to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of… civilization? Big Brother on steroids?
U.S. culture and language blames the victim even, and especially, if they were victimized through no fault of their own. Civil rights and liberties are discarded in the name of military-industrial complex security (grossly expanded because of its inadequacies in the years leading up to 9/11), and in favor of corporate greed.
This, despite numerous instances of case law upheld by the courts for generations that Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government includes the right to privacy.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and many other countries’ constitutions concur.
Even before the advent of A.I., availability of personal information online through our digital footprints on social media, in transacting business and pursuing pleasure, in connecting with loved ones and researching what is going on in the world around us, attracted unwanted scrutiny and exposed people to having their identity hacked, their interests misinterpreted or manipulated, and their assets stolen.
A.I has made it even more challenging to protect personal information and to ensure that people’s privacy, dignity and autonomy are respected, to protect those human rights we hold so dear, to defend democracy itself, and the freedom for individuals to live their lives without fear of being monitored or surveilled.
A.I. now allows people’s own voices and faces to be weaponized against them and used to destroy their lives.
A.I. is both a money-suck and a power-grab and raises red flags about sociotechnical concerns where technological innovations blur the boundaries between artificial and real-world experiences.
This month, Apple is trying to shove more of the same down their customers’ throats with the upselling of the iPhone 16.
Just another example of how Americans and people everywhere are reaching for glittery new toys, the purpose of which is to train them not to think but to find fulfillment as the programmed consumer cogs in the corporatocracy’s prime agenda.
Mankind now faces an existential danger if the forces that could contain Big Tech continue to pump out these partially tested products willy-nilly while protecting A.I. from any government regulation.
That black box of data and programming matrixes that A.I. developers and profiteers claim as trade secrets and refuse to reveal is a Pandora’s Box of misaligned values masquerading as “assistance” about which we, as human beings, need to be very, very careful.
For people who want to learn more about the A.I. industry’s over-reaction to the common-sense approaches contained in California’s SB-1047, check this out.
For people wishing to take a much deeper dive into the issue and paths to solutions already being addressed in D.C.
Those wanting a broader overview of internet and technology issues can learn more in two very accessible books: Dignity in the Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us and Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us. Both are by Ro Khanna, Representative from California’s Fremont District (which encompasses Silicon Valley), author of the Internet Bill of Rights developed in the wake of abuses and breaches during the 2016 election, and dark horse candidate for President in 2028.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
