Who Owns The Future?

To be free is to have a zone around you that is private, where you can be with your own thoughts, your own experiments, for a time, between confrontations with the larger world. When you are wearing sensors on your body all the time, such as the GPS and camera on your smartphone, and constantly piping data to a mega-computer owned by a corporation that is paid by ‘advertisers’ to subtly manipulate you by tweaking the options immediately available to you, you gradually become less free.

It is all too easy to forget that ‘free’ inevitably means that someone else will be deciding how you live.

But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent AIs, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double-check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the signal has been given to walk.