Ahhh, it's the stuff of science fiction action hero fantasy: Sarah Connor fighting the Terminator, sent from a future where Skynet has self-actualized and is fighting a pre-emptive battle for control of Earth through time itself. Or the mayhem that follows when our helpful iron golems find ways to get around the Three Laws of Robotics. Perhaps the scientists of the original "Rossum's Universal Robots" watching helplessly as their inventions tear apart human existence.
All very scary. The subjugation of human will and dominion of our very physical existence at the hands ...or claws, picers, lasers... of a superior being of our own creation.
But it may have already happened, without artificial intelligence, without the Transformers' Cube bringing our toasters to an immediate and severly aggro life. In a more Matrix-like way, the directions we've given the "systems" that run our everyday lives may already be automatically controlling us. We may need to walk back some of the influence we've ceded them for the sake of humanity.
I'm not writing this post about the chip in your home thermostat here, but it serves as a good analogy. Your home thermostat uses direct input from it's sensors to automatically run one or several systems to control the climate inside a house. It may turn on the furnace and heat circulating system. It may activate an air conditioning unit. The important part of the equation is that once it's been programmed, it becomes an "inhuman" link and the devices at the other end run solely at its command.
Great, neat! I can set my computerized thermostat so my furnace uses less fuel at night, and warms my home just before I get up in the morning. Very helpful, as the major heating and cooling devices in my home now need little or no input from me, their actions are totally controlled by the computer chip in my thermostat.
I believe we're getting to a similar place with computers and their automatic decision making capacities within our economy, and it is not a good thing.
Bit of an over-reach, maybe? Perhaps. But:
What happens when someone feels entitled to have a balmy 90 degree house all winter? Then someone else decides they want it as cold indoors as out, but without opening the doors or windows or shutting off the furnace, so they install their own thermostat and set it at 30 degrees. Then someone else likes it freezing at night, but balmy all day, so they... you get the picture.
Multiple industries are making huge demands on us, and the better they get at using automated systems to control our money, the less interested they are at giving a damn. They provide less insurance coverage for more money. They turn their banks into casinos and charge exorbitant fees. They crank up their rates for the same service, but offer less and less customer service or satisfaction. And they get away with it.
There is a link in each of these situations that provides an perfect and totally impersonal firewall for the expression of inhumanity, with no gray areas: "Our computer says" You can sign up for a service, say cable TV, online, pay through automatic payments, go into default through insufficient funds, and destroy your credit rating with very, very little direct human involvement.
Computers run the models that guide the decisions on cost-effectiveness: pre-existing condition? Credit risk? What's the lowest wage you'll work for? They crunch the numbers and send the bills. Then, they dictate what, if any, leeway there is on your behalf. And throughout, the profit motive is the overriding consideration. It is the alpha, and the omega. We, like electrons, jump and move at their directives.
You can be denied coverage for a medical procedure by a high-school graduate in front of a computer screen, if the code ever even gets reviewed by human eyes.
Your SSN gets a little three-digit tag-along called a "credit rating," created by bits and bytes on myriad spreadsheets, and much more compelling to your future than any face-to-face meeting could be. And there is no longer any place where it doesn't go. Want credit for any reason, anywhere? Taking your dog to the vet? Renting an apartment? Getting a mobile phone? Your needs are so secondary to your creditworthiness, it's laughable.
And have you ever had an ad for an item you looked at online follow you around the web like a lost puppy? Well, it's more like a hungry coyote. Data mining creates an actual virtual caricature of you as your spending and shopping history: It's you, with your clothes and hygiene products for a body, a collection of brands for a stomach, teeth made of toothpaste, etc. But it's more: it has your frailties writ large: it knows if you smoke. It remembers your trips to the drug store. Your future interactions with your doctor and your bank will be largely steered by it. But there's more.
The computers that buy and sell on the NYSE for the biggest fish, for whom electrons are too slow, are more connected than you or I will ever be, and control more wealth than the lower 99% could ever convince a silicon chip to part with. Their decisions are becoming like a force of nature, like a hurricane, like bedrock. They have their own savage laws and directive. It is simply to get the biggest positive number out of any equation. That's it. They have no ability to comprehend the daily lives of the people at the origination of those equations.
Hell, they already rode their technological juggernaut, like T. J. Kong astride his nuclear bomb in Dr. Strangelove, to the destructive tune of, oh like 10X the entire world's GDP. (How did they do that?!?) Back then we had a somewhat decent economy to fling on the cataclysm and absorb the explosion. I wonder what we'll sacrifice next time?
So maybe we should unplug the monitors in front of the customer service people. Maybe bankers should be looking at the lives of the people in their communities when they grant a loan; not at directives from corporate HQ to originate more paper. Maybe we should sever the umbilicus of the Wall Street speculators' electronic homunculus, and see if it can survive being weaned from our lives' blood.
I go to work, wary and weary. Bills and expenses are inevitable, even necessary. But, as I try to sort it all out, I can not say that the impersonality of "My computer says" will ever sit well with me.