I’m getting increasingly concerned by our technological advance and I want to know what your thoughts on the matter are. As a computer programmer, technology plays a significant role in my life. As time advance, I’m developing a love-hate relationship with it. On one side, it’s how I make a living and pretty much the only skill that I have, and when I’m not too cognitively impaired (this tend to come and go), I even enjoy working with technologies.
On the other hand, especially when I don’t feel so well, I feel technologies become a burden. There is many factors to that. There for one my tendency for internet addiction, the short attention span it develop but also the mental fatigue of handling that ever increasing complexity.
We cannot deny the good side of it, neither the irony of writing this on a forum that allows people from around the world to connect in a way that wasn’t possible 30 years ago. Still, I’m skeptical that the good side balance the ill effects. Some are more optimist than I am, Shinzen Young might be a good example. The folks at Buddhist Geeks are in part dedicated to the question, but since they are looking more at the positive side of the equation, it sometimes comes out as naïve.
There are many debates to have. From environmental impact, social impact, psychological implications, and so forth. This post was more triggered by personal concerns, so my reflection doesn’t goes much beyond the impact I noticed first hand. For instance, in the last few weeks, I did some experiment with
Watson User Modeling and it got me to reflect on the advance of artificial intelligence and how its applications.
While you might have heard of how Watson can win at Jeopardy and it’s going to be a great to assist doctors in their diagnosis, I got to be exposed to the less glorious potentials uses for Watson and how it is marketed. Watson has been essentially designed to assist marketers in profiling consumers’ personalities.
We are all already the subject of targeted ads. A few years ago, I went through a breakup and Gmail picked up some keywords in my e-mail and I was targeted with relationship counselling. This was more than 5 years ago. If you never ventured in the world of online marketing, you might be shocked by the level of sophistication it got today. Marketing is an old business (Side note: watch
The Century Of The Self if you want to see a compelling exposé on how Freudian theory was key in the development of the consumer society).
Still, with artificial intelligence coming into play, marketers’ ability to map human behavior and personalities will reach an entirely new level. All our mental weaknesses, our cravings, our desires for an identity, will be analyzed at a scale and with a precision never seen before. This project of setting booby traps for the human mind is only growing in scale unopposed. To make the matter worse, western psychology, the field that should be the most concerned about human well-being, has positioned itself in a way that make it complicit about it. And don’t get me started about positive psychology, someone close to me got into it and I don’t have many things positive to say about it.
I will end my gloomy rant before it get too depressing. Maybe behind all this is some other issue and I’m just not looking at it from the right angle. There are surely positive avenues, neuroscience being one of which that give me great hope. If only we can keep fRMI from the hands of marketers…