Kissmyrobot

My robot just read George Orwell’s “1984” and it nearly scared the pants off him. Ok, it would have, if he wore pants. He wasn’t scared of the book’s story, but rather the parallels his artificial intelligence found with our lives today. He’s puzzled that it seems we, humans, have read the book and thought “Cool, let’s do that!” rather than “Crap, that’s some scary stuff. Let’s steer clear.”

I told him that I guess that’s what makes us different from robots; we’re often acting not on reason alone, but through a maze of socialization, advertising and propaganda that is tailored to our deepest psychological worries and fears. We can also be masochistic, bent on destruction, and often just plain stupid to boot.

The problem with the 1984 scenario, though, is that it creeps up on us. We get use to the loss of privacy as it evolves and are smothered with campaigns about the benefits we’ll reap, be it security, convenience or better targeted advertisements. Funny, mind you, how I feel less safe than a few years ago, more stressed and try to block advertisements on my browser to the best of my ability (thank goodness for the Firefox Adblock Plus add-on!).

But anyway, my point is that the negative consequences are nearly always downplayed and rarely debated in the public sphere. And they’re not minor. They involve huge sacrifices that American revolutionaries wouldn’t come near without a loaded gun.

There are individuals and groups trying to raise the alarm, but they rarely seem to hit mainstream. When I tell my friends that I’m concerned about my name, personal details and credit card number being scattered across the Web, and don’t want to allow Facebook mini-application developers to access to my personal details, some of them wonder if I don’t have better things to worry about. It’s just something you have to live with. Or is it?

There’s an interesting article in a recent issue of the ACM magazine “Communications” about the psychology of risk. It seems that most people don’t realize how vulnerable they really are to identity theft, virus attacks, and so on. Unless the consequences are perceived to be as strong as the potential benefits, people will generally make “safe” decisions. But this is all warped when you take into account the immediacy of the costs and benefits. If the benefits are now and the cost is later… well, we all know how credit cards work.

But back to the negative consequences. We are being so completely sucked into the World Wide Web, through which everything we buy, read, view, write, post, comment, rent and bid on can be, or is, being monitored by companies, the authorities or both – and usually they’re one and the same.

Soon, with the magic of cloud computing, we’ll be writing our reports, compiling our monthly budget spreadsheets, and writing our personal diaries on servers far away from where we sit at a lonely little terminal. And these servers can be confiscated by the authorities with a flimsy warrant, or, better yet, with nothing when your government has passed through an act that gives it power to snoop through anything – not that it usually refrains from doing so without one.

But they can’t possibly sift through all that information! Oh yes, they can. Millions are being spent on developing software that digs through all the information on the web to find links and patterns, images and personal records. The Internet actually makes it a lot easier for them to keep tabs, not on criminals or t*rrorists, but on the average Jane Doe, her political and religious affiliations, her spending habits, her health record and so on.

And you know what? This is really how it is.

But oh! the convenience is worth it. Is it really? I sometimes wish we’d wake up and realize that it’s all been a very bad dream. It’s been fun, but I want my life back