Part Six of Natural Intelligence - How Artificial Intelligence could spiral downward into real stupidity

Part 6 of 14: Manipulative Commercialism - How to sell snow to Eskimos

The last couple of instalments have been getting a bit heavy, not filled with the anecdotes of the earlier writings, so let us lighten things up a bit. Let us start with the premise that I absolutely believe in commercialism. To do many good things in this world you need to have money to back it up. However, I also believe that we all have choices about how we spend that money, and increasingly that should not be solely about individual or corporate or Government gain. The rise of ESG has illustrated that there is now actually value in its own right to making things better because you want to and you can. Put another way, I believe there is a shift to the aim of being comfortable enough to not have to think just about yourself or your personal survival, but instead to be aware and empathetic in a wider context than your own bubble.

This is what then makes me consider what might be called, “rampant” commercialism. This goes beyond money itself and is more about status and demonstrating that you are better than someone, or something, else. What amplifies this is that people and organisations that display these type of characteristics band together.

So look at the stock exchanges around the world. Originally, they were ways to raise money for a company by selling a proportion, which then gave someone a share of the profits – simple really. Now that is nowhere near as simple. Distributable profits are actually a minor element in the story of a company - it more about growth and potential. This focus on the marketing side of the company is now a core measure. How many customers you have, regardless of profitability of those customers is a driving force. Skype is a very good example of this. Before disappearing into the Microsoft Empire, Skype was sold in multi-billion dollar deals a couple of times, despite never making a profit (indeed it did not even charge for most of its services) but its inherent value was the customer base, which it could sell something to.

Think about that – the core value of the organisation was the number of people it had access to market things to…. (sorry , we are getting heavy again – yes someone figured out how to make money appear from thin air – I need to learn that trick…)

On the other side of the coin there has been real value derived from the search engine and social media giants from knowing what people are doing and directing advertising to them. This has real tangible value in that the “click-through” they create are billable events – tiny amounts but at great volume. So other organisations are paying them for the access plus the insight to target markets to sell products. For the sellers of this information they are selling that “targeted” mantra as better “bang for your buck”, for the purchaser of the access they are telling the story of using some else’s access to market.

Albertism: “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”

So what about the consumer in this. Big companies will contribute to the greater good by paying tax (sometimes), employing people (until this find technical efficiencies to replace them) and contributing profit to pensions via fund managers (that will also be taking their own profit along the way whilst also decreasing the values of shares by expressing “disappointing performance” of those assets normally in terms of growth). The “real” person on the street is something of a pawn in this. On one side, it is their data that the search engines and social media use to harvest data from – in that, they have direct access to people and their habits and aspirations and use that to target advertising. Social media is also about capturing the same, but with the added parameter of sentiment – they are not limited to knowing what you do, they know, to some extent, how you feel.

This is not new, this is what all of these big internet systems are designed to do – it is their business model. Yet I have come across many intelligent people recently who really did not understand that this was the way that Google made money, by selling analysis of your data. They also did not realise that an organisation could pay to move up the search list, or appear on the first page of a search for a particular word, or to be in the adverts at the side of a search page or you can pay companies to help you be seen (Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO). I find it hard to believe (but it is true) that such a substantial number of people still believe that the big companies are giving us these services because they are being altruistic and that things like search engine results are random and fair.

Therein lies the crux of the problem that ties in with everything we have observed to date in this sequence of articles – that if we do not understand now how we interact with a set of tools that are embedded into our lives, how can we hope to understand the infinitely more complex world of AI. AI has the ability to increase the automation of decision making that can have profound implications. This can be ultimately beneficial but unlike the use of our data in the past, this can be more invasive. Therefore, now is the time for openness and transparency to prevail. The technologists have to take the step of bringing an understanding to the masses of the way things really work, not at a highly technical level, but to bring forward the effects that result from active and passive actions have on each of us. Now is not the time to abdicate from transparency, but instead to embrace it and capture the sentiment to advance in a positive and empathetic way.

Coming Next - Part 7 of 14: Lies, damn lies and shares - Fake News and the rise of influencers