Written by Ben Tarnoff on The Guardian.
“We are often sold a similar bill of goods: big tech companies talk incessantly about how ‘AI’ and digitization will bring a better future. In the present tense, however, putting computers everywhere is bad for most people. It enables advertisers, employers and cops to exercise more control over us – in addition to helping heat the planet.”
“Training models isn’t the only way [machine learning] contributes to the cooking of our planet. It has also stimulated a hunger for data that is probably the single biggest driver of the digitization of everything. Corporations and governments now have an incentive to acquire as much data as possible, because that data, with the help of [machine learning], might yield valuable patterns. It might tell them who to fire, who to arrest, when to perform maintenance on a machine or how to promote a new product.”