Near-universal surveillance of our digital lives (and in some places our natural ones) has been with us for two decades or more. John Robb sees this expanding to surveillance by the state, with systems in the U.S. coming to resemble China’s: “As this system matures, the desire to profile, grade, and target people, on and offline, will emerge. To do that, AI ‘minders’ will be built to monitor every individual, creating detailed profiles that can predict behavior, assign scores (from threat level to deviation from authorized norms), and punish infractions. Punishments span unsuitability for employment to law enforcement action to limiting access to public services.”
He also suggests remedies:
- Data ownership. You own your own data. Your (our) data drives AI development. We should benefit from that ownership and have a say. Unfortunately, the data ownership ship has largely sailed. The time to take action on that was during my testimony to the Senate, just before AI emerged publicly. There is still some room to demand ownership with copyrights and in corporate settings, but the easy fix isn’t possible anymore.
- AI ownership. You have an ownership stake in the AIs you train as coworkers, assistants, household workers, and so on. This ownership means that AIs shouldn’t be delivered as a service running on a centralized platform. Instead, AI should run in private instances or on local hardware that you own or control.
- Choice. You should have the option to pick the alignment (values, viewpoint, etc.) of the AIs you have an ownership stake in. You should be able to choose (from the templates available) or, through training, configure the alignment of the AIs you interact with. For example, you should be able to set the values of the AIs tutoring your kids, caring for your home, working in your community, or interacting with you at work (that’s a negotiation between you and your employer).
We need personal AI’s, just like we need personal shoes, bikes, and computers. I’ve been writing about this since May 2023. Check it out.
I also just ran A New Era Begins through an edit to tighten up the case for MyTerms, which is the only way we’ll get real privacy online. If we want to blow up Ye Olde Fecosystem—and build something that’s much better for business and ourselves, MyTerms is where we start.
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