Is The Technology Created to Liberate Commoner Now Taking Away Liberty ?

I recently read that Google has tried in many countries to skew public opinion and thus helped in change of power. Initially I discarded the idea but probing little deeper, I realised that it is very much possible. Just think over, the moment you type restaurant on your browser, you get lot of advertisements of the restaurants will suddenly appear on the right hand side. You chat on any chatting or social media site, your each and every word is understood by smart marketeers through complex algorithms and accordingly they change their business strategies.The technology which was advanced by Silicon Valley big wigs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg is now taking away our privacy and liberty.




Hope you might have also seen an advertisement on TV in the year 1984 capturing harbinger of new time :Cased by the riot police, a beautiful girl is sprinting through a lifeless, monochrome crowd carrying a sledgehammer. She runs towards a giant screen on which Big Brother is intoning a monotonous speech, the girl winds up the hammer and hurls up at the screen, causing it to explode. In the backdrop a portentous voice proclaims 'Why 1984 wont' be like 1984. This mesmerising advertisement announced arrival of Apple Macintosh Personal Computer. The wizard of Apple that was Steve Jobs certainly presented himself as iconoclast determined to smash repressive powers, be they corporate or political, and was keen to cast a magic spell of its own. The message was loud and clear in a unsubtle way that here comes technology to liberate the consumer and citzen both. Technology would end conformity and unleash a new wave of creativity. Technology would help to achieve utopia.




In a sense, this iconic Apple advertisement was the volcanic eruption of several sub currents of US West Coast's ideological thinking. Yes, Silicon Valley was shaped by the anti establishment, communalist, let it all hang-out ethos of the hippie era. Stewart Brand, high priest of the Valley's counter culture movement, had even suggested that computer might become a new LSD, helping to open mind , liberate and reform the society. Silicon Valley disrupters were determined to wrest control of technology from the grip of the military-industrial complex, which had until then dominated the computer industry. The monstrous computers behind the nuclear missile age were transformed into the machines of loving grace.




But if look today, it has taken a very different turn, now the technology industry is ushering in a winner-takes-all economy, which has become a capitalist's dream and the worker's nightmare. The talks of the rise of robots, the destruction of jobs, and the erosion of employees' earnings and rights. In the popular telling, our privacy is invaded, our purchase decisions are influenced, our political opinions are manipulated. The algorithms track every key pad stroke, tweet and swipe, recording our ambitions, dreams, and twitches of desire. Rather than smashing Big Brother, Big Tech now embodied it and it is an alarm bell for youth who is intoxicated by taking and posting selfies on social media on his newly acquired Apple or Samsung's Phone.




Recently a new film The Circle, based on the acclaimed novel by Dave Eggers was released. Eggers lived and worked in the bay area, he tried to give and idea how the compnies like Google and Facebook trying to take control on the life of masses. In the movie, Mae Holland (Emma Watson) seizes the opportunity of a lifetime when she lands a job with the world's most powerful technology and social media company called The Circle. Encouraged by the company's founder (Tom Hanks), Mae joins a groundbreaking experiment that pushes the boundaries of privacy, ethics and personal freedom. Her participation in the experiment, and every decision she makes soon starts to affect the lives and futures of her friends, family and that of humanity.You probably have a good idea of where this story is going even if you've never read Eggers' book or seen an anti-tech warning tale before. Mae is handpicked by Eamon and his right-hand man, company co-founder Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt), to take part in an experiment to glorify a new tiny camera they've invented. She'll wear cameras on herself and plant them all over her apartment and in other significant locations of her life and embrace the idea of "total transparency" hyped by her boss. "Transparency" and "integration" and other multi-syllable words get tossed around a lot by guys like Eamon, who are really interested in getting access to our data so they can monitor our lives, sell us new products, and resell our information to third parties. "The Circle" gets this and uses it to generate low-level paranoia in every scene, and amps it up whenever Eamon strides onstage to give one of his TED-talk styled addresses to the company or to unveil a groundbreaking new product (such as the tiny spherical cameras that Eamon distributes all over the world, giving the resultant Orwellian surveillance network a granola-crunching progressive label: SeeChange).


The Circle embodies our fears that we might reach a moment of technological singularity when a super intelligence outsmarts us and begin to view us as no more than an inefficient relic. But the Tech Blogger Elizer Yudkowsky assures us on the possible threat of singularity


- I don't think you can time Artifical Intelligence (AI) with Moore's Law. AI is a software problem.

- I don't think that humans and machines "merging" is a likely source for the first superhuman intelligences. It took a century after the first cars before we could even begin to put a robotic exoskeleton on a horse, and a real car would still be faster than that.

- I don't expect the first strong AIs to be based on algorithms discovered by way of neuroscience any more than the first airplanes looked like birds.

- I don't think that nano-info-bio "convergence" is probable, inevitable, well-defined, or desirable.

- I think the changes between 1930 and 1970 were bigger than the changes between 1970 and 2010.

- I buy that productivity is currently stagnating in developed countries.

- I think extrapolating a Moore's Law graph of technological progress past the point where you say it predicts smarter-than-human AI is just plain weird. Smarter-than-human AI breaks your graphs.

- Some analysts, such as Illka Tuomi, claim that Moore's Law broke down in the '00s. I don't particularly disbelieve this.

- The only key technological threshold I care about is the one where AI, which is to say AI software, becomes capable of strong self-improvement. We have no graph of progress toward this threshold and no idea where it lies (except that it should not be high above the human level because humans can do computer science), so it can't be timed by a graph, nor known to be near, nor known to be far. (Ignorance implies a wide credibility interval, not being certain that something is far away.)

- I think outcomes are not good by default - I think outcomes can be made good, but this will require hard work that key actors may not have immediate incentives to do. Telling people that we're on a default trajectory to great and wonderful times is false.

- I think that the "Singularity" has become a suitcase word with too many mutually incompatible meanings and details packed into it, and I've stopped using'.

Now how we as a citizen as well as consumer can combat and not to become a tool in the hand of technology giants ? Little difficult to answer as our every action is monitored. Go back to our past at least for some time every day spend some time without our family and friends, read books and be away from the online gadgets.






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