How Algorithms Use Your Data to Control You

Uncertainty is a good news because it means that the future is not written and that you can intercede and that it's partly up to you. If you knew exactly what you were going to do tomorrow and a year from now and ten years from now, you'd probably be living in a police state. What is your position on the nature of our privacy? It's not in a great state. We are increasing surveillance with all of this data collection, partly to feed Machinery of prediction. And that's how these two topics go together, because the machinery of surveillance is at the service of the machinery of prediction. That all already tells you something. You wouldn't surveil if you didn't want to predict. And why do you want to predict? Because you want to control. What does it mean to control? To either influence people's behavior or to react to people's behavior. I think that there are some jobs that sure, in theory. Could be done by AI, but we wouldn't want it to and we wouldn't get the same uh from it. So teaching is a perfect example. There are so many studies that show that people don't learn as much from screens. You can learn something, but it's really when a human being teaches you that inspires you and that it makes you learn. And when I think back on high school, I had an incredible teacher got called um Roger Gower and who taught me Latin and taught me Shakespeare and this guy had read Shakespeare dozens of times, but every time he would cry reading Shakespeare. And it was that kind of emotion that got me interested as a teenager and got me to think, okay, there's something important happening there that I would have never gotten from a screen.

All right, everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show brought to you as always by the Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine. Hey, here it is, in print. Look at that. Four color throughout. Check it out. Go to Skeptic dot com slash magazine. Yeah, it's God. But it's not about God. It's about UFOs, the new religion. Anyway, and if you uh like the show and support our work, we are a 501c3 nonprofit. Go to skeptic.com slash donate if you want to give us a little love there. Okay, my guest today is Dr. Carissa Valey's, associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI. At the University of Oxford. Her first book, Privacy Is Power was an economist, the magazine Economist, book of the year and has been published in seven languages.

Her academic work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, Nature. AI and society and the American of Bioethics. Among others. She is also the author of The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance I kinda gave up my privacy long ago, so who knows? We'll see what she recommends there. And the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics in her new book.

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