Sam's Internet

In Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, a book that exposed the horrid conditions of meat processing, Sinclair writes:

The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.

After Sinclair and other muckrakers revealed that our hot dogs contain some undesirable ingredients, Americans called for regulation. And they got it—the FDA was formed and the government mandated nutrition labels which listed all ingredients and other nutritional information.

Today, our hot dogs may be 100% beef (with some added nitrates), but our advertisements are not as clearly labeled. In particular, political advertisements in the 2016 election cycle often made use of native advertising techniques on platforms like Facebook and Reddit. In some cases, paid actors would pose as real members of these platforms and promote candidates without disclosing that they were paid.

We need to start labeling our advertisements. We need the government to mandate this labeling. We need platforms to buy in and better inform users about the sources of their content.

What I’m imagining is something like a nutrition label for advertisements, showing who has financed the advertisement and clearly labeling ads. I think that people would be shocked to discover how much of the content that they perceive to be organic is actually sponsored.

In class we discussed the possibility of labeling fake news, but I don’t think that this is necessary or feasible. There is inherent bias involved with parsing the “real” from the “fake,” which can lead dangerously down the path of corporate and government censorship. The issue of fake, unsponsored news is different from that of fake, sponsored content, which I believe is the larger issue and represents a larger portion of politically driven content.

We must start with labeling political ads and take steps from there—nobody likes rat-flavored hot dogs.

One of the most poignant points that David Eaves, our guest speaker for the day, made was in regard to the metaphor that he drew between the Internet and the printing press. To poorly paraphrase, he described that in the first hundred years of the printing press, individual power was massively increased in terms of disseminating information. However, drawing on the example of Napoleon raising a one million man army, he argued that in the next hundred years, the power of the printing press shifted dramatically from the individual level to the state level. In other words, being able to standardize the distribution of information lead initially to individual power and eventually to state power. According to David, we are approaching the equivalent of the latter hundred years of the printing press with the Internet, where state actors will begin to more effectively use the power of the Internet and wield it in a manner that supersedes individual power.

Some might argue that this is already the case, and it certainly is in countries like China, where government control over the Internet effectively means government control over information that citizens can access. Yet, is there a way that open government can prevent this change?

I think that e-government is inevitable. We live in a technological world and when there is a more efficient solution to a problem, despite how long it may take to be implemented, the technological solution will eventually win out. When countries who invest in e-government begin cashing in, similar to the way that Estonia has drawn business through its e-government, other countries will follow suit. It is a simple matter of economics. Thus, the only question that remains is will these e-governments be open or closed?

Complete government transparency is almost impossible, yet taking steps toward open data sets allows for citizen and NGO oversight of government activity that is certainly a step in the right direction. Open government paired with e-government sounds like a reasonable check and balance, though providing the government with even more information about myself never seems like the greatest option.

On the other hand, closed e-governments could lead to nightmare scenarios. Systems like India’s Aadhaar, a citizen tracking system/unique citizen identification code, lead to more government power by providing governments with even more information about their citizens. This information can be used for good or it can be used to control citizens. This is what open government tries to prevent.

Ultimately, as David described, the civil war between open and closed governments must be won by the open side if we are to ensure our safety in the e-government future.

What makes you, you? How do we define consciousness? Are we just biological computers? What is intelligence? — These aren’t questions you would expect to be answering in an internet seminar, yet much of our conversation revolved around these philosophical dilemmas (at times heading off the cliff of radical skepticism).

As humans, we think we are special. For thousands of years, we believed that we were the center of the universe. Still, many believe that we are created in God’s image, models of the divine. How could a computer or some artificial intelligence ever achieve human levels of intelligence, emotion, and complexity?

Just because the brain is neurochemical, as opposed to digital, does not make it special. If you look inside the human brain, there is no consciousness section. All you will find is neurons and neural connections processing stimuli in parallel to create massive computing power. If you managed to simulate the brain with transistors in the place of neurons, connected in parallel, I don’t think that you would be able to distinguish between the neurochemical brain and the digital brain. I don’t think the brains would be able to tell if they were digital or neurochemical, either.

Yet, this is just postulation. I have no idea if there is something else to consciousness besides neural connections, though we have yet to discover anything else.

I think that the more interesting thing to think about is the potential of the runaway artificial intelligence singularity. All of the current applications of artificial intelligence are narrow. This includes Google Translate and other A.I. initiatives. Gradually, I think we will see more and more narrow applications of A.I., followed by the merging of these applications, and finally a general A.I. software that will lead to an asymptotic development of computing power and intelligence (are they one in the same?). The importance is in setting parameters early and often.

I don’t foresee a malevolent artificial intelligence, but I may be underestimating the capacity of humans to do evil. Regardless, it seems like we’re just along for the ride.

A youtube channel that I follow, exurb1a, posted an timely video, which goes into the possible future utopias and dystopias that come along with the exponential growth of technology. I found it interesting.

If you asked people twenty years ago if they believed that we would have refrigerators and salt shakers with internet connections, or always-listening devices like the Amazon Echo that can control these devices, they would have thought you were talking about science fiction. They would also probably be terrified if you told them that everything they do, every website that they visit, every location they visit, is tracked and recorded. They would be affixing their tinfoil hats if they found out that their refrigerator may be sending data about their food preferences to advertisers to create tailored advertisements.

This is quickly becoming a reality. The “Internet of Things,” the connection of previously unconnected devices to the Internet such that they can communicate with each other and central hubs, is an advertiser’s and data collector’s dream. We already have tailored advertisements that track our searches and cookies to feed us ads that include products we may be interested in based on this data. With the growth of the Internet of Things, the data available to advertisers will continue to increase exponentially.

An advertiser who wants to target a very specific demographic, for example, males age 18-35 who are lactose intolerant and have an interest in hip hop, could potentially find users matching this description through the treasure trove of data available among the Internet of Things. They could see that an individual had bought lactase pills or almond milk, and also made use of their Spotify data to find their music preferences if they really wanted to market their milk-free, hip hop related product.

If we reach a point where almost all of the things that we interact with are connected to the Internet, there would be almost nothing stopping data aggregators and advertisers from knowing everything about us. The privacy implications of the Internet of Things are the scariest thing for me. It seems that we are like boiling frogs, unaware of the gradual rise of our privacy being eroded until it’s too late.

At the individual level it seems impossible to stop the trend of privacy invasion. As the Internet of Things progresses, I think it’s up to governments to regulate the ways in which the data generated can be used.