I made a mistake this week. I read too much news, powered through my backlog of articles like I was possessed. I let myself give in to a hunger for information I’d been suppressing, and it was soon clear it was getting close to turning into a hunger for misery.
I’ve started having daydream nightmares about little things AI is going to ruin. Or at least things there won’t be any way to prevent it ruining.
Today on Apple Music, an alternate version of an old favorite song came on my shuffle. I’ve listened to the old song so many times I could pick out a single note out of place, so the difference was immediately clear. In this case it was just another version of the song, which artists release all the time. It’s their music after all.
But it got me thinking, what’s to stop Apple Music or anyone else who owns the content I stream from changing songs I know? They could enter an entirely new world of censorship. Lyrics changing would be the tip of the iceberg. Entire catalogs could be subtly adjusted, adding tones that alter your mood depending on the day, playing versions that subtly make you mad one day and soothing away your rebellious thoughts the next. The ability to manipulate the data is there. All that’s missing is the choice by Apple to do the altering, and also the selection of a goal for that manipulation.
I also worry about my own memory. So much of my life is tied up into my photo albums, but who’s to say that somebody couldn’t one day just wipe that out and change my memories and subtly gaslighting me to believe in my life was something totally different. again, Apple has the ability and data and computational firepower to do this, and only needs to make the choice for it to happen.
This freaked me out to the point where I’m actually writing down my entire life story in a off-line document on my computer that is only stored on off-line flash drive. I’m writing down my memories like a journal which is not an uncomfortable to do obviously and can easily be done in an off-line format, but What really bothers me is the impetus behind this in my brain. I’ve started taking all my notes off-line on a paper pad, which doesn’t sound that crazy until you realize that I haven’t done this in 15 years. I’ve been taking every single note and email and communication digitally. Since probably the moment the iPhone came out.
Is this paranoia or is this just wise?
You can obviously expand this line thinking to any number of big scale or small scale things but in the end, what the hell do you do about it?
I don’t have all the big answers but I do have a small answer. I’m using my iPod I’m playing music that I probably ripped from YouTube videos or FrostWire or whatever the hell is happening in 2010 that’s off-line and not connected anything in the device that will never be connected to the Internet or AI or anything that may or may not turn nefarious one day. It’s a small form of rebellion against the future data overlords but it’s pretty much all I can think of.
It’s also making me look for more things that can’t possibly be connected to the word of AI in the short term. Maybe long-term like the dimmers of AI predict there could be a AI in fact in the physical world through robotics or whatever the hell else be invented but in the meantime, at least I’ll have my original 128 kB per second low quality version of all my reggae music to soothe me to sleep while the world is ending around me.
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