In the uber-connected world of today, haven’t you ever wanted to escape the grid? To abandon the feed on your smart phone that already knows what you are interested in and where you might want to go?
We live in a world that is a far cry different from the likes of the television show the Little House on the Prairie, when the Wilder family would walk into Nels Oleson’s store and he already knew the staples they might need. The predictability of their purchasing, and others,’ in that Hollywood portrayal of real lives from times gone by, would have helped Mr. Oleson manage his inventory, if it was real life.
Unlike today, Mr. Oleson was the only one who knew the spending habits of the Wilders and the other inhabitants of the fictional ‘Little Town’ (besides his busy-body wife of course). And even that knowledge, just translated into a tic mark in a ledger that was kept behind the counter.
But in that Hollywood world, and in real-life for shop keepers years ago, it helped manage inventory, meet customer needs, and ultimately make ends meet.
Today, the ledger has been extrapolated almost infinitely into a giant beast that breaks the bindings of the ledgers of yesteryear. It isn’t just about making ends meet, but then having those ends spiral to unimaginable distances, meeting only after lassoing as much profit as possible.
It resides within servers in data warehouses across the world. The 3-D impression left by the pen on the paper has been propelled into an almost incomprehensible, complex dimension. It is now a multi-faceted array as it exits a technological prism, where each tic mark has been berated with algorithms, dissected into a multitude of perspectives and sucked into formulas that spit out historical data, attempting clairvoyance as the formulas wade into the waters of predicting what the Mrs. Wilders of today will want and when she might want to buy it.
The Sears & Robuck catalogue and Sunday circulars have been replaced with internet shopping, where clicks are tracked and analyzed to give the spiral another twirl, and another twist. The stagnant, dog-eared pages of a catalogue are now channeled virtually through a crystal ball keyboard into systems and data models, enabling advertisements to be linked to the user via social media channels, or splash adds in the margins. Store club cards woo with benefits to enable merchants to track personal purchases.
My husband was in Seattle when I saw this article, which shared that 23 and me had a plan all along to sell their customer data to big pharma.
I immediately texted him the link.
They know where I might go?
My father only used cash to buy things. This included a brand new, red, Dodge Ram truck he purchased many years ago. The car dealer, who had negotiated the price, assuming he would be financing the truck, tried to go back on his offer when my dad refused the financing and pulled out his checkbook to pay for it instead.
Needless to say my dad drove off with the truck for the originally agreed-upon price.
He loved to tell that story.
I painted this picture of his truck for him over a decade ago.
My dad lived a little bit off the grid. He had no check card and no credit cards. He never went to the doctor. He didn’t even fall victim to the promise of the grocery store club card. While he had spending habits, they disappeared without a trace when he stopped spending.
No data set has a line item for my father that notates he chewed Red Man Tobacco for most of his life, or that he liked to drink Coca Cola or buttermilk and that he loved onions. Just the cashier at the Food Lion or the Mick or Mack in Newcastle might know that, if she is even still there.
One thing is for sure, nobody will ever have his DNA.
Artificial Intelligence
It was in the fine-print of the terms and conditions, where people signed away the privacy of their DNA to 23andme, but artificial intelligence may be one of the tools that is ultimately leveraged to study the database of DNA.
Artificial intelligence is also what may have already determined that I have been researching alpaca-fiber underwear, or that I might be looking for a few acres with a stream. 😉
So what is Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is commonly known?
According to the software company SAS, AI, or machine intelligence, “makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and perform human-like tasks.”
The concept has been around since 1956 and was founded on the idea that human intelligence can be simulated by a machine.
Some of the traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, planning, learning, language processing, and the ability to move and manipulate objects. Some great examples are self-driving cars, or computerized games. And, according to SAS, computers can be trained to accomplish specific tasks by processing a large amount of data and finding the patterns in the data.
Like in cancer research, agriculture, drug development, retail, and health care.
And, take Big Pharma as an example. They might use AI to tackle the data gleaned from 23andme, to gain insight on where they need to focus drug developments. As a result, they could shift their focus (even more) from the less-common needs and increase work that is related to conditions, which might affect a larger percentage of the population.
It might be because they want to serve this larger population more-effectively or it could be because that is where more of the the profits will reside.
The cynical side of me says it is mainly about profit, but the endeavor to to make the balance sheet better through the use of AI may have an important byproduct of improving things for people.
For example, AI can reduce the overall time and cost to produce drugs. According to Psychology Today, AI can help in many ways including predicting toxicity prior to trials, aiding synthesis, and predicting organic reaction outcomes. AI could drive the overall cost of researching, producing and testing drugs down substantially.
So, as long as these savings are passed along to the customer, instead of spiraling into the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, it is a win.
Artificial Intelligence is a complex landscape that, despite its intrigue and promise, does not come without concerns for the future. Is it possible for AI to be leveraged in such a way that the compassion and judgment of the human is lost? Is it possible that the world portrayed in the movie The Terminator, where the computer system (Skynet) realizes it’s being disabled and then attempts to preserve itself by trying to destroy humanity, could become a reality? Unlike humans, computers don’t have a voice of reason. They possess no personality, no compassion and likewise no malice.
But can computers be coded to review data sets with compassionate calculations to prevent a Terminator-esque plot?
I’m sure this work is already underway, but I am still left wondering: can computers, who have been injected with the AI ‘genome’ by their human creators, take over the world?
The answer for me is simple: if humans allow them to.
As the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, said in May of 2018, “Artificial Intelligence brings great opportunity, but also great responsibility.” And, “We’re at that stage with AI where the choices we make need to be grounded in principles and ethics – that’s the best way to ensure a future we all want.”
