AI
Big techs promote 'commodification' of life, say authors at AI table
Technology companies sell solutions to problems they themselves created and tend to promote a kind of "merdification" of contemporary life. This was the tone of the "Sleeping with the Enemy" table, which brought together American Danny Caine and Belgian Mark Coeckelbergh early this Thursday evening at Flip. According to the authors, big techs benefit from the fatigue and anxiety that the excessive use of their technologies generates in people.
"This goes for Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and many others", said Caine, poet and owner of a bookstore in the interior of the USA who inspired his book "How to Resist Amazon and Why", released in Brazil by the publisher Elefante .
"My anxiety often results from scrolling through my feed forever, without ever getting to the end of the news, posts and comments," he said, for whom this dynamic means that objective reality doesn't matter as much as the economy of people's directed attention. for digital media.
Belgian Coeckelbergh, author of "Ethics in Artificial Intelligence", released in Brazil by publisher Ubu, argued that many technologies developed by big tech generate anxiety at the same time that they promise to make our lives simpler, which he says is not necessarily true .
"E-mail is a simple example. It is easier and faster than sending a letter, but it favored the circulation of a huge amount of messages, which created new demands and made time pass faster", he says He is a professor of media philosophy and technology at the University of Vienna, Austria.
"There are other technologies that exploit our insecurities and vulnerabilities, while at the same time there is an industry of books, courses and workshops that offer marketable versions of self-improvement."
The panel was mediated by journalist Fabiana Moraes, professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and author of the book "Ter Medo de Quê?" (Arquipélago), to be released during Flip.
Caine and Coeckelbergh explored the issue of using data for product suggestions on websites belonging to billionaire Jeff Bezos' conglomerate of companies and the damage of digital commerce to the book market.
"Bezos is not interested in selling books, sold on Amazon at such low prices that competition is impossible. He wants to use book sales to collect data that will allow his companies to bait you online and offer other, more profitable products," Caine pointed out.
For him, the greatest damage of this process to the publishing market is the devaluation of the book itself. "If a book is sold for half price on Amazon, because Bezos doesn't need to make money from them, people start to think that these books are worth half their price, when it is a work of years, which involves the writer, of course, but a series of other professionals, inside and outside the publishers, who need to be paid", he argued.
These other products suggested by the site through algorithms is what Coeckelbergh called libertarian paternalism. "This type of incentive that Amazon offers through recommendations, in a way, ends up undermining your autonomy because you are left with the impression that you have freedom and autonomy of choice, but you are being influenced and manipulated in this direction."
In the field of authorship, Coeckelbergh evokes artificial intelligence (AI) to cite another collateral damage of new technologies to the book market. "There are extended language models that are capable of writing book reviews based on the work of authors and authors who are not being paid for it," he explained.
"There is no transparency in the system regarding its sources. It is not possible to track which texts were used and who the original authors are. As a result, we are left in a closed circuit in which all material becomes the same and, when used repeatedly, it becomes increasingly difficult new ideas emerge. How can we keep creativity alive in this context?", asked the Belgian.
This is one aspect of what Caine called the "merdification" of life, paraphrasing Canadian writer Cory Doctorow, who coined the English term, "inshittification."
"It's a great linguistic model that cannot produce a new idea because it feeds on everything that already exists. Big tech is reducing the quality of things."
"We can influence the development of new technologies that can support democracy and social change. Artificial intelligence does not have a predetermined destiny, as big tech wants us to believe and simply accept. A more democratic technology market would be very better than supporting the initiatives of half a dozen billionaires."