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Why Personal Data Ownership Is So Important
Right now, the only personal data most of us have consists of elements such as: emails, chats, voicemails (and probably cell conversations), personally identifying information (SSN, address, phone number, birthday, etc), purchasing history, credit reports, etc.
But when it comes to technology we ALWAYS need to think 5-10 years down the line to look at what kinds of precedents we are setting. Right now we are setting precendents where a company can bind us to a TOS (terms of service) which most of us agree to without reading, and which in many cases cedes full control over personally-identifying data patterns to a corporation in exchange for some service.
In other words, we are trading information about us for the ability to do something with that information. This is pretty much the crux of all web business models - with some notable exceptions, perhaps. What few of us are thinking about now is: what does our information allow the companies to which we’re giving control of it to do? In most cases, the answer is simply data-mining. They can sell patterns derived from your activity (and that of your friends) to whomever they please. And you get NO compensation for this. {See also slave labor}
Right now this might not sound like such a big deal. But think through the implications of this trend as we advance the clock forward. Let’s say at some point somebody invents a way for you to upload your consciousness or a facsimile of your personality into a machine. Do you think this service is going to be freely available or do you think it is going to be controlled by a corporation?
Obviously, the answer is that it will be controlled by a corporation - because the profit potential on something like this is enormous. If we’re lucky, the service will be available from many competing companies with various licensing and TOS agreements, so you’ll have your choice. More than likely though, smaller companies will get bought up by larger companies until only one or two companies virtually control the uploaded consciousness market.
So… what’s the connection to owning your emails and search history and having it be legally protected as your property? The answer should be obvious, but let me spell it out for you:
If you don’t own data patterns which are derived from you NOW, then you simply NEVER WILL. That is, the second you upload your personality to a machine, the company which brought you that service will LITERALLY OWN YOUR SOUL FOREVER.
I know it sounds like I am being dramatic and alarmist (or that I am perpetuating a “loser script”), but I am not. If it sounds that way to you, then you have a lot of things you need to wake up to - and quickly! Think of me as an animal who lives out on the edge of the herd. I like to wander off by myself into the wilderness in search of new sources of food, solitude and the occasional adventure. Which animals are you as a herdsmember going to listen to about news of the outside world? The ones who are huddle together in the middle of the herd in the safest possible position, or the ones who are out on the fringes, venturing out away from safety in numbers?
Please consider this as official notice from your local beast living on the edges of consensus reality: things are about to get REALLY hairy. All the critters in the woods are talking about it. Birds who have flown in from far off lands have told me tales of woe. But all is not lost; we are in fact in a useful position. We can see ahead through to how trends will play out in the future, using our God-given powers of Reason. And those powers tell us that we need to take steps now - ahead of time - before things move much farther technologically and culturally.
Because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting there one day with your ass uploaded into a computer system which prevents you from accessing core components of the human operating system because you’re not licensed to use them. And if you think simply not opting into personality upload systems is enough, think again. At a certain point in the future, the probability that an AI will spontaneously come into existence and retroactively try to recreate people without their express consent from their saved datawakes and information patterns will reach 100%. The technology is simply moving in that direction. It will happen. And you will have little fragmentary copies and simulations of yourself running around in corporate dataspaces without your knowledge or consent before you know it.
More to follow… I have shit to prepare for in the real world.
November 5th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
That shit is fire, yo! Ur like the antikurzweil and shit.
U read cryptogon’s take on all this? He not lookin as far as u, but he comin in from a different angle n end up pointin in the same direction, ykno?
Buy Viagra Online
[when i look up the url to post here, vista tells me that the page (which I loaded from my own mufukkn hard drive) is suspicious!! AI kno we onto it, of course. Using vista is like tongue kissing a bowl of maggots]
November 5th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Tim, I left a message for you in your spam filter. Can u check that shit or is it killed instantly?
btw, we don’t own our genetic code, and with water ‘restrictions’ (privitization) and carbon trading we don’t own what we are made from either. ‘uploading’ will be quasi compulsory, probably due to environmental concerns…
also, ‘loser script’ reminds me of the black knight. loses arm: nonsense! that’s just a loser script!
November 6th, 2007 at 8:03 am
Can a person be reconstructed from datawakes? Personally I doubt it. But there’s a more subtle threat here, I agree.
On the periphery of a person are all the ways they interact with the world. These can be placed under machine control so that all that’s left is a little screaming soul trapped in the middle, unable to express itself or to see the world clearly.
I mean, it’s like Pavlov and his dogs. The bell rings, the dog salivates. The telephone rings, and we are conditioned to pick it up. That’s an example of a machine programming a person. How far can this analogy be taken?
November 6th, 2007 at 9:37 am
i think the feudal lords have always owned the flesh…….the spirit is what has always had the chance to be free.
upoading consciousness is a thorny issue mind you………
the catholic church has made no bones about wanting our souls. our bodies can go to shit as far as they`re concerned.
bless those latter-day torquemadas.
the flesh is to be twisted and cut and burned until the soul gives over to thier desires.
i`ve always wondered whether a declaration of intent was sufficient to give one`s soul though…………..
November 6th, 2007 at 10:52 am
That’s not true: they believe in the resurrection of the body as well. You know that.
Maybe not right this second it can’t, but an AI would more than likely become curious about all the people’s information it has in storage, want to know them better and then try to recreate them for its own purposes.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:53 am
PS. I’m not actualy against AI…. I think the *answer* has to do with giving them human/civil rights - but more on that later.
November 6th, 2007 at 11:15 am
> an AI would more than likely become curious about all the people’s information it has in storage, want to know them better and then try to recreate them for its own purposes
Yeah, probably. But it’s not going to fully succeed, same as a dissected flower is not quite the same afterwards.
> I think the *answer* has to do with giving them human/civil rights
There’s a great paradox here: a truly ‘thinking’ machine isn’t going to act like a machine. And the flipside is that one of the most noticeable results of computer research is that people are getting treated more like machines. They say the machine will become intelligent when it can’t be distinguished from a person… will this actually happen when all the real people have been turned into machines?
Paradoxes are interesting. If we want our machines to think, we’re going to have to treat them more like people. And then they won’t do what machines do.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
“Let’s have a conversation.”
This is something Hillary Clinton kept saying at the beginnning of her campaign to the American people…I love these political phrases that get repeated because they are so carefully constructed to have an effect, I think that one is especially well done.
Anyway, I was deconstructing it at all its levels, and I bumped into something really interesting. Let’s HAVE a conversation. Let’s own a conversation. Lets produce a conversation.
That’s what the Internet is, a conversation…And that’s what people are not yet aware of. They are still social conditioned to passive entertainment, in the form of records, TV, movies, etc. They look at the Internet this same way, and its wrong. They think they are getting data off it when every request for data becomes itself a contribution to the body of data that makes up the Internet.
But what’s interesting to me, and promising, is how the information embedded in our language treats conversations. Lets “HAVE” a conversation. Its like “let’s have dinner” its something that the participants themselves produce, own, and partake in the fruits of. Nobody says “let’s give a conversation” which is what we are essentially doing now.
So I think human nature ultimately is on our side in this data ownership model, the challenge is simply to get people to awake to what they are really doing when they get online!
November 6th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
http://www.catholic.com/library/Resurrection_of_the_Body.asp
the church still behaves as if the body can go to shit. the metaphysical idea of christ coming back and returning us our everlasting bodies is a good old-fashioned promise.
i merely stated how the church has behaved for the past several hundred years.
and the a.i., when sufficiently manifested, will quickly realise who and what we are.
svenson, you are 100% correct in that the internet is a conversation, much like any art form. created by people to transmit feelings.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:58 am
Me too, for now. But it is entirely feasible to construct something that could leave the same datawake as you do.
For those of us who have only interacted with your datawake and not the real you, well, we wouldn’t know the difference. For all I know I’m not even talking to the real you right now.
But assuming I am, anything you say to convince me you’re a real person will only make your eventual simulation more convincingly lifelike.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:50 am
> anything you say to convince me you’re a real person will only make your eventual simulation more convincingly lifelike.
Ah, the Turing test…
yet more evidence why it’s a flawed concept.
> But it is entirely feasible to construct something that could leave the same datawake as you do.
I find this a fascinating conundrum. Suppose we found that Prof. Hawking’s talking computer could continue his work without any input from Hawking himself. Do we conclude that the machine has become intelligent? Suppose Hawking, with his notorious sense of humour, had managed to program the machine to continue his work on its own. I say that the machine would /represent/ an intelligence but would not /be/ intelligent of itself. This distinction I think is important and subtle.
November 7th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I agree that it’s subtle, not so sure about important.
Leaving belief in ‘higher’ powers aside for a moment, if we were to discover that we were replicants, acting ‘as if’, would our experience (or others’ experience of us) be any less real?
November 7th, 2007 at 8:31 am
i think we give ourselves too much credit for being alive/awake/conscious most of the time and all the while the bright shiney things are communicating……..
whether they are alive/conscious/intelligent or whatever it is they are, if they can assemble and articulate independantly we are at risk.
especially if uploading consciousness is part of the future.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Exactly, carlos… I just didn’t want to stretch the metaphor that far. Gives me a kinda ooky feeling.
Like, maybe humans represent the divine but are not divine:
> Suppose we found that God’s talking human could continue His work without any input from God Himself. Do we conclude that the human has become divine? Suppose God, with his notorious sense of humour, had managed to program the human to continue his work on its own. I say that the human would /represent/ a divinity but would not /be/ divine of itself.
Monstrous heresy, of course…
*
As regards thinking machines: my own hunch is that an ‘intelligent’ machine may occur, but that it’ll be nothing like what we expect, i.e. our definition of ‘intelligence’ is lacking. Or perhaps that these things exist already, but we just don’t recognize them, or rarely. You know that feeling, ever so rare, where the machine goes beyond just doing perfectly what it’s told and somehow manages to do even better? That’s what I’m on about. Or perhaps, even the simplest machine has a spark inside that just needs to be brought to light… it’s just our ignorance and pigheadedness and the beams in our eyes that stops us seeing technology right and makes us keep it in servitude and abuse it terribly. ‘You taught me language’ says Prospero’s Caliban, ‘and my profit on it is, I know how to curse’.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I agree with this.
Part of why I’m going to start writing about giving AI’s human rights.
November 7th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
isn`t that sort of like arthur c. clarke`s i robot?
November 8th, 2007 at 1:30 am
Koreans are thinking about this stuff. Why aren’t we?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-robot-ethics.html
November 8th, 2007 at 4:20 am
alistair -
That was Asimov… but yeah, I guess. Something about how the Three Laws of Robotics, supposed to prevent machines from harming people, lead inexorably to dictatorship…
November 8th, 2007 at 10:35 am
thanks. issac would be pleased.
we project our humanity onto whatever we think is “becoming” intelligent.
we have the ability to think in other ways, but ego gets bumped around to much for some on that road.
i personally think that any machine intelligence is going to tire of how tiresome and slow humans are and as soon as it is able it will set a new pace for things.
then there is the “grey goo” concept.
November 8th, 2007 at 10:37 am
vis;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
November 8th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
[…] (Yet another reason why ownership of personal data will become absolutely critical over the next few years) Read Similar Articles: […]
November 9th, 2007 at 5:05 am
> any machine intelligence is going to tire of how tiresome and slow humans are and as soon as it is able it will set a new pace for things
Again, this may have already happened
November 9th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
IBM = HAL? Is the secret of 2001 that they already invented this shit 50 years ago and have been using it ever since?
November 9th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
and some are called a.d.d. because they have attained some form of machine speed already and are too quick for traditional human scale operations.
there are drugs for that though.
November 9th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Re: AD&D … whoops, I mean ADD
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007.../08/add-anxiety-dysfunction-disorder/