AI, Robot
The Three Laws, quoted from the "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:
First Law A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Sarah Conner, the future mother of the Resistance against Skynet is in danger. The Terminator, sent from the future to destroy her and thus ensure the reign of the machines, is not killing a young Bill Paxton for his clothing or making pithy quips in an Austrian accent.
Rather, the Terminator is right there in the room with her. It is hovering underneath her Google searches for shoes and running through her purchases via Amazon. The Terminator is guiding her choices with targeted ads on her Instagram feed and in her Faceborg wall. It is not flashy but can be seen, if Sarah were paying attention, in the inevitability of using her behavior online to manipulate her choices. What she reads, what she watches on YouTube, what she buys is not really up to her anymore.
Less like Schwarzenegger and more like Max Headroom, the modern Skynet is not robots with laser guns. The modern mechanized AI taking over thge planet is an algorithm.
YouTube, aiming to maximize viewing time, deploys AI-based content recommendation algorithms. Years ago, computer scientists and users began noticing that YouTube’s algorithm seemed to achieve its goal by recommending increasingly extreme and conspiratorial content.
One researcher reported that after she viewed footage of Donald Trump campaign rallies, YouTube next offered her videos featuring “white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.” The algorithm’s upping-the-ante approach went beyond politics, she said: “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.”
As a result, research suggests, YouTube’s algorithm has been helping to polarize and radicalize people and spread misinformation, just to keep us watching.
One would think that YouTube, Faceborg, Instagram. Twitter, TikTok, SnapChat, WhatsApp, and the host of other similar but differently incorporated social media platforms are somehow individual companies but they are not. Not really. They are all robots in service of Skynet.
Skynet does not follow the Three Laws of Robotics.
Skynet already has too much control over discourse. They have user populations greater than the population of any country on earth, and their moderation policies affect many times more people than the media, the courts, or the Bill of Rights. The real problem is at the core: a business model that sells people’s attention to advertisers, which motivates companies to reward the content that most effectively manipulates people’s emotions. That in turn, because of Skynet's scale and dominance, has detrimental effects for all of media, culture, and politics.
The technology is two-pronged. On one side is the part we have heard about in the Faceborg Papers and in documentaries detailing how the algorithms collect our viewing habits, recognize that we are driven to see heads rolling across the highway following a horrendous accident, and guide us to see more and more decapitations. The other side is data mining. Recognizing our buying behaviors, interest levels, and selling our identities to people selling things so that they can more fully annoy us until we capitulate and buy whatever crap they feed us.
Skynet is Meta. Skynet is also ZoomInfo. Aside from the luddites in the world, casually refusing to participate in the digital world at all, everyone is captive and tool of the coming human extinction.
The Achilles Heel to Skynet is To Make It Inconvenient
Modern humanity is no different from ancient humanity. We each crave sustenance, shelter, resources but what we really cling to is convenience.
From 100 years ago as we waited for our often one full meal a day for the hours it took to prepare, today we can barely handle waiting more than five minutes for one of three per day. We know that driving vehicles with combustion engines is slowly destroying our species' ability to live on the planet, yet the convenience of traveling twenty miles in twenty minutes is too alluring.
We love our labels because stereotyping huge groups of people based entirely on either immutable characteristics or ideological choices is more convenient than spending the time required to understand the individual. Using a search engine is so much easier than reading for comprehension.
We don't need Kyle Reese to travel through time to both save and impregnate us (although Michael Biehn is a serious example of Alpha Male genetic material), we need someone to make Skynet less convenient.
Here's the idea that will save humanity: charge for social media access. You think TikTok would have more than a billion idiots following it to watch thirty second videos about nonsense if users had to pay a monthly subscription? Do you believe Faceborg would have its nefarious ability to sell billions of points of identity resolved data if we had to pay to use it?
How to get Skynet to play along? Legally make them accountable for what they publish, fine the shit out of them when they ignore decapitated heads, and tax their asses off. The data privacy thing sounds like progress but, trust me, they're finding their way around these safeguards.
Every time you log on, I want you to hear the "Bum-bum-bum-bump" strains of the opening to 1984's Terminator and comprehend that the end of humanity doesn't come with anything more than a clicked upon thumbs up.
