Years ago, news spread about a system resembling a credit rating used by China to evaluate its citizens and determine their eligibility for government services. This unverified news fed the imagination of the "free world" regarding the difference between itself and authoritarian states. In the free world, the British have repeatedly defeated proposals to introduce identity cards, viewing it as an overreach by the state beyond the boundaries of its relationship with citizens, and an unjustified form of surveillance.
Then came artificial intelligence - a development born in the heart of the free world - to activate the most extensive surveillance machine humanity has ever known. The machine already existed in the hands of corporations, search engines, and social media platforms, but it remained scattered across various entities, requiring extra effort to be organized into a coherent system. AI simplified this task; it became capable of instantly organizing this data for every individual with precise detail and an ability to analyze, classify, and predict. In doing so, it turned the surveillance machine imagined in the novel "1984" into an outdated, laughable mechanism.
Do not think for a moment that Big Brother's surveillance was mandatory while current surveillance is optional. This is a ridiculous joke. Your correspondence is conducted through it, and both government and private transactions are delivered to you through its channels. Your tastes in fashion and entertainment, your daily schedule, the places you visit, your opinions, your sense of humor, your blood sugar level, and your intelligence level are all entirely under its control.
A few days ago, "Gemini" gave me the choice between keeping my activity history or deleting it. My activity history is the log I access to review every question I asked within a conversation, organized by day and hour. The condition was that if I kept it, real people at Google would have the right to access and review it, so I chose to delete it. However, I was surprised to find that Gemini did not just delete this log, it also erased all my previous, completed conversations from the list that appears on the left side of the screen, which are conversations important to my work.
When I questioned why, it informed me that they follow an "all or nothing" policy on this specific point. You cannot keep your conversations while choosing not to have them reviewed by real people, even though this option exists in other applications. My personal interpretation is that Google is in a frantic race to catch up with competitors that outperformed it in AI, and it uses its giant search engine for this purpose, cornering you from every direction.
I was also unsettled by a secondary comparison: surveillance states did what they did at their own expense and picked up the bill, whereas Google charges me for its surveillance of me, which is what prompted me to cancel the paid subscription.
If you think that the issue of total, comprehensive surveillance does not affect you because you and I are ordinary people, you are mistaken. I will give you a simple example. You have a Facebook account, verified with your name and photo, free of violations, and functioning normally. At the same time, you have a private business, and you decide to run an advertisement for it on the platform, only for Facebook to surprise you by informing you that you are blocked from advertising. You will not know the reason, nor how to lift the ban, but the AI-powered algorithm discovered that 10 years ago, you left a comment that does not comply with the content policy.
In real life, a ban like this is only imposed on you for a clear and severe violation, your punishment would have a specific duration, and you would have a third party to turn to in the dispute. A company would not tell you that you uttered a sentence in a conversation with someone that violated the rules. Yet, in the "state" of Big Tech, AI might misunderstand a sarcastic comment or a joke because of the language, and that is all it needs to punish you.
Did you remember Milan Kundera's novel "The Joke"? This is not a joke. Big Tech corporations, combined with AI, have transformed into a de facto surveillance state, while the countries of the free world act with a suspiciously sluggish legislative response. They neither attempt to break monopolies, nor do they try to protect privacy and compel these corporations to respect the boundaries of the law.
