Artifiical Intelligence vs. Superficial Intelligence

The reality is that I don't consider Facebook, or Microsoft or Instagram or whoever our favourite digital demagogue is, as services that look after my privacy.  Only now with the Facebook hearings featuring Mark Zuckerberg are people raising questions that I have always raised for years on end.  The growth of artificial intelligence simply gives these digital behemoths even predictive power to assemble a marketable picture of us, which can then be sold to those who count on the system knowing us to sell me things or even, in the worst case scenario, to deny me services.

So it is that we need to be cognizant of what these systems are doing and what eventually may be cited as "unintended consequences" of their surveillance or invasive means of probing our behaviour.  Everytime I say I like a picture, that feeds information to an artificial intelligent agent, which makes "decisions" as to figuring out what it is I like.  This reminds of a girl I used to go to college with, who initially seemed to like the things I liked.  At 19 it is OK to go with superficial intelligence and think that such a girl is destiny placing our soul mate in front of us.  Not so fast.  I also noted that she did not dislike anything - and this was my first experience of feeling used.

That girl was real flesh and blood, but an artificial agent is not something I particularly want to bond with, yet I recognize that our own responses to the artificial are not something that we largely think about.  This means that we are for the most part operating intelligently but our intelligence is set at the superficial level - mainly because we don't think we need to use our cognitive bandwidth to pay attention to this aspect of our life.  It is simply life happening until that is our fingers get burned or worse we enter into a relationship which without forethought, will simply end up ripping our heart out.

In the course of simply looking at this relationship between a machine's artificial intelligence capacity to try to figure out how to "know us" and our own superficial intelligence acting at the level of a surfer dude like "just chill man, it's nothing!", I did come across people online who do urge us to look at our digital settings - this one from ThioJoe talking about Windows 10 settings (a note to self: maybe worth listening to!)

Now I will know what level my current superficial intelligence is operating on, depending on what it is I do when I have watched this video, but I am pretty sure that I may be apt to get into a conversation about artificial intelligence, yet have total disregard for services that artificial intelligence operates that are literally on my fingertips !

The actual conclusion I draw from recognizing machines that are being programmed to know us better than we know ourselves is that this at a superficial intelligence level can be classified as invasive, but as active intelligence - it is an OPPORTUNITY to sharpen our awareness and raise our own level of intelligence.  It may well be that even a small child might actually be able to wrap us around their little finger, which in this case means accepting the level of superficial intelligence we are capable of - because maybe there is not a next level for us to attain - but clearly I am not a "flatliner" because I am able to think through these thoughts.

Thus I become cognizant that when Microsoft is asking me whether I like or dislike something they are collecting information on my psychographic data.  Who talked about that?  Wait, yes, that Cambridge Analytica guy that I guess Facebook is not quite happy with and probably wish know never existed :