Living in the Age of AI

AI, a technology that has evolved significantly over the years, presents a dual nature. On the one hand, it offers numerous benefits, such as AI grammar tools like Grammarly, that aid writing and idea generation. On the other hand, it poses significant risks, threatening privacy and national security and leading to online security issues and identity theft. 

As a female, one of the most significant issues with AI is that women disproportionately have jobs that today are at the highest risk of automation compared to men. These jobs include cashiers, fast-food workers, and many office-type jobs. Not only has automation affected women, but it has also affected around half of Americans because all of a sudden, people are out of jobs and cannot go without a month's pay or two months and potentially a year. Not only is this affecting everyday office jobs but also the Wall Street stock jobs. Eventually, as AI continues to develop and continues to be able to do jobs better, more and more people will not be able to support their families, which is incredibly scary to someone working in a few years. With AI in the Frontline AI video, it says that rich people will continue to become richer, and those who are poor will become poorer. Eventually, they will be unable to dig themselves out of the hole, which is terrible to hear, and will continue to get worse with AI. With that being said, there is also a helpfulness to AI. Grammarly is huge for me because it helps me ensure that my sentences make sense and that words are correct when I write a paper. It also gives suggestions to help with word count. This form of AI is helpful as a student and will be beneficial in the future when it comes to writing emails because it comes up with suggestions when I write emails to professors. 

Everywhere anyone goes online, you form a cloud of data, and then computers look at the data you created and learn it, which means that the computers are trying to personalize the internet for you and adapt the world for you. Have you ever gone to Google or Safari and found the recommended news articles to be topics you have searched within the last week or so? That is because of the cloud of data that you are forming. While that sounds great, the companies that create these algorithms do not have the same goals as you, which is when it gets dangerous. When we go on social media, we think that we are using it when it's actually the opposite, social media is using us. What makes it dangerous is surveillance capitalism, which says it is the private human experience. Shoshana Zuboff says that human knowledge is supposed to be a free source of raw material fabricated into human behaviors. Many businesses want to know what we do currently and in the future. Google can learn your thoughts, desires, dreams, who your friends and what your private thoughts are. Companies want to know everything they can about you. Whenever we search, we leave behind traces of our behaviors. The founders of Google realized how valuable this information about each person was by using algorithms that predicted what certain people would be interested in and showing ads for them to click on. Today, other companies such as Facebook do the same thing as home smart speakers. AI has spread too far into our lives and work. Even if we are not using technology, AI still discovers information about us. 

We are continuously getting filmed whether we know it or not. We are secretly filmed during interviews so hiring companies can see our expressions. Due to it being released, we get filmed during interviews and settings where we do not know we are being filmed, and people are trying to figure out how to make it more evident and prominent that we are being recorded. Many people thought we had control over what we read and saw online and determined our futures. Today, cameras are everywhere to catch illegal walking, especially in major cities, but they are also used to let pedestrians know that the state they are in is watching. These cameras can recognize cars, faces, or how we walk. This technology is built into phones too; data such as if you talk to your relatives, the language you speak at home, and if you pray is being captured. Today, everyone needs to be more careful and pay better attention to their technology and the sites they are on.