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Surveillance Capitalism is turning us all into robots. Don’t fear the machines: they are us.

Show Links:

•https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
•https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754
•https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html
•https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/
•https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/13/dont-believe-the-hype-media-are-selling-us-an-ai-fantasy


Episode Excerpt

On last week’s MSP, Matt Armitage thrilled us with a tale of swashbuckling misadventure and mis-spoken grammar. This week we’re heading further beyond the edge of sanity to ask: whose robot are you?

Should we assume that this is another one of those shows talking about our entire existence being a computer simulation and that the creator of our Universe is actually a pre-teen working on a school computer project?
•That’s a very specific example.
•Have you spent a lot of time thinking about this?

What’s the point of it all is if we’re only ones and zeroes?
•I’d probably point you in the direction of Rod Rees’s Demi-Monde series of books.
•Simulations aren’t what we’re talking about today btw, but if it was, then your life still has as much meaning as it did before you realised it was all a simulation.
•It’s not like pain or joy is any less real. Or the taste of food.
•It’s unlikely to be a Matrix type situation:
oI don’t think anyone is holding our bodies prisoner while our minds are plunged into some fiction.
•This is our existence – simulation or not – and it’s really as simple as that.

So, why are we robots?
•This is building on from something we were talking about in last week’s Geeks Squawk.
•Radio listeners will know that these shows, MSP and Geeks Squawk, are kind of a pair.
•but I have had some of our podcast listeners tell me that they know about one show but not the other.
•Both shows are me and Jeff.
•I get to wander off into fantasy realms and thought experiments on MSP whereas on Geeks we’re a bit more grounded in the events of the week, looking at big or quirky stories from the world of tech and culture.

That’s the cross-promotion done. How does this follow from last week’s Geeks.
•We were talking about the 10 year challenge and how that information can be used to train machine intelligence to identify, track and even age humans more effectively.
•We also mentioned some other areas where we are inadvertently helping to train AI

So you’re being literal? You’re actually saying that we’re robots?
•Not in a mechanical sense. But in the sense that we are often used as objects that are the possession of someone or something.
•Which, of course, begs the question: whose robots are we?
•Who thinks they own us?