More and more of us see the narrative about the supposed dangers of machine learning and generative algorithms as a way of creating alarm among the public and thus influencing governments to regulate in favor of Big Tech, which presents itself as the gatekeeper for these new technologies, and with our best interests at heart.
Big Tech knows that politicians respond to the public’s fears: if they can get people to implore regulators to protect them from self-aware machines taking over the world, a narrative that science fiction has explored for decades.
We find ourselves, once again, being told about the dangers of technology, this time driven by viral-hungry social networks, with the aim of pressuring politicians to protect us, not from those who made up this story, who alerted us to those dangers and are therefore presumed responsible, but against “others” who may use that technology against us.
What’s really going on here is that companies like OpenAI are applying the classic Silicon Valley startup strategy of using strong initial leverage to change the scale of machine learning projects, now need to monetize their development by wooing, or wowing, the markets. For these companies and their investors, the danger is the emergence of open source initiatives able to emulate or improve their models, because this could lead to greater use of them for free.
Hence the need to link the dangers of this technology with “unregulated” developments, i.e. not carried out by Big Tech, even though we all know that many of them have behaved irresponsibly in the past by applying the principle of “move fast and break things”.
Faced with manipulation on this scale, we need to take a step back and apply some perspective. Machines have no purpose other than to serve us. They do not have intentions, they are not endowed with agency. What we must do with this technology is take advantage of increasingly lower entry barriers and try to incorporate it into our companies’ processes: first, because this is something that no one will do better than us thanks to the knowledge of the data generated by our activity, and second, because this will allow us to keep control over our data and what it is being used for. Basically, this will allow us to build our competitive advantage based on these tools, on our ability to continuously generate data and feed them into our algorithms.
Organizations that fail to take a proactive approach will be left waiting for OpenAI, Google and others to solve their problems. Good luck with that one.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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