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The same person who started the day like this, yesterday showed us his school, his childhood, his apartment decoration, the political party he hates, the social norms he disrespects, his best friend, and the color of his best friend's eyes.
The same energy spent on spreading "be free, express yourself" decades ago, seems to be channeled in "alright, not that free, you are violating your privacy”.
As your awareness is being calm and untroubled with “I have nothing to hide”, you are generating more data, day by day, revealing quite a lot of information about yourself and people like you. More data means more powerful and granular analysis.
Streams of such data from mobile phones and other online devices expand the volume, variety, and velocity of information about every facet of your life and put privacy into the spotlight as a global public policy issue.
Protecting personal information and interests, as much as being unexposed to religious convictions, union memberships, foreign powers, or terrorist organizations, stands beyond an individual who has nothing to hide. The importance of the right to privacy is more complex than that.
What is not shown to the user, who is currently enjoying facilities and opportunities that AI offers, is:
Data persistence - data existing longer than the human subjects that created it.
Data spillovers - data collected on people who are not the target of data collection, and
Data repurposing - data being used beyond their originally imagined purpose (Pearce, 2021).
Democracy allows us to make free collective decisions about how society is organized, hence we value democracy, right? But, what is democracy without aware and well-informed citizens?
Citizens must be aware and well informed about the use of technology, social media, and its potential consequences, the same way they are informed about its benefits and primary advantages. This would make them have free judgments on whether technology should be regulated or not.
Awareness in two steps:
Enabling AI ethics as a school subject.
It’s clear that technology is here to stay, and the world is becoming only more digitally driven. According to a national survey conducted by the Erikson Institute, technology use by young children under age 6 was found to be almost universal, and 85% of parents reported that they allow their young children to use technology, tablets, smartphones, and computers.
Making education in school existent, and providing the needful information among the young children and teenagers about how to use technology and AI as an instrument healthily, appears needed. This step could, for sure, raise awareness at the right time.
Making AI sufficiently understandable by every human being would also lead to responsible individuals, an ethically healthier society, and more control in preventing possible future pitfalls.
Why focus the concern firstly on the awareness? Through amplifying awareness, we bring together the homo sociologicus of Ralf Dahrendorf, who is bowed to norms, values, and expectations (Dahrendorf, 1973), and his psychology. Therefore, we balance and synchronize both psychological and sociological elements of a human, to achieve better results.
Let’s use AI without letting us get misused.