Today’s New York Times features an article that pulls back the curtain on how the AI handover is getting underway, how Google, Meta, X, et al are changing their privacy policies to allow their respective AI models to ingest and use all our activity and information.
Admittedly, I’m on high alert after reading The Handover by David Runciman, a provocative book showing how AI is not the first time we handed our decision-making to machines; it started centuries ago when we built nation-states and corporations, immensely powerful artificial entities with capacities far beyond the that of the individual.
According the Runciman, the handover starts silently and slowly. Which perhaps frames a question we must discuss and solve:
Is it a good thing to feed AI with the near totality of human thought and behavior?
Might doing so create a more humanistic entity that serves us, or does it create an entity that makes obsolete human imagination, creativity, and agency?
