Fair trade: Your soul for data?
- Retha Langa
In an increasingly data-driven world, are we just walking data sources for the benefit of giant multinational corporations?
Every single minute, there are 3.8 million search queries on Google; 4.5 million videos watched on YouTube; almost $1 million spent online; 41.6 million messages sent via WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – and these are a fraction of the interactions that currently happen online.
As we go about our daily lives – sharing our personal experiences on social media, asking Siri to set our alarms, and counting how many steps we walk on our wearables – we are essentially becoming walking data points, where our information is collected and analysed to predict behaviour. Where will it end?
Professor Turgay Celik, Director of the National e-Science Postgraduate Teaching and Training Platform (NEPTTP) and the Wits Institute of Data Science (WIDS), predicts that in the next 10 to 15 years, humans will be “directly connected to cyber space without using devices. Your brain will be directly connected to the internet,” he says.
Wits Biomedical engineers have already connected a human brain to the internet in real time. This Brainternet project essentially turned the brain into an Internet of Things node on the World Wide Web.
In 2019, the same team connected two computers through the human brain and transmitted words like ‘hello’ and ‘apple’, passively, without the user being aware that a message was present.
“Do we really need to have our physical bodies to experience life, or do we only need to have our own brain?” asks Celik. “We will be seeing the systems creating those virtual environments to give humans an experience of nature. You want to go and see the osean, but do you really need to physically go there? Can I stimulate a part of my brain to give me that experience?”
Android rights and the Big Other
Dr Christopher Wareham, Senior Lecturer in the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics at Wits argues that we need to think about the implications of such technological developments from the perspective of artificial agents. These “digital beings” will potentially have lives – and rights – of their own.
“Traditionally the focus on this question is very much on the other side of the issue: How are we going to stop them from harming us? There is very little work that looks at it from the other side. How are we going to prevent humans from harming this being, experimenting on it? Should there be laws that protect this type of being?”
The developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) already significantly affect how we live our lives today. American academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ in 2014. Surveillance capitalism depends on “the global architecture of computer mediation… [which] produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power”. Zuboff christens this the “Big Other”. Currently, the “Big Other” includes Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
Surveillance capitalism
Writing in The Guardian, Zuboff explains, “The logic of surveillance capitalism begins with unilaterally claiming the private human experience as free raw material for production and sales. These experiences are translated into behavioural data. Some of this data may be applied to product or service improvements, and the rest is valued for its predictive power. These flows of predictive data are fed into computational products that predict human behaviour.”?
Surveillance capitalism is a “real issue”, says Professor Brian Armstrong, Chair in Digital