Page 24 - ARUBA TODAY

A24 TECHNOLOGY
Monday 31 deceMber 2018
Did 2018 usher in a creeping tech dystopia?

By MATT O'BRIEN to the tech industry's rush
AP Technology Writer to apply its newest innova-
We may remember 2018 tions to questionable com-
as the year when technol- mercial uses has come
ogy's dystopian potential from its own employees.
became clear, from Face- Google workers helped
book's role enabling the scuttle the company's Pen-
harvesting of our personal tagon drone contract, and
data for election interfer- workers at Amazon, Micro-
ence to a seemingly un- soft and Salesforce sought
ending series of revelations to cancel their companies'
about the dark side of Sili- contracts to supply tech
con Valley's connect-ev- services to immigration au-
erything ethos. thorities.
The list is long: High-tech "It became obvious to a lot
tools for immigration crack- of people that the rhetoric
downs. Fears of smart- of doing good and benefit-
phone addiction . YouTube ing society and 'Don't be
algorithms that steer youths evil' was not what these
into extremism. An experi- companies were actually
ment in gene-edited ba- living up to," said Whittak-
bies . er, who is also a research
Doorbells and concert scientist at Google who
venues that can pinpoint founded its Open Research
individual faces and alert In this Aug. 8, 2018, file photo, a mobile phone displays a user's travels using Google Maps in New group.
York. Google attracted concern about its continuous surveillance of users after The Associated
police. Repurposing gene- Press reported that it was tracking people’s movements whether they like it or not. At the same time, even
alogy websites to hunt for Associated Press some titans of technol-
crime suspects based on ogy have been sounding
a relative's DNA. Automat- of New York University's AI over its collaboration with "We were just trying to get alarms. Prominent engi-
ed systems that keep tabs Now Institute for studying the U.S. military to create it to work," recalled Cerf, neers and designers have
of workers' movements the social implications of drones with "computer vi- who is now Google's chief increasingly spoken out
and habits. Electric cars in artificial intelligence. sion" to help find battlefield internet evangelist. "But about shielding children
Shanghai transmitting their The group has compiled targets and a secret pro- now that it's in the hands from the habit-forming
every movement to the a long list of what made posal to launch a censored of the general public, there tech products they helped
government. 2018 so ominous, though search engine in China. are people who ... want it create.
It's been enough to exhaust many are examples of the And it unveiled a remark- to work in a way that ob- And then there's Microsoft
even the most imaginative public simply becoming ably human-like voice as- viously does harm, or ben- President Brad Smith, who
sci-fi visionaries. newly aware of problems sistant that sounds so real efits themselves, or disrupts in December called for
"It doesn't so much feel like that have built up for years. that people on the other the political system. So we regulating facial recogni-
we're living in the future Among the most troubling end of the phone didn't are going to have to deal tion technology so that the
now, as that we're living cases was the revelation know they were talking to with that." "year 2024 doesn't look like
in a retro-future," novelist in March that political da- a computer. Contrary to futuristic fears a page" from George Or-
William Gibson wrote this ta-mining firm Cambridge Those and other concerns of "super-intelligent" robots well's "1984."
month on Twitter. "A dark, Analytica swept up per- bubbled up in Decem- taking control, the real dan- In a blog post and a Wash-
goofy '90s retro-future." sonal information of millions ber as lawmakers grilled gers of our tech era have ington speech, Smith
More awaits us in 2019, as of Facebook users for the Google CEO Sundar Pichai crept in more prosaically painted a bleak vision of
surveillance and data-col- purpose of manipulating at a congressional hearing — often in the form of tech all-seeing government sur-
lection efforts ramp up and national elections. — a sequel to similar pub- innovations we welcomed veillance systems forcing
artificial intelligence sys- "It really helped wake up lic reckonings this year with for making life more conve- dissidents to hide in dark-
tems start sounding more people to the fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuck- nient . ened rooms "to tap in code
human , reading facial ex- these systems are actually erberg and other tech ex- Part of experts' concern with hand signals on each
pressions and generating touching the core of our ecutives. about the leap into con- other's arms."
fake video images so real- lives and shaping our social "It was necessary to con- necting every home de- To avoid such an Orwellian
istic that it will be harder to institutions," Whittaker said. vene this hearing because vice to the internet and let- scenario, Smith advocates
detect malicious distortions That was on top of other of the widening gap of dis- ting computers do our work regulating technology so
of the truth. Facebook disasters, includ- trust between technology is that the technology is still that anyone about to sub-
But there are also counter- ing its role in fomenting vio- companies and the Ameri- buggy and influenced by ject themselves to surveil-
measures afoot in Congress lence in Myanmar , major can people," Republican human errors and prejudic- lance is properly notified.
and state government — data breaches and ongo- House Majority Leader Kev- es. Uber and Tesla were in- But privacy advocates ar-
and even among tech-firm ing concerns about its host- in McCarthy said. vestigated for fatal self-driv- gue that's not enough.
employees who are more ing of fake accounts for Internet pioneer Vint Cerf ing car crashes in March, Such debates are already
active about ensuring their Russian propaganda . said he and other engineers IBM came under scrutiny happening in states like Il-
work is put to positive ends. It wasn't just Facebook. never imagined their vision for working with New York linois, where a strict facial
"Something that was heart- Google attracted concern of a worldwide network City police to build a fa- recognition law has faced
ening this year was that ac- about its continuous sur- of connected computers cial recognition system that tech industry challenges,
companying this parade veillance of users after The would morph 45 years later can detect ethnicity, and and California, which in
of scandals was a grow- Associated Press reported into a surveillance system Amazon took heat for sup- 2018 passed the nation's
ing public awareness that that it was tracking peo- that collects personal infor- plying its own flawed facial most far-reaching law to
there's an accountability ple's movements whether mation or a propaganda recognition service to law give consumers more con-
crisis in tech," said Meredith they like it or not. machine that could sway enforcement agencies. trol over their personal
Whittaker, a co-founder It also faced internal dissent elections. In some cases, opposition data. It takes effect in 2020.