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The boss of encrypted messaging app Signal told AFP on Thursday that AI tools that crunch numbers, generate text and videos and look for patterns in data are a form of mass surveillance in terms of control over our lives. And depend on practice.
Pushing back against the undoubted excitement at VivaTech in Paris, Europe's top startup conference where industry players tout the merits of their products, Meredith Whittaker said concerns about surveillance and AI are “the same thing. has two framings”.
“The AI technologies we're talking about today rely heavily on surveillance,” he said.
“They require large amounts of data that are derivatives of the mass surveillance business model that has grown in the US since the '90s, and has become the economic engine of the tech industry.”
Whitaker, who worked for Google for years before helping organize a 2018 staff walkout over working conditions, founded the AI Now Institute at New York University in 2017.
She is now campaigning for privacy and against business models built on extracting personal data.
And he's clear that he doesn't believe the AI industry is moving in the right direction.
AI systems are hungry for data input, but they also produce a lot of data.
Even if it is wrong, he said, this output “has the power to classify, order and direct our lives in ways that we should be equally concerned about”.
And he pointed to the power imbalance created by an industry controlled by “a handful of surveillance giants” who are “largely unaccountable.”
“Most of us are not users of AI,” he said.
“Most of us are used by our employers, law enforcement, governments, whatever.
“They have their own goals but they can't be goals that benefit us or benefit society.”
A striking example, he said, is the way AI firms like to say they are helping to find solutions to the climate crisis.
In fact, he said, they were taking money from fossil fuel companies and using their technology to find new resources to extract.
“Because, of course, where's the revenue? It's not in saving the climate,” he said.
“It's in massive contracts with BP, with Exxon, with other major oil and gas companies.”
Ultimately, he argued, Europeans shouldn't think in terms of competing with big American AI firms.
Another option might be “reimagining technology to serve more democratic and more rights-protecting or pluralistic societies.”