Will household AI systems enslave us?

A little context: this was actually an essay I wrote for my English classes back in 2016 — not a manifesto. Go easy on me.

Imagine the world where you are exempt from thinking about your fridge contents, clean clothes in the wardrobe, shopping lists and many more daily routine tasks. Imagine that you delegate those responsibilities to someone else. Someone who knows everything about your habits, strengths and weaknesses. This little spy is your own personalized AI System. Consider that “your own” is really an overblown sentence there; I rather mean that you - or even better - data about you is one of many objects of interest to this big, cloud-based, distributed system.

Sounds a little scary

It may seem to be a futuristic idea, but it’s already happening! Every smartphone, browser, search engine and even small blogs are collecting data about you. Why? Because they want to know you. Why? To show you better commercials for things that you probably would buy – and it might be okay because why should you watch some uninteresting ads? It would be a waste of your time and attention.

But returning to our case. If we let our machines know even more about us, and some intelligent people will build great tools - this could really improve our lives! Everyone can have their own personal assistant. If we are confident enough we can give this virtual personality our money to do online shopping for us! And other robots will pack it and deliver it by drone to our doors within hours when we are at home. Sounds good? But such improvements of course have a price.

Is it OK for humanity or against us?

• First of all, as I mentioned above, our privacy will be an abstract word. All this enormous amount of sensitive data can be used in many ways. Some criminals could use it for their nasty purposes. Governments can manipulate society and market in a more efficient way. Even worse – corporations can manipulate governments.

• Second, what about our sense of existence? Some people will use all this free time to create art, develop themselves, spend it with family and be happy. But some of us can lose ourselves. Having too much free time could demoralize many people. Others can lose their ability to survive without machines.

• Last but not least, “Rise of the Machines” – yeah, Terminator scenario.

My opinion

I would give it a chance. Maybe I’m not a reliable person because I’m an IT geek and I consider myself part of this society that would know what to do with some extra free time. The other thing that I think is the future that is already knocking at our doors. The question is – who will let this enter?