Lady, Where's My Spy Camera?

I'm trying to pay attention to the little words in these big books I read.

One word I'm seeing a lot of in Kai-Fu Lee's "AI Superpowers, China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order," is data. As in calling China the "Saudi Arabia of data."

Dig this:

But this Chinese commitment to grunt work is also what is laying the groundwork for Chinese leadership in the age of AI implementation. By immersing themselves in the messy details of food delivery, car repairs, shared bikes, and purchases at the corner store, these companies are turning China into the Saudi Arabia of data: a country that suddenly finds itself sitting atop stockpiles of the key resource that powers this technological era. China has already vaulted far ahead of the United States as the world's largest producer of digital data, a gap that's widening by the day.

What kind of data is being gathered? He continues:

Silicon Valley juggernauts are amassing data from your activity on their platforms, but the data concentrates heavily in your online behavior, such as searched made, photos uploaded, YouTube videos watched, and post "liked." Chinese companies are instead gathering data from the real world: the what, when, and where of physical purchases, meals, makeovers, and transportation. Deep learning can only optimize what it can "see" by way of data, and China's physically grounded technology ecosystem gives these algorithms many more eyes into the content of our daily lives. As AI begins to "electrify" new industries, China's embrace of the messy details of the real world will give it an edge on Silicon Valley.

In other words, mass surveillance of life aspects both online and offline -- severe invasions of privacy -- will become the future driver as China and Silicon Valley race to the ethical bottom of this AI-influenced competition.

We see this already in the United States. Amazon offers a $10 premium a month to users who'll share receipts of non-Amazon purchases with them. We do this, for the money, so we are part of the problem. We don't quite have the level of China's mysterious "social credit" system, but the foundations are being laid. More data is being gathered on us than we probably want to believe.

And we're supposed to cheer for this, according to Lee. Or, at least Silicon Valley is supposed to be shaking in their boots that they're not collecting enough of this kind of crap.

I'm sure AI will find ways to do magnificent things, from detecting breast cancer earlier and such. But a lot of what I'm seeing is "Hey, use our AI to write or create art, so you can get back to the drudgery of your everyday life and hope some other poor sucker out there buys your AI "creations" so you can make a fast buck. That's not what I want for my future.

Become the Saudia Arabia of data all you want. And continue the metaphor by seeing your data contribute to global warming, snarled traffic, microplastics in the Mariana Trench, and the other pollutants your oil-based metaphor would have us believe. Remember, not everything that came from oil was good for the Earth, and the same will be said of AI.