Image by mungang kim - The Noun Project
The answer is a resounding yes! You and I have been contributing millions of digital actions to allow the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon learn about our likes, our dislikes, our shopping behaviours, our feelings, our relationships, our networking, our friends and our enemies and much more besides.
The data is colossal and the collecting of it all has been fierce for decades, because all these companies knew that one day this data could be harvested, could be interrogated and could be used to make predictions.
Let's just imagine that apart from retargeting or remarketing a technology that has ads follow you around when you browse the internet, ads are served up to you before you even have thought of it. Sounds unbelievable, well consider this.
If data on you has been collected for decades and you have willingly served it up to your tech masters, they can serve it up to you. I am trying to explain this in a really simplistic way, it's just data, ones and zeros inside a computer blackhole that is so big that neither you or I will ever truly understand how it works. Most of us don't even understand Bitcoin, so no chance with big data then.
Let's explain it in a slightly different way. Human suffering is something we all experience every single day. I am not talking about being ill or being a refugee for example, I am talking about really basic stuff, like you have gotten annoyed about something on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and you react by commenting on it and saying that you just need to have a drink of alcohol to calm you down and maybe a Chinese takeaway to go with it. Now AI, already knows this about you, it has been monitoring you for decades and knows that you will react in a very predictable way, in fact most humans are predictable because human suffering is central to all our lives every single day of our lives. You are just not conscious of it, your suffering is automatic and your solutions to your own suffering have been the same for decades, yes you are stuck in groundhog day.
If you always use the same strategies to make yourself 'happy', you become just a whole lot more predictable and if your fellow human does exactly the same, which they likely are to, then we've all just become totally predictable. The data confirms that we are predictable organisms that behave in the same way every time, every day, every minute of the day.
If tech companies can prove this by the data, then the data can be manipulated in such a way to become more intelligent and make predictions on you, me, society, the world etc. These predictions are the artificial intelligence that everyone's working on. Initially it may show up in small ways, like what you'd like to watch on Netflix or YouTube, or what you'd like to buy on Amazon, but eventually these predictions or the AI will show up wherever you visit, either in person or on apps, the internet and anything digital.
The official description of this technology is 'multi-agent artificial intelligence' or MAAI for short. MAAI will be all pervasive, you won't be able to get away from it. We are already all inside the machine, in Star Trek speak, 'resistance is futile'.
You can read a lot more about this technology and how it is already being used and planned to be used.
Let's get back to the alcohol and Chinese takeaway, consider that whilst you are having a rant on whatever platform this might be and an ad will pop-up suggesting how they could help you feel better, this could be a new pair of shoes, some alcohol or the nearest Chinese takeaway that will be delivered by your favourite food delivery app. And all these ads will pop-up even before you have finished your snarky comment online.
Take this a step further to your political voting, the school you will send your children to, the bank you choose, the investments you will make, the kind of house or car you buy, the biggest decisions, the biggest purchases in your life will be decided for you and you haven't even got a clue that you have been manipulated.
The conditioned mind is a mind in captivity. Tech companies are very much conditioning our minds and our decisions are therefore not our own, they belong to the advertisers, they already do to a large extend today and tomorrow it will be even greater and neither you or me will be aware of it, in fact we won't have clue that it's going on.
So how do we protect ourselves? It's too late, you and I have already been assimilated, eventually it will only end when we leave this planet, even your funeral will be decided for you.