Living with AI | ACTION 4 | Follow the alternatives too.

This will sound contradictory when ACTION 3 explained why you should reject each and every opportunity to ‘click’.

However, we are already within a digital world and until such time as we aren’t, or preferably we have a system of ethics and regulation that protects humanity on both an individual and collective basis, we have no choice but to recognise, accept and then work with some of the more ‘everyday use’ AI systems. So that they can be made to work for us, rather than being used against us.

Everyday use AI are the sources of information that many of us read, that we use to inform our understanding and views on current affairs and pretty much everything where any kind of meaningful life choice for us or the people we care about is being made.

The chances are that you will already be following, bookmarking or subscribing to various companies, news sources, celebrities, people with public profiles and the list really does go on.

Each and every one of these is likely to be exerting an influence on you in some way and although you will genuinely believe that you follow them because you ‘like’ them or you ‘agree’ with them, what you are doing is limiting your own input and therefore the understanding that you have about events, issues, trends and ways of thinking and giving yourself an isolated viewpoint – irrespective of whether you believe it to be right or wrong.

Nobody is impartial. But everyone can be objective.

Sadly, we are experiencing times when it is more often than not the case that writers, speakers and just about everyone who is in the public eye – or has a platform that people like you and I follow and listen to or read, that they tell us is based upon them being impartial in some way (e.g. they speak for the public or have the majority view), when they are actually being highly subjective.

By isolating our information gathering, reading or listening just to the people and the subjects that we like, we are consuming and growing with a subjective view of the world too.

This has never been more dangerous than it is right now, when you can no longer even be sure that the words you read or listen to come from the source you believe and may have been created only using a criteria they gave to a machine.

To understand a subject, the news, or what is really going on, follow as many sources that have different views on the same subject areas as possible – even when the differences seem trivial or too small to note.