Following up from our previous post on ‘How the Foundation Principles of Internet May be Flawed‘, the issue with ad-financed internet only came up to the surface with the emergence of powerful Artificial Intelligence. As described in this TED talk ‘We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads‘
“It may seem like artificial intelligence is just the next thing after online ads. It’s not. It’s a jump in category. It’s a whole different world, and it has great potential. It could accelerate our understanding of many areas of study and research […] And these things only work if there’s an enormous amount of data, so they also encourage deep surveillance on all of us so that the machine learning algorithms can work. That’s why Facebook wants to collect all the data it can about you. The algorithms work better.”
Therefore, it is possible that the rising of AI combined with the ad-financed model is the fundamental reason why the Google and Facebook are excessively collecting data on us. The issue is that this may lead to “building this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads.” It might be time to change the business model of the internet.
