Digital Manipulation and the Loss of Free Will in the Tech Era

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Bing AI

Welcome my new and usual readers to my blog. Today's topic is about the scientific leaps and if there are advances that pose risks for humanity.

It is a really interesting topic because we know that science is growing more and more day by day and its method, which we know is fundamental for the evolution of all humanity, for us to progress as humans.

Actually, it is not science that generates the disagreement but the way in which these things or these inventions are applied technologically, creating serious ethical and social dilemmas.

There are things that have very negative consequences, and among them, for example, what causes more concern, especially for the events that we have seen recently in Iran and Gaza, is this militarization of high technologies, that weapons have been created that are really autonomous and do not depend on humans to make decisions.

Lethal weapons such as drones that are able to shoot and recognize targets to kill humans, soldiers that are robots like in the time of the movie Terminator, capable of attacking and identifying targets without a human controlling this weapon or this drone or this robot.

So here we cross an ethical limit.

The threshold to create conflict is reduced because there is no human responsibility to make life or death decisions. It is the machine that is deciding if that human lives or dies, and there can be very high risks.

Imagine that a hacking occurs, hacking this drone or this machine, and the machine or the drone begins to kill people in a massive way, so that massive disasters can occur by a hacking or by an algorithm that can fail.

This is something that is really worrying.

We also have the aspect of manipulation and the erosion of what is the free will, this of combining artificial intelligence, the analysis of data, neuroscience to create systems that manipulate behavior and human decisions with a lot of precision.

For example, Google algorithms that predict when a person can be more exposed or may have a greater tendency to buy a product, what kind of product or what kind of food is going to buy or clothes, is really something that leads to a state of social control.

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And this really undermines the autonomy of each person, of each human being.

This definitely exploits human vulnerabilities, can manipulate people's choices for this type of neuromarketing, and make people buy certain products for pure interest, as I am really sure that happens today.

It can fragment societies into bubbles of opinion and create opinion matrices.

Then they are having a high level of intrusion in our cognitive processes, and this attacks the fundamental freedom of the human being. It is a big problem.

What to say about the problem of applications of genetic engineering? Because I am very clear that this is going to create a great genetic inequality or a genetic gap, where the human features are going to be commoditized.

That is, those who are more beautiful or have a better appearance are the ones who are going to have more value, and this level of control over the biology of future generations is not necessary.

It is questionable ethically and above all because this should not be used to improve physical appearance but rather to prevent diseases and make our body and our organs more resistant to these diseases, not to have an appearance or a more beautiful body only.

There is the other aspect of this technology focused on the use of human psychology, the way in which through social networks they give us these rewards.

This is something that I have talked about before with dopamine discharges and make people addicted to TikTok or short videos or games, social networks, applications that are created specifically to maximize the time of commitment of people, that people stay glued to the screen and collect data, taking advantage of the time of the users.

And this really is not a leap for science but they are doing marketing, a commercial application of scientific knowledge. Then they are taking advantage of people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities, making people addicted to an application, that people are glued to the phone all the time, that they have less attention capacity, that people lose that ability to have critical thinking.

And this is definitely a manipulation that is done only for economic profit.

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Then here the problems are that it is not scientific knowledge, algorithms, or neuroscience, but the way in which it is applied and who controls these algorithms and what may be necessary depends on the performance, because it may be something necessary for a corporation but it is not good for society.

As everything has positive and negative use, for example, artificial intelligence for medical diagnoses or use artificial intelligence for these automated drones, then it is really difficult because the speed of this advance exceeds human capacity to be able to create these ethical frameworks and to be able to control all these things, all these regulations.

I believe that science is not the enemy, but it is something that we really need and it is very important to solve all the challenges that we face.

The technology that we currently have exceeds the ethical frameworks so weak that we currently have, and this generates many risks.

What I see as the most dangerous of this technology are all those applications that threaten our ability to be autonomous, to decide, all those autonomous weapons, all those massive manipulations that they are applying to us through TikTok of dopamine downloads and creating all these types of addiction.

And this what it does is create inequalities that are irreversible, and it is creating a profound biological alteration in all of humanity, and this is already happening.

I believe that the solution is to build ethical frameworks that are strong and that anticipate everything that may come, that there is a supervision that is really democratic, that there is transparency, that all people come together in favor of this, and that above all the well-being of humanity is prioritized, equality and sustainability over profit, over profit or power or just because it is possible.

Then you have to be very clear that these technologies need global cooperation and that we must not continue to allow this manipulation to exist that is currently happening with these technologies, because these technologies present all these challenges that I am criticizing and what I am highlighting here, and it is really very dangerous that we have a society really of people controlled by these technologies, by these people who are really behind these technologies, because we do not know the agendas that these corporations or these governments can have to have launched these technologies that can decide who to spy on and who to kill or who to let live.

Then it is something very dangerous, and I think we are still in time to create ethical regulations to be able to control and avoid a greater disaster.

But I really do not have hope that this happens, and I think that definitely the level of stupidity is very high currently, and we are destined for extinction directly because the power and ambitions of people are greater than anything else than global well-being.

So this is my opinion on this interesting topic of this week.

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