How AI is changing free will.

It’s why you’re reading this article.

Free will encompasses a whole lot of concepts, but essentially what it boils down to is this :
free will is the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe.

Now there is a lot of debate around whether humans actually do have free will, and there have been some convincing arguments against it, but let’s assume for now that free will exists, and we are the masters of our choices.

But, one very interesting argument could be how habits make the distinction between free will and hard determinism very obscure, but we’re still in the clear here, since we could just value the decision as a rather long term one, one that you made with much deliberation and kept on repeating it to the point that it was no longer a conscious decision.

Even though with habits, we can still see that it is a product of free will, something that makes the discussion even more interesting is addictions. Addictions are not necessarily self introduced, and some of them are so difficult to get rid of, that they really challenge the whole free will and hard determinism boundary, although we have seen numerous people turn sober after being addicts, there’s also many that relapse soon after.

But with all this discussion around free will and choice, AI has seemingly come out of nowhere, let’s explore this aspect.

(The part of AI that we will primarily be discussing about is Recommender Systems, for the purpose of simplicity, we will use the term AI, but if you want to look further into it google ‘Recommender Systems’ and you’ll find a lot of literature around this topic.)

Most people, in their daily life use the internet in one way or the other to consume content, buy products they seem to like, sell stuff they create, basically for all sorts of transactions, there are a large number people that function completely on the internet, hell, you’re even reading this on it.

Now companies like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon are household names, in that we are all very likely to deal with them on a daily basis, and these companies love having you spend your oh so precious time on their apps, that’s because it allows them to show you ads and they make money off of those ads, in fact the global online ad industry is currently valued at $319 billion and is expected to cross well over $1 trillion in the next 5 years.

Now, to keep you engaged for long, they could show you all the different things that they have, or, they could show you what they think you might like, and by that I mean that there’s someone on the other side of screen who’s looking at what you bought/watched, what you added to your wish list/watchlist, and it sees what other people like you saw and liked and shows you the same stuff, hell, medium suggested this article to you only because it thinks you might like it that’s what “based on your reading history” means , only that the someone on the other side of the screen is the AI.

Now, the AI learns from the data it gets and over time it gets better at predicting what you like, and eventually at some point it will get so good at it, it will know what you like better than you yourself would, and it would show you products that you didn’t know you’d like, and since it’s based on a bunch of data recorded from your daily interactions with their system over years, you would end up buying a lot more stuff, and it would still legally be you buying the stuff, but was it really you?

Essentially, the AI, some could say, is making the decision for you, and while that’s debatable, it surely seems like a scary prospect. On the one hand, it’s you who is clicking on the button, entering your card details, and making the purchase, but on the other hand, was it really you making the choice.

This opens up a whole new perspective on how AI will soon control a lot of your decisions, and what’s even scarier is the fact that the AI is owned by another person, and this brings up a whole host of ethical issues, where it wouldn’t be the most outrageous thing to say that, that person could be in more control of your life than yourself.

One more thing that adds to this is the fact that regulation hasn’t been able to keep up with the pace of rapid development of such technologies, and thus with lesser people aware of the power of these technologies in the law making parts of our countries, we might find ourselves in a situation where it might be too little too late, and although certain governments and organisations are trying hard to keep up, it’s most definitely not enough.

One of the ways that you could combat this is of course by reducing your exposure to these apps, but with more and more of our lives moving online, it will be a big ask of the people to do this.

Another way could be to understand and be very careful of the permissions that you give to the apps you download on your phone, or the websites on your laptops.

Finally, you could also reduce the time you spend on your phone, but if most people around you are glued to their devices, it’s indeed difficult to abstain. One of the ways to combat this could be to raise discussions about things like these at a larger stage and better regulation created by people who are well informed.

The purpose of this discussion was not to project a sort of an Orwellian future, where everything about you is controlled , but the fact that such a discussion is even on the table is rather concerning.