Will household AI systems enslave us?

Imagine the world where you are exempt from thinking about your fridge content, clean clothes in the wardrobe, shopping lists and many more daily routine tasks. Imagine that you delegate that responsibilities to someone else. Someone who knows everything about your habits, strengths and weakness. This little spy is your own personalized AI System. Consider that “your own” is really overblown sentence there, I rather mean that you - or even better - data about you is one of many objects of interest of this big, cloud based, distributed system.

Sounds little scary.

It may seem to be a futuristic idea but it’s already happening! Every smartphone, browser, search engine and even small blogs are collecting data about you. Why? Because they want to know you. Why? To show you better commercials of things that you probably would buy – and it’s OK because why should you watch some uninteresting Ads? It would be waste of your time.

But returning to our case. If we let our machines to know even more about us, and some intelligent people will build great tools - this could really improve our lives! Everyone can have its own personal assistant. If we will be confident enough we can give this virtual personality our money to make online shopping instead of us! And other robots will pack it and deliver it with drone to our doors in hours when we are currently at home. Sounds good? But such improvements of course have a price.

Is it OK for humanity or against us?

• First of all, as I mentioned above our privacy will be an abstract word. All this enormous amount of sensitive data can be used in many ways. Some criminals could use it to their nasty purposes. Governments can manipulate society and market in more efficient way. Even worse – corporations can manipulate governments.

• Second, what about our sense of existence? Some people will use all this free time to create art, develop themselves, spend it with family and being happy. But some of us can lose themselves. Having too much of free time could demoralize many people. Others can lose their ability to survive without machines.

• Last but not least, “Rise of the Machines” – yeah, Terminator scenario.

My opinion

I would give it a chance. Maybe I’m not a reliable person because I’m an IT geek and I consider myself as a part of this society that would know what to do with some extra free time. The other thing that I think is the future that is already knocking to our doors. The question is – who will let this enter?