What is Actually up With Artificial Intelligence | Humans will soon be HACKABLE and we should be ready for it

Humans will soon be hackable animals.

I know I don't usually start with such openers. Usually, I try and pace out the actual point I want to get to. But it's time to face reality. It's time for the hard truth of life which is about to hit you.

Right now we're just being able to hack computer emails accounts, bank accounts, etc

But soon we will enter an era where we can hack humans beings. Yes, sir.

What does it mean? It means that there will be an algorithm that will be created that will know you better than you know yourself. This means that it will predict your choice, manipulate your desires and make decisions on your behalf.

The algorithm obviously won’t know you perfectly, that won’t be possible. They will just know you a little better than you will know yourselves. Which let's face it can't be tough since we live in an era which is full of "I don't know what I want to do" and "I'm still trying to figure myself out"

I want to explain this to you with a personal example here. I’ve always been a creative person, I used to make cards, really fancy ones, for my friends and family, and I used to draw too and watch youtube videos for it. But somehow it never once occurred to me that I could actually take it up as a career and ended up studying, you guessed it right, BCom!!

And when I come to think about it, how did I miss it? I don’t have an answer to that.

And it’s just not this. There are many people who don’t know so many other things in life.

There are people who still don’t know their sexual orientation. I’ve heard of people knowing that they’re gay at the age of 40, and some not knowing whether they want to change their sex. 

Now imagine, an algorithm made which will tell a kid by studying the data and analyzing it, what exactly it’s feeling, and what exactly his preferences are.

I read that one of the ways to do this would be by just tracking eye movements. The computer would track eye movements while the person would surf the internet. Here, what will actually happen is that, say you see a picture of a good looking boy and a girl, the computer will try to analyze where your eyes go and linger. 

Now, you must be thinking what if I don't give access to my computer to do this because I don’t want a third party telling me that I’m gay or straight? Then what, right?

You still wouldn’t be able to escape from the big corporate companies, who are desperately wanting to market their product. Wherever you go, whether it’s on the internet or of it, the algorithm will secretly be monitoring you to service the government or big corporates. 

So in this case what will happen now is that maybe you don’t know you’re gay now, but big companies like Amazon will, and they’ll show you ads with men instead of ads with women. So, next time you want to buy something you just end up choosing Amazon over Flipkart and you won’t even know why. But, they will.

According to Yuval Harari, to hack a person you need just two things. You need a good understanding of Biology and Brain Science and good knowledge of Computing Power. Previously the knowledge in these two things was very limited, which now it is getting better as we speak.

Once they start mastering this in the next few years, authorities will shift from humans to algorithms. And to think about it we are already trusting them.

We trust Facebook to find friends for us and tell us what is new, we trust Google to tell us what’s true, we trust in Netflix to tell us what to watch and Amazon to tell us what to buy.

Who knows in the next 20-30 years these algorithms might tell us where to study, which career path to choose. Maybe even, whom to marry or even whom to vote for (I cannot wait for the latter)

And as they keep becoming better, they’ll not just guide us but also replace us. Yes, replace us.

the truth really does hurt, doesn't it?

For this to happen, a computer will first need to understand a human being completely and will have to understand the behavior and human body thoroughly, and of course, will have to do it better than humans are doing it right now. 

But here’s the problem, they would probably be able to detect this better than a human could. 

Say, if a computer wants to know whether a person is in fear, anger, or depression, they will be able to because after all, all of those are biochemical phenomena just like flu, diabetes, etc. So if they can diagnose that, they can diagnose fear too. 

But as more, and more jobs start to be replaced, more and more jobs will emerge too.

Automation will keep happening, and it will just keep getting bigger.

This means that to stay relevant to the technology existing, you will have to keep changing yourselves and reinvent yourself. It's tough to reinvent, and even tougher to reinvent when you’ve become an adult who is settled in their lives because who likes change, come on?

Therefore, you’ll have to increase your emotional intelligence and mental balance. Because these are the things which will help you to deal with a hectic world, to keep learning, and to keep reinventing ourselves to keep up with the algorithms.