Talking about big data, artificial intelligence and ethics, we surely also there to talk about persuasive technology in the attention economy because they provide a very good example of what can go ethically wrong in the digital real. What these technologies basically are, is they are extensions of our mind. Same as previous industrial revolution build, steam technology extensions of our muscles, these technologies provide extensions of our mind functions. Thinking and feeling, among others. If you're like me, for example, you probably outsource some of your memory functions to your reminder on your phone, and this is where these technologies dog on. They dog onto your thoughts, on your emotions and then they sometimes drag them all over the Internet for everybody else to see. We have to talk about how this is happening and for what reason this is happening. We will talk about the extent that this is already happening in our society today and last but not least, about some exit strategies. What can we do about this now? We usually when we create new technology and we're in the beginning of a technological revolution, we tend to focus on the upsides of the human strength and then we see the technologies and how I can complement these human strength. Before example at the beginning of the Internet where we were convinced it's a tool for democracy, for freedom to spread joy and likes and now the like button was intended to spread a lot of joy and likes, it says it, giving some positive feedback to people. If we were thinking about the downsides, we never thought that actually you could also flip that around. The technology can be used to destroy democracy. It can improve our freedom, it can manipulate us, it can dictate us, and it can lead to depression. Totally the opposite of what we were thinking about before. Now if we were thinking about some downsides eventually we're thinking, well, it could be that these technologies then overcome the best of our strength so we gave this event a name, it's called the technological singularity, but that was pretty far out. If technology came close to actually overtaking our mind, overtaking our intelligence, we were always looking for a new solution. For example, the last battle of humanity, that's how it was called in the late 90s. The chess game of Kasparov against Deep Blue from IBM. We sent our best. Our best chess player we send to fight this machine in something that is really difficult, a good chess game, and he famously lost. Well, that was back in the late '90s. Then we said, well, maybe in chess there's a quantitative math nerd thing. What about images? They're stills the qualitative things. The machine cannot, how could a machine understand an image? Then in 2015, machines recognized images better than we could, but then we said, what are the human voice? The voice of a mother, the child recognizes this. The human world. In 2016, the machines were better than human in recognizing human voices. Then we said, well, the human face, the human face is unique. We are evolutionary programmed to well, and then we programmed machines that actually, and so we're in this race and we're still in this race, it becomes more difficult to find aspects, but they are certainly the machines cannot do everything human can, and I'm also convinced of that. Let me say that very clearly. While the frontier is being pushed back, there is still this raise on-going and the best way we can do is Professor John [inaudible] was used to say, we just have to see what the machine does better and what we do better and then find ways to integrate and to work together with the machines. The same happened before when we divide the labor and the muscle work. We still can do some things better than the machines, the muscle machines of the previous industrial revolutions. The same happens now in the mind revolution, in the information communication revolution. Now, what we completely lost sight of while playing this game to see what the machine can do and what we cannot do, is we completely lost sight of the fact that in order to control us and get the best of us, the machines don't have to be better than the best of us. In order to get the best of us, they just have to be better than the worst in us, and they have to dominate our weaknesses. By exploiting our weaknesses, they can actually dominate the best in us, and we completely lost sight of that. While the digital paradigm went on through those first two decades and then during the third and fourth decade we realized it's controlling already our mind to some extent. Technological angst has then been rising in the 2010s to the 2020s, this phenomena became more and more visible among people. Depression, addiction, fake news, misinformation and there are also some documentaries. If you haven't seen this documentary, The Social Dilemma, I invite you to watch it. It's a movie. As an academic, I have a lot of things to say about this movie, but let's say it's a movie. It's informative so I invite you to watch this one and learn a little bit more about the social dilemma which has to do with the downsides of persuasive technology in our attention economy.
