On October 6, 2020, the The House Antitrust Report on Big Tech led by staffers for the House Judiciary Committee’s in the United States is released, with a conclusion that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google’s anti-competitive stance has “hindered innovation, reduced consumer choice and weakened democracy.” (Fung, CNN Buisness, 2020) In other words, the monopoly status of the tech giants has impacted the society negatively. As a consumer, it is not obvious to see the negative impact on a personal or individual level. One might even welcome the penetration of their lives by the Big Tech. Google, for example, provides services that cover almost all aspects of one’s life from email, search engine, navigation, to health — all for free and all so convenient.
In essence, at the core of their products, it is “convenience” that the Big Tech is selling to consumers. They deliver goods to our doors the next day, they tell us which route is the best to get to our destination, and they connect us with family and friends that are thousands of miles away — they are hard to resist. The ability of the Big Tech to provide the utmost convenience is a combination of their state-of-art artificial intelligence systems and their possession of big data collected by such systems. They have achieved what Yang Qiang (2018) called a “closed loop” — services provided by an information system generate data that are fed back into the system for self-refinement. In the case of the Amazon Echo smart home device, users purchase a device that comes with a set of convenient affordances. In using the product, the users then become a resource for the company as their voice commands are collected (Crawford & Joler , 2018), revealing their preferences, desires, and behaviour patterns. To get the access of the free and convenient services, we consumers participate in the loop and welcome the companies to collect our personal data in the name of improving the systems.
However, the compromise is not just on a personal level. As Crawford and Joler (2018) stated, “every small moment of convenience requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data.” Coming back to the example of Amazon Echo, the amount of resources needed to execute the commands is much greater than the energy and labour it would take to switch the lights or play the music. The effort of building and maintaining the stack of these digital systems is not just virtual, but is embodied in the chain of exploitation in nature and people. As a consumer who interacts with the products but not the production chain, we are put in the position to focus on the functional aspects of the products and the elevation of life quality, but not so much on the social consequences of the AI products on a larger scale. The closed loop of AI products that we participate in with the Big Tech is not just a loop for self-refinement, but a vicious cycle that makes profits for the companies, provides conveniences to the consumers, but is unhealthy to the society as a whole (Bengio, 2020).
According to Yang Qiang (2018), the Third Industrial Revolution was triggered by the internet and mobile technologies; driven by big data, AI technologies are inciting a Fourth Industrial Revolution. It can be argued that whoever possesses AI technologies has the power to shape our behaviours and values. Bengio said that science in AI has reached a level of maturity that makes it very useful for companies. In fact, they are using AI to form an enormous ecosystem that has a mechanism to strengthen their kins by default. As a consumer, we should know that the stack required to sustain an AI system is not just data modeling, servers or networks; it goes further into capital, labour and nature. The cost of the systems are not just our own personal data on an individual level, but on societal, environmental, economical and political levels (Crawford & Joler , 2018).
References
Chao, W. (2018). Yang Qiang: The Fourth Revolution. UNESCO Courier, 22–24.
Fung, B. (2020, October 10). ‘Near-perfect market intelligence’: Why a House report says Big Tech monopolies are uniquely powerful. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/10/tech/apple-amazon-facebook-amazon-monopoly-data/index.html
Kate Crawford & V. Joler. (2018). Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources. https://anatomyof.ai/.
Šopova, J. (2018). Yoshua Bengio: Countering the monopolization of research. UNESCO Courier, 18–19.
