The planet has gone through many "ages" from bronze to iron to industrial to information and now, it seems, to AI. Many things have been said about the impact AI will have on individuals in various aspects, with some mentioning various impacts it has on the workplace and individual jobs, others claiming an existential threat to human life while yet others noting the threat AI poses to people's reputation, with some being examples themselves.
Reputation is everything, and it is this that I will talk about.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are full of stories about men whose reputations and entire lives have been damaged and/or destroyed because of some allegations that stain their characters.
While some of them are true, a good number are normal cases of "acting up" or truant behaviour and the vast majority are outright lies. These lies appear to be inbuilt as a feature to make AI systems look like they are behaving like human beings or are part of flawed datasets fed to these systems or something else entirely, like a random cosmic ray falling on the GPU of a data centre running AI models at just the precise moment to cause a lifetime of heartache. Who knows?
The only defence people seem to have at this stage seems to be how people know you. What is your character?
It also means that these people who know you "can't do that" are also willing to stake their names, reputations, livelihoods and lives to defend you, especially if the political winds are blowing against you.
In an age dominated by computers, all we have is each other. Even then, we can still betray one another spectacularly.
The last defence - our minds - that we have also seems to be unsafe from the sullies of computers -actually, those who wield them with the creation of brain-computer interfaces that can do everything from control Mario to read our thoughts.
As a result, because we do not want our nakedness exposed to the public, it is important that we have something to defend ourselves with when all our secrets are laid bare; a clear conscience.
Is your conscience clear?