Advantages vs Disadvantages Of Progress

Did you know that in the very first moment you’re opening Google Chrome, Facebook or any other app from the Internet you’re being watched? Your data is being used and it’s against you that they use it for profit. That’s what’s called surveillance capitalism and the big companies have been using it almost since their creation. However, there’s good news: the Internet has created lots of new jobs… while AI crushed some old ones. Therefore, in this article, we’re going to discuss the good and the bad aspects of the whole technology progress.

The bad news is…

Your data is being used and maybe even sold for companies’ profit. They are using it in order to show you relevant information, ads or, in other words, make you buy things. A very good example of this new era mood would be the following quote: “we buy things we don’t need in order to impress people we don’t like”.

Nobody knows for sure what AI can do. What if, as Nick Bostrom says, something goes bad and there’s no way of reversing the process. Furthermore, what if the machines will entirely replace human intelligence and isolate mankind? The outcome cannot be foreseen and that’s scary.

AI also means automatization. Lots of people have been replaced by robots who do their tasks without being exhausted. The good part of this is that people can adapt. However, what about the old people who haven’t done anything else in their lives? What will become of them?

Moreover, television is almost dead and the old type of marketing is barely alive. This means that their profits are going down and that’s because people love using the Internet. TV channels’ sites are being used almost just for backlinks for sites who want to pay them.

The world is polarized. Each of us has a different news feed where we can only see our own reality. If we like a particular page on Facebook, the algorithm feeds us with more and more “lookalike” pages, a thing which leads to creating an artificial world, an artificial belief that doesn’t exist, only maybe in each of our minds.

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On the other hand…

Thousands of new jobs have been created. Marketing specialist is just one of them and it implies at least 7 niches: SEO, Facebook, Instagram, Email Marketing, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google Ads Marketing. All of them are paid well enough and anyone can learn these skills.

The SEO specialists make the sites rank organically, while the CPC specialists (Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads marketers etc.) acquire traffic through paid ads. In other words, they pay the companies mentioned above in order to make their ads being shown. There’s an organic way of getting traffic through Facebook and the other platforms, but it’s pretty hard to do so, as they are all business and they want revenue. This means that the organic way of getting likes, traffic, shares have gone down.

While the classical types of marketing are almost gone, digital marketing has risen. It is more accurate, more personalized. That’s why everyone’s on Google, Facebook etc. To buy things and get informed. Even if each person lives in his or her own world (as all of us have different feeds), the Internet became and still is the first source of information. What is more, the small businesses have more chances of surviving because they can advertise here and get connected to the right audience, without paying lots of money for billboards, for example.

AI means automatization, but it also means progress. One of the best examples of this situation is the creation of the COVID vaccine, which was developed by using Artificial Intelligence. Furthermore, tracking the Coronavirus cases was possible also because of AI and because of the people from the IT sector.

While we don’t know yet what AI can become, we can still enjoy the benefits that it brings to us. And we don’t have to worry about robots conquering the world because it’s impossible to do so, as they don’t have human consciousness, as it’s us that program them and tell them what to do. Even if they become very intelligent, it’s impossible for them to acquire our type of intelligence.

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Conclusion

To sum up, there are lots of disadvantages to the progress of technology, especially the one which evolved in the past decade. But apparently, the advantages outweigh the bad part. Human jobs were lost, but human jobs better paid were created. Your search history is being watched over, but so are the COVID cases. By using AI, scientists were able to create the vaccine of a very dangerous disease. The most important question to be asked is whether the whole population of Earth is under a spell. It seems so. But in the meanwhile, you can start learning about AI with Auxilio and rent GPU online in order to start training your own models!