The Digital Revolution Is Too Costly to Continue

Malwarebytes is a service that can help you to reduce your cybersecurity risks, but not eliminate them.  The Internet will always be vulnerable, because it was developed as an open system.

Malwarebytes reports on two recent new ways cybercriminals can steal your identity.

One results from a problem in Google’s infrastructure that allows cybercriminals to send emails that seem to be from Google.  Responding to them can result in identity theft.

Another operates by exploiting the Zoom video conferencing system to take control of your computer, drain your bank account or do whatever the cybercriminals have in mind.

It is not only cybercriminals who are after your data.  So are commercial services and sellers of products.  A suit has been brought against Shopify for installing tracking cookies on customers’ iPhones and using this data to create a profile that can be sold to merchants.  If successful, the lawsuit is likely to greatly raise the cost to Internet marketers by dragging them into courtrooms in many jurisdictions.  Defending in multiple jurisdictions easily exhausts a company’s capital.

So, just as the vulnerability of the Internet raises the threat level and cost to individuals, it also raises the cost to Internet commerce and service providers.

There needs to be some objective cost/benefit studies of the digital/AI revolution. From observation, I conclude that the costs are sharply rising, and the benefits are declining.  Indeed, many claimed benefits, such as students using AI to do their assignments and, thereby, never learning any skills, such as how to write a theme, solve a math or physics problem, in fact create an ignorant population devoid of ability to function independently of technology.  They have no ability to even know if the information provided to them by AI is correct. Their minds are totally controlled by whoever programs the software.

The digital revolution has driven up the cost of cars and appliances and made them increasingly frustrating and costly to repair.

The digital revolution has made it extremely costly in terms of time and stress to resolve any service issue problem.  Problems that in the analogue age were resolved with a three-minute telephone call answered on the third ring, now can go on for hours and days.  A telephone call gets you a robot voice programed to answer questions that you would never call about and to direct you to another robot voice to take your payment or add to your service.  It is a struggle to ever get a human, and when you do, it is someone in Asia who you can barely understand and wants your Social Security number in order to tell you that they don’t have the authority to deal with your problem, but they will connect you to a higher up.  Sometimes it happens and you reach a higher up, but usually via a return call 24 hours or more later.

Sometimes your bank account is frozen, and you can’t get to it when you need it. Your credit card gets compromised, and you have to be issued a new one, which often means you have to re-notify all of your automatic payments you have foolishly been tricked into: “Go Paperless, Save Trees, Save the Cost of Stamps,” and spend a day of your life informing your autopay service providers and merchant accounts of your new credit card number.

Everyone can add to this list, and on top of it all the digital revolution has caused people to cease answering a ringing telephone.  About 95 percent of calls are scams.  If a person recognizes your number, you might get a call back, and if you recognize the number you might answer.  Today a telephone  is mainly used for scrolling the internet and watching porn.

The digital revolution does enable us to work from home and to do video conferencing.  The fake “Covid pandemic” introduced working from home, but now companies are finding that the absence of interaction with colleagues reduces work performance and creates a sense of isolation that undermines an employee’s association with the firm.

It was possible to audio conference under the old analogue system.  What does the visual element add?  It appears that it lengthens the meetings, because participants want to be seen dominating the meetings.

The gainers from the digital revolution and AI are the companies as they are able to shift the cost of customer service to their customers and offshore any customer contact with a human customer service representative to Bangladesh.

Corporate executives and boards welcomed the digital revolution.  It lowered corporate costs by shifting them to customers and, thereby, raised corporate profits and the “performance bonuses” of executives and board members.

During the era of the digital revolution, cybercriminals have had no problem bypassing current protections by exploiting new vulnerabilities.  What, in my experience, cybersecurity firms tell their clients is that the best they can do for them is to train their employees in how to be careful and not be tricked into unintentionally giving access to the company’s records.  These training sessions are ongoing as new methods of gaining access to confidential data continue to multiply.

Has the cost of protecting information in the digital age already exceeded the reduction in cost from imposing customer service costs on the customers?  If not, it soon will.

What happens then?  Do all the people who have been taken for a ride by the digital revolution repudiate it and demand the return of sanity?  Or would they be lost and not know what do to with themselves if they couldn’t scroll their cell phone?

The digital revolution and its offspring AI raise a big question.  What is to become of humanity?  What role do humans have?  Apparently a very limited one.  I recently read that already there are operations that only machines can provide, humans surgeons being insufficiently quick for the operation to succeed.

So, if surgeons are not needed, who is?

Why did some humans think it was a service to mankind to eliminate human purpose? Confronted with the irrelevancy of people, little wonder that Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum saw the future in terms of reducing the world human population from the current billions down to 500,000 million people.  And it is not even clear what these would have as a purpose.

In the movie, “The Graduate,” the line was that the future was plastics.  Today in real life the line is that the future is Artificial Intelligence.  If so it is a dystopian future, a future we should prevent at all cost. It is a future in which humanity is both irrelevant and unneeded as there is nothing for them to do except for a handful to program the machines.  But for whom are the machines programed?

Earlier when I first raised this issue, I said a colleague and I would provide a positive scenario of AI.  Here I withdraw my intent, as I am convinced that there is no acceptable human outcome from the digital revolution.  It will destroy us as certainly as world nuclear war.  Humanity has no greater enemy than the digital revolution, a horror beyond horrors.

Dr. Mathew Maavak raises the question whether the combination of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) with Artificial Intelligence has given us an existence “that no longer rewards insight, only compliance.”

Was it the raison d’être of the World Economic Forum to create a new breed of leaders who are more feckless and pliant than their predecessors?