it is an error in thinking that more information helps us make better decisions.
I've heard this idea before. I can't remember exactly, but I think I've mostly seen it in psychology circles where they show that most of our choices are no better than a random coin flip because we tend to get overwhelmed by too much info and default to making the decision that "feels" best.
Anyway, your three points in rebuttal to that argument are excellent as well as your suggestions that maybe we can utilize AI to help sort through those problems.
And while at this point it seems scary to lose our privacy, we actually have already lost it
We think we are hiding, yet with every click, search and scroll, we are generating data and exposing ourselves more and more - making us ever more vulnerable to being controlled.
I remember reading a story in the paper about how Target identified a young women as pregnant based on what she had been buying and they started giving her coupons on baby supplies, all of this long before she was brave enough to tell anyone around her about her condition. And that's just the data from shopping. With all the more metadata all these corporations have on us from our online actions.... Yeah, privacy is dead.
Yep, it is the people who study psychology that say more information doesn't help, but that isn't the case with AI, is it? It gets better and better. As long as it doesn't become sentient, we might survive ;D
That Target story is interesting, because that actually happened when I was at university - in the 90s... 25 years later and the internet, what can they do now? It is scary really.
Was it 25 years ago?? I thought it was more recent... haha man.... time gets away from us. Anyway, yeah, I'm sure all of us would be completely horrified by how much they know about us now. Even those of us who are careful, they still know a ton about us.