Grzegorz Osiński "Digital slaves. Trans-humanism in practice"

For many of us, checking the phone is the first thing we do in the morning; we take it to the kitchen, to the toilet, and then, of course, to work. Does it cross our mind that our state of health can be analysed on the basis of the movement of our fingers on the screen? That the microphone is listening and sending the content of our phone calls to the big IT corporations, and that it even identifies part of what we eat based on the sounds? It seems science fiction, but it is reality, claims dr Grzegorz Osiński, a computer scientist and a quantum physicist, in his last book written before his death in 2022. After reading about this, I checked the permissions of the applications on my phone - more than a dozen of them had been allowed to use the microphone, some of them not just during use. Without such a permission you can't even use the camera. Why would somebody need such data? Well, the Big Tech companies: Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), and Amazon - gather huge amounts of data about their users and examine innumerable correlations, including correlations with political views. On the one hand, this lets them develop super-personalised marketing, but on the other, they subtly influence our behaviour and worldview.

This is just one thread in this particularly valuable book. Reading it, we will also learn a bit about the history of the internet, but also about a very timely topic - AI, which offers terrifying possibilities, like deep fake, digital twins, or even a simulated child or deceased person in VR. It made me think that AI should never have been invented, especially because many people use it in order not to think by themselves. The book's message is: stick to reality - and I can only join this call.