Letter: Government spying could change humanity

Editor,

This is the era when the processing of Big Data by artificial intelligence is revealing things about you and your past that even you don’t know -- revealed not to you, but to those who are looking to use what they find to act maliciously against you, both transnational criminal enterprises, and Big Government saying it is all for the greater good, of course.

No, this is not the kind of AI that is beating the best GO player in the world; that kind of pattern recognition is superficial. This kind has built-in motive to spy on everything you do, in conjunction with everything you are in your being and every genetic predisposition you have in your body.

What in the world is this snooping, often through secret malware, going to make humanity into, even as the slightest sliver of wrongdoing is used to, say, rejecting a generally bright graduate from getting that job? What letter of recommendation will not come through, given the professor knows, through the mandatory dossier every university is required to keep on your psychology (paid for by the FBI, given all the mass shootings on campus), that you profile out to be simply a creative genius of the tinkering kind, who would not be the right material for a narrow, tunneling researcher within a super-specialized field, as in pursuing a Ph.D?

Would then the vast mass of people simply become like goodie-goodie boy scouts and girl scouts, spooked into good conduct and playing only cookie-cutter roles throughout their lives in resigned acceptance of everything that is not the next right thing to do being wrong, of every step sideways from the straight and narrow resulting in a fall off a steep cliff, so to speak – all such deviations flagged as such while presented by social media scans by parties who do not exactly have our best interests at heart?

Would all adventures need to be abandoned from advanced warning by one’s personal insurance carrier – a requirement by law, as a result to insurance companies effectively telling everyone and their doctor what to do and not do, thereby zeroing out the freedom to take risks of any kind? Would all fun be taken out of life, because people, even our youth, freeze up, hold back, just stay put, from conservatism in the extreme?

Arun Ahuja

UNM student