Who am I.

 

Subject:Who am I.

Up in the Cloud, the internet world of computing, a fusion of bits and bytes brought into being an electronic doppelgänger, a creation of artificial intelligence which had kept tabs on me for over two years sifting my purchases, from the books I read to assessing my taste in music and which sports I followed. The assembly was a good attempt but it lacked many of the things which marked out the real me. It knew my email address and the bank I banked with but it didn't understand how I came by them or even the period which preceded them. 
Still it was enough to start indoctrinating the supposed influencers.  Unsolicited messages began to appear on my email and advertisements popped up alongside the story I was reading on Google. 

My doppelgänger was everywhere reminding me of this creation which sought to advise by mimicry. The problem was that it had got me wrong. I was not the skin deep avatar reincarnated from some past life but a work in progress, unfathomable for an assembly of ones and zeros but a person like we all are made up of fives and sixes, sevens and eights, the shades and shadows, not just the primary colours.

One of the things which worries me is that in another fifty years, AI will have computed its version of people who lack the subtlety of generations of breeding by sifting out the strange  unfathomable  quirks which make mankind so unique and instead we will be drafted a sense or predictable which will conform only the role nominated by random selection. People will have a purpose as evaluated by AI but others without purpose will be cast outside the walls of the city state,  far away from those idyllic retreats which success pines for. 
Of course Mad Max comes to mind, the illiterate horde eking out an existence in a half  life of of violence and debauchery. Perhaps we are already on our way as the street brims over with rioters and choking teargas swirls around. The differentials get wider more grotesque, 40 years ago a CO in a company earned a ratio of 25-1 compared to the average worker, today it's getting close to 300-1. If you equate the earnings of the likes of Jeff Bizos,  there is no end to the disharmony within society. 
Unregulated free market capitalism is the bane of most people's lives and it can only get worse as the market prefers to deal with its AI postulated Avatar. The day is fast approaching when we will be required to fit an AI profile rather than the other way around.