The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

When driving, people mostly learn from their own mistakes, but they rarely learn from the mistakes of others. People collectively make the same mistakes over and over again. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people die worldwide every year in traffic collisions. AI evolves differently. When one of the self-driving cars makes an error, all of the self-driving cars learn from it. In fact, new self-driving cars are “born” with the complete skill set of their ancestors and peers. So collectively, these cars can learn faster than people. With this insight, in a short time self-driving cars safely blended onto our roads alongside human drivers, as they kept learning from each other’s mistakes.… Sophisticated AI-powered tools will empower us to better learn from the experiences of others.… The lesson with self-driving cars is that we can learn and do more collectively.33 This is a succinct but extraordinary statement of the machine template for the social relations of an instrumentarian society. The essence of these facts is that first, machines are not individuals, and second, we should be more like machines. The machines mimic each other, and so must we. The machines move in confluence, not many rivers but one, and so must we. The machines are each structured by the same reasoning and flowing toward the same objective, and so must we be structured.