AI will sell our decisions before we make them

Madrid. In the near future, artificial intelligence (AI) assistants will have the potential to forecast and influence our decision-making at an early stage and will be able to sell these intentions in real-time development to companies that meet the need, even before we realize we’ve made a decision.

This is stated by AI ethicists from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) in the new edition of Harvard Data Scien-ce Review.

In the study, AI specialists assure that we are at the dawn of a Lucrative but problematic new market for digital intent signalsfrom buying movie tickets to voting for candidates. They call it intention economy.

In this way, researchers at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) in Cambridge argue that the explosion of generative AI and our growing familiarity with chatbots open a new frontier persuasive technologieshinted at in recent corporate announcements from tech giants.

AI agents anthropomorphicfrom assistants of chatbots to digital tutors, will have access to large amounts of intimate psychological and behavioral data, often obtained through informal and conversational spoken dialogues.

This AI will combine knowledge of our online habits with an uncanny ability to attune to us in ways we find comforting (imitating personalities and anticipating desired responses) to generate levels of trust and understanding that enable social manipulation on an industrial scale, say the researchers. researchers.

Huge resources are being spent to place AI assistants in all areas of life, which should raise the question of what interests and purposes these so-called assistants are intended to serve.says Yaqub Chaudhary, visiting researcher at LCFI.

What people say when they converse, how they say it, and the kinds of inferences that can be made in real time as a result are much more intimate than simple records of online interactions. We note that artificial intelligence tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes.adds the expert in a statement.

Motivations, new currency

For his part, Jonnie Penn, technology historian at the LCFI in Cambridge, reflects: For decades, attention has been the currency of the Internet. Sharing attention with social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram boosted the online economy. Unless regulated, intention economics will treat motivations as the new currency. It will be a gold rush for those who focus on human intentions, direct them and sell them. We should begin to consider the possible impact that such a market would have on human aspirations, including free and fair elections, an independent press and fair market competition, before we become victims of its unintended consequences.he warns.

Penn and Chaudhary write that the economy of intention will be the economy of attention graphed over time: profiling how the user’s attention and communication style connect with the behavioral patterns and choices we make.

While researchers say the intention economy is currently a aspiration For the tech industry, they are already tracking the first signs of this trend through published research and clues released by several major tech players.