How Your Data Is The Driving Fuel For Artificial Intelligence

Have you ever wondered why tech giants are allowing you to store your data on their servers for free ?

Or rather think about how social media can identify your friends and you in your pictures automatically? 

They are giving us their servers for free cloud storage in gigabytes to store all our different kinds of documents, photos, videos without even asking for a single penny.

It's not just the target advertising that these tech giants are interested in but they want something more from us. They want our data for developing Artificial intelligence. 

AI in simple terms is nothing but machines being able to interact with the environment just like as we humans do. To make this possible and interact with the surroundings the machine has to learn about different objects that exists in its environment. 

Learning is not easy for a machine. Machines currently don't have the same ability to learn as we humans do.To learn about how to identify different objects in the world, we first need to understand how we humans learn. 

Let us take a scenario of new baby in our family. We have to introduce every new object that the baby comes across for couple of times to make sure that the baby recognises the object, next time when he/she sees one.

But machines are not intelligent beings like us humans, at least not till now , so to make them identify an object, suppose a bird, they need algorithms, it's a fancy word for a set of logical steps, and to develop these logical steps for a machine to identify a particular object, the algorithm developers need lots and lots of data. 

They need data about the same object in different positions, backgrounds, weather etc to create the most efficient and effective algorithm. So that in future these machines can identify these objects on their own by running the algorithm that are being designed today.

Collection of such large amount of data was not possible before the era of smart phones and cloud computing. It is now in this era that we have all the three technologies required, the collection of data from smartphones and laptops, the storage from such large storage servers and processing of algorithms from advance hardware .

Now as from the above paragraph it is clearly evident that effectiveness and efficiency of machine learning is directly dependent on the data. 

Though these tech giants can capture lots and lots of data on their own but why they want our data? 

The only reason is that they can have it for free and our data is more realistic and authentic, we are not capturing data, we are just clicking moments from our real life trips, gatherings without having to focus that it will be used to train the machines , thus making it very authentic rather it being like a test sample. 

Though it is not completely wrong for them to use our data for the progress of AI, but are they really telling us this? Are they buying our data from us? A simple answer is No, they are collecting it for free, keeping us in an illusion that they are giving us something( cloud storage) for free. 

Another big question is that, are they only using our data just for the benefit of human race, or can they manipulate us to do things by learning about us from the patterns in our data and figuring out our lifestyle, habits and personalities 

It is a very delicate topic and everybody will have his/her take on it , so I would like to leave you with this thought to think it for yourself.

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