Surveillance capitalism x AI

Explaining the crucial system behind modern AI development

In the modern digital age, internet companies tend to generate a substantial amount of their revenue using business models based on surveillance capitalism. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff provides an overview of what surveillance capitalism is:

Surveillance capitalism claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,” and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioural predictions that I call behavioural future markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behaviour.¹ (emphasis added)

Accordingly, surveillance capitalism can be seen as a system whereby companies collect people’s information to extract insights about their behaviour from which predictions about their behaviour can be made. It is those predictions that are then used for various other means that generate revenue for those companies, such as targeted advertising.

Surveillance capitalism therefore consists of four main constituent elements: the capturing of human experience; the extraction of behavioural data from that human experience; the creation of prediction products from that behavioural data; the selling of prediction products that generates revenue.

The whole system is essentially one big reinforcing feedback loop designed to generate revenue from personal data:

1. The more user activity that occurs on the platform, the more personal data about that activity can be collected.

2. This then allows more behavioural insights to be garnered, leading to more prediction products to be created.

3. Those prediction products become more effective as more users engage with the content, in turn allowing those prediction products to increase in value and generating revenue for the platform when they are sold to advertisers.

But surveillance capitalism is a system that does not just fuel targeted advertising. It also provides massive amounts of data that can be used for developing AI models.

This is why internet companies are often in prime positions to take advantage of the current AI hype. As I have written about previously, this hype encourages companies to either use data they have collected about users to develop their own models, or sell that data to others for model development.

AI hype is encouraging bad data practices

Surveillance capitalism is what allows the current AI hype to keep going.

1. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books 2019), p.8.