Datafication and AI

After watching the talk about Datafication presented by Dr. Bonnie Stewart, I reflected on how much of my life is being transformed into data. Every single google search and click is a part of the system that earns money off of my activity. Although always knowing that our data was being tracked and shared, it never felt real until hearing an expert explain how deeply it actually affects everyone’s lives.

One of the major things she talks about in this video was the difference between digital skills and digital literacy. Having digital skills is knowing how to use a tool while having digital literacy is knowing how the tools have an impact on society. This made me think about numerous of times when schools would teach us how to use certain programs and software but not explain how the software works or what it gains from us.

The only part I slightly disagree with is when Dr. Bonnie Stewart talks about AI being in a hype phase extreme in the Gartner Hype Scale. She mentions that this is caused by companies as they prioritize money and power but I also think that this is a real opportunity for everyone, not just big corporations. AI can be taken advantage of by students to learn, research, and create ideas. People can use AI to develop their own businesses, or explore/learn things that weren’t so easily accessible before. I speak from my own experience as I feel that a lot of my programming skills have been developed by playing around with AI.

However, I don’t object with the fact that we should be cautious. Although AI can be useful in lots of ways, we feed it a lot of our information which are under massive corporations’ control. This video and discussion made me understand that technology isn’t always neutral. We should all learn to be digitally literate on the technology we use everyday.

Image by Amanz from Unsplash