Sometimes AI seems a bit of a niche idea, relegated to dystopian prophecies or sentient robots. But AI is much more pervasive and influential in our present world in more ways than we might assume. Oxford mathematician John Lennox reminds us in this recent podcast episode that our society teems with AI. Lennox commented,

Now, the final example I would give you is the fact that we’re all involved in AI. That is any of us who own a smartphone, it’s tracking us all the time. What many of us don’t realize is that, for example, we make a purchase at Amazon. A few days later, we’ll get a pop-up saying, people that bought this book were interested in that book and they’re trying to encourage you to buy something else. Okay, we put up with that. But what we don’t often realize is we are feeding a vast amount of information into that system, and large companies are selling that on to third parties without our permission. And this has become a real problem, and it is really what is called by Shoshana Zuboff who’s an expert on it and has written a book talking about it called Surveillance Capitalism.

Every time we visit a site, purchase something, or give our information online, artificial intelligence stores the input and generates tailored ads and content. AI, then, isn’t limited to ChatGPT or a futuristic vision that sees robots overtaking humanity. Most of us carry powerful AI in our pockets every single day!