General Discussion

But as I was infuriated by heavy traffic on the street outside, I was thinking about the use of big data and ai riding this wave, with bullshit “studies” in tow.

I needed to rant in an ai thread so forgive me highplainsdem as it is only tangentially related best case to your op.

One infuriating thing I suspect is that with the various deregulated real world experiments ongoing in Ai and big data (which clearly encroach into the real world) they try to build junk like this:
https://www.noemamag.com/are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain/

Obviously left or right they would kick out environmentalists, scientists, journalists or regulators who don’t go just along with stuff. O They also have the most bogus types of inhouse “critics” (think the FB oversight board).

It is bound to be the most corrupt, sexist and sleazy space grab imaginable. They usually do just about anything in the most anti-democratic exploitative way imaginable the world over.

It always follows the same pattern wrt any scientist/journalist or regulator who doesn’t play ball: Timnit Gebru was fired by Google; Maria Ressa was persecuted; Madhav Gadgil’s “Gadgil report” was tossed aside by the corrupt communist CM Pinarayi Vijayan of the state of Kerala. That last is an example of how ecologists or evolutionary biologists who are not bought and paid for by corrupt business interests are thwarted when environmental laws and wildlife rhythms are messed up by poorly regulated technologists..
And with the surveillance state, the implicit threat of the use of any triviality (e.g.: marijuana laws) to harass complainants is ever present. I am so glad on that head that Duterte was sent to The Hague.

They want to build these things using big data, dubious ai and deregulated emerging technologies. They won’t stand for regulation or scientific methods in any serious sense.

This guy seems like a crank (not that I should be attacking anyone else on that head ) and worse he talks to irredeemable creeps like Roger MacNamee, but even guys like this are bashing this ai push:

https://www.the-geyser.com/ai-defends-the-status-quo/

And anything “open” sold by Google or its creepy small fellow travellers would be bilge.
(Tristan Harris, MacNamee etc define astroturf unlike say the always awesome, universal hater Yasha Levine. Zitron is also trustworthy. Haters are the only people I listen to anymore.)