Guest 2

That's the tragedy of the data commons.

Individual transactions, rational maybe in isolation, undermine the collective good, especially with de-anonymization techniques getting so good.

Instrumentarian power.

It means you might be selling your future ability to choose freely, to be spontaneous.

Because A.I.

trained on all this data isn't just knowing things about us.

It's creating systems designed to nudge, steer, manipulate, ultimately control behavior.

As one scholar put it, yeah, potentially a series of algorithmically guided steps towards predictable outcomes.

Spontaneity, genuine free choice gets squeezed out.

That's the deep concern.

And it connects directly to that temporal mismatch problem.

The temporal mismatch.

We sell data now for immediate, maybe small benefit.

But the harm doesn't.

The profiling, the manipulation, the loss of autonomy that comes later, years later maybe.

Terribly bad.

Behavioral economics calls it bounded rationality.

We systematically discount long-term risks, especially complex cumulative ones like algorithmic harm.

We just can't accurately price the future cost of selling today's data.

Recognized international law, yeah.