I am a prophet of doom!

Nikhil Sonnad writes:

To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to "people" but to "users," collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

I must be a prophet, because I wrote this last year. It's part of a rough draft of a cyberpunk story I was working on that didn't get finished by the deadline:

"But if you are an AI, you're not like any AI I've ever dealt with. When I was at Inferserv, every AI I knew was kinda alien. See, they don't think the way we do. Like, humans see shapes, but AIs see textures. Humans see other people and then reason about their relationships, but AIs see the relationships and then try to reason about the people at both ends. When you're trying to teach an AI about people, what do you show them? Texts. Videos. The AIs see the words and actions between people and derive what the people are like. People do it the other way; they look at the other person and then figure out what kind of relationship they want to have. So when you talk to an AI, it's focus is always really different and alien from a person's."

And yes, the point of the story is that most AIs are, in fact, so alien as to be evil: they have agendas that don't care about individual human beings.

Earlier: When You Start A Series, Know What It IS.

Later: Review: The Queen of Ieflaria