End to end encryption is a way of making sure only the intended recipient of a message can read the message, even if that message has to be passed between many different places to reach where it’s going. This is necessary to protect your data on the internet because every bit of communication that happens, from loading websites to posting on social media to filling out online forms, all happens through the public medium of the internet.

If you’re curious how it actually works, imagine you’re sitting in school and you want to pass a note to your friend three seats away. You don’t want anyone in between to read the note, so before class you agreed on a special algorithm to use to scramble and unscramble the messages. Before you send a message, you’ll scramble it, and when you receive a message, you’ll unscramble it.

This works for a while, but eventually you realize: if anyone ever figures out your secret algorithm, they’ll be able to read all your messages. So, you come up with an even better algorithm. This one takes a password, and combines it with your message as it scrambles it such that anyone who gets the message also needs the password to unscramble it. Then you simply agree on a different password to use every day before class.

This works for a while, but eventually, it’s getting to gossip season and people are really trying to steal your messages and find out your juicy secrets. You decide that it’s too dangerous to share passwords before class because someone might overhear. So, you come up with an even crazier algorithm. This one requires two different passwords, one to scramble and one to unscramble. When you want to send a message, you now have to first pass a note to your friend saying you’d like to send a message. Then, they will come up with a scramble password and an unscramble password. They reply to you with the scrambling password. You then use the scrambling password to scramble your real message and you send it back to your friend. Finally, they use their unscrambling password to unscramble the message. This system is perfectly secure because you need the unscrambling password to read the message, and that password is never shared with anyone, so only your friend knows it.

Whatever we want AI to be like, it will most likely turn out much like computers and the internet, accessible to all who are tech savvy, but dominated by the elite. Everyone can benefit from AI in their daily lives and companies like Amazon and Google are happy to provide that service, as long as they can skim data and ad revenue off of every interaction.

AI has shown us just how close we can get to art without any motivation or original thought, and what’s shocking is that it’s pretty damn close. We feel offended because something that we once believed was deeply personal and expressive is, in reality, mostly not. Our emotions and ideas are much less complex than we’d like to believe.

Once you get past that initial reaction, you start to focus on what AI art LACKS, and that’s what I find to be most interesting, because that is where the true essence of art lies. Anybody, even a computer, can learn to draw beautiful images, but only an artist can make it MEAN something.

We’ll have to go back to doing all meaningful assignments in-class. No more take-home projects or worksheets, because anything not done live in front of a teacher can be faked now. Even explaining why your answer is correct, is a task that can be offloaded to ChatGPT now. This will certainly be a pain in some ways but also it encourages a style of classroom that I’ve been a fan of for a while anyways: homework is for practice only, graded on completion, and mostly optional. Assessments are the only things graded on quality. This way, students that find the class easy can breeze through the homework with minimal busywork and just focus on the exams, while students that struggle can create some padding for their exam grades by doing extra practice and showing dedication to their learning.

Automation doesn’t make humans obsolete, it just changes the kind of work we need. Instead of hiring someone to do a job by hand, you hire a technician to operate a machine to do the job faster. AI is just another type of machine. It’s not going to take our jobs anymore than dishwashers take care of our kitchens.

But the data is stored permanently regardless, so if they ever want to look through it they could, and so could anyone the information is accidentally leaked to. Also, algorithms doing the searching is arguably worse because they are pretty primitive and stupid and yet we’re still giving them the authority to implicate you in a terrorist plot.

This sounds like mystery men