Patrik Stoopendahl from Marketing took us on a consumer’s voyage from starting to look for a thing they wanted to buy and through a more an more mazelike jungle of back and forths of searches, suggested alternatives by the search engine and social media and in the end the consumer might have spent hours doing their cyber window shopping and market research only to find themselves back at the initial webpage where they started, but maybe buying something completely different.
He concluded that marketing online is next to impossible to grasp on an individual level. Some consumers just want out of the maze whereas others see it more like a candy store where they enjoy spending their time. For the professional it then becomes clear that no matter how advanced the technology is today, the process of selling still needs its manual adjustments. Potential seems to be through the roof, but current know how is often very limited.
Behrang Kianzad from Malmö University and Jonas Ledendal from LUSEM, both researchers in Business Law connected to the online store story by looking at our rights as consumers and citizens.
For instance if I apply for a loan or want to buy an insurance and the decision making process on the bank’s side is automated, what kind of variables do they take into account? There is bound to be a certain degree of profiling involved, but as a customer I am entitled to an explanation as to what the decision was based upon and the logic behind it.
They also talked about “the black box”, that we can see the input the AI gets to work with as well as the output (in this case a decision), but we cannot fully understand the process by wich it gets there. Something that puts practical limitations on the right we have to get an explanation.
Our final speaker Miranda Kajtazi who’s area of research is informatics also took us deeper into the subjects of what rights we have in the age of AI and how much information about us is constantly collected, analyzed and used, often without our consent.
Another thing is how we get funneled into using certain digital tools or social media in order to participate in everyday life, social interactions, but Miranda highlights that everybody is not able to participate in this way, for economical reasons, educational, age, physical or mental variations there should be alternatives so we do not exclude people.
The researchers moved effortlessly between critical, optimistic and pessimistic standpoints on digitalization in general and AI specifically throughout their lectures and the ensuing discussion. Some of the key takeaways would be that AI is not inherently good or bad, but a tool that can be used in many ways. It makes our lives easier in some ways, we might find stuff or find out stuff that wasn’t accessible just a few years ago, but we also need to be aware of what information we leave out there in cyberspace and how it can be used both for good and bad.