AI Is Here, Privacy Is Gone

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Feb. 28, 2026

If you are worried about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over and controlling your life, you are way, way too late because your fears have already been realized. AI is loose and capable of running wild. And don’t be concerned about your privacy, either, because you have none.

Let’s back up a little. Artificial intelligence in machines is not a new idea. More than 90 years ago, British mathematician, logician, and cryptologist Alan Turing—he helped break the Nazi enigma codes in World War II—predicted there would be machines that could “...remember, learn and expand capabilities...” This was a pretty bold pronouncement in 1935, since those primitive computers would not have even a minimal memory capability until 1948.

Turing’s prediction came true in 1951 when the first computer with any form of AI taught itself how to improve at checkers. Computers’ abilities have become significantly more sophisticated. In 2021, the U.S. became the first country to land a satellite on an asteroid, but it was more than that. Once it began to orbit the asteroid, the spacecraft, NEAR Shoemaker, was on its own. It autonomously decided when to land, where to land, and how to land. These were not the pre-programmed actions it was simply following but decisions it was making without human intervention.

Generative artificial intelligence, the latest iteration, learns on its own and constantly expands its capabilities over time without human intervention. It “learns” by accessing everything out there in the digital world—literally all of it.

Scientists see AI as a tool that dramatically speeds their work in virtually every field and will lead to dramatic breakthroughs in medicine—it’s already working on creating more effective chemotherapy for cancer patients—and energy distribution, weather and disaster forecasting, and a host of additional activities that impact most everyone’s daily lives.

But there is also more than one downside, not the least of which is the absolute loss of privacy.

Your home “assistants” like Siri and Alexa are full of AI and are actually never off unless you unplug them. They are always listening and recording. They know what you talk about, what you watch on television and the music you listen to. They know the products you buy online. Your phone, tablet, and laptop keep track, too. Certain news feeds and ads pop up on our electronic devices because they have decided, for us, that’s what we want.

Of course, you can skip all the electronic devices, use an old land line for a phone, and eschew computers and cable/streaming on your television (yes, they now use AI, too). Alas, things won’t get much better if you leave the house because there is now digital surveillance pretty much everywhere: doorbell cameras on private homes, closed circuit cameras outside and inside businesses, and Flock license plate readers. In some instances, they’ve all been coordinated to be used together for some law enforcement activities. (No, we don’t have Fourth Amendment protections from these intrusions as there is “no expectation of privacy” when we’re in public.)

No expectation on your computer, either. The courts have decided the social media ether is a public space, not private. Plus, every site you ever visit, every keystroke you make, every song you play, everything is in that box forever, and a savvy computer tech can retrieve it quickly. Law enforcement employs people who spend their days recalling all manner of computer files their owner thought were gone.

As expected, AI is fertile ground for military applications, and we are already seeing that in the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine is using relatively cheap drones, with cameras and explosives, guided by human operators, with great success. But they have also introduced autonomous drones that independently seek targets and make decisions absent human intervention. And they are learning as they go to counteract Russian anti-drone defense tactics. It presages a time when the battlefield includes no human actors.

As much as it has already advanced, the computer age is in its infancy. Even now scientists are working on something called quantum computers, thousands of times faster than current super computers requiring smaller boxes and using fewer resources. They will open new horizons everywhere in almost everything.

They might also make the huge resource-gobbling data centers with thousands of computers running nonstop for AI’s endless knowledge acquisition obsolete, or at least reduce the obscene amount of electricity and water these things greedily consume. (Neighbors aren’t crazy about the noise of that many machines whirring away, either.) When quantum computing takes over, we’ll have to decide if we still need these gigantic facilities.

Artificial intelligence is already all around us in nearly all our electronics and appliances and its expansion will only accelerate. Privacy is now mostly a myth both inside and outside our homes. The time for worrying about either has long since passed.