The Santa Claus Village in Finland was buzzing with activity. The Christmas tree planted in the middle of the village was aglow with shimmering lights, and small toy trains criss-crossing the tree were all moving on their tracks, with the last shipments ready to be delivered on the huge Santa sleighs. Reindeer, all decked up for their annual nocturnal outing around the world, stood impatiently.
The six chief elves and their platoon of underling elves – which had grown over the years to 30,000 as per the last census held in 1925 – were busy with final preparations.
Santa, as was his habit of late, was puffing away at his pipe a day ahead of his long, arduous journey around the globe. Over the years, Santa had perfected the art of HO, HO and Ho, ho, but still spent 30 minutes daily rehearsing HO, HO, ho, ho. However, over the last few days, Mrs Santa had noticed that something was amiss, and Santa definitely seemed a little perturbed. Someone not so close to Santa would have found it difficult to believe, but having spent nearly 52 years with him, Mrs Santa would not have minded taking a flutter on whether Santa was perturbed or not at this time.
Mrs Santa knew it would be an exercise in futility to directly confront Santa. Bernard, the head elf in Santa’s house, also pointed out that he too had noticed that everything was not as usual with his chief. A man of few words, Bernard, in his gruff voice, confided that it was something to do with the suited-and-booted person who had lately been coming from across the continent to sell something to Santa.
Both finally mustered the courage to confront Santa at the dinner table. Caught totally off guard, Santa blurted out that it was this AI thing which was causing him a wee bit of concern.
“Over the last six months,” Santa said, “this persistent salesman has been trying his best to make me download AI on my large computer. He keeps emphasising that without AI it would be difficult for anyone to survive in the tech-savvy world. He says that with AI we can do away entirely with reading the mails and letters from kids around the globe.”
Predictive AI, the salesman claimed, would not only generate the demands of all kids in a region, but also pinpoint what each child actually wanted with 98.93 per cent accuracy.
“Impossible!” exclaimed the grumpy Bernard. “Our elves take so much pain to read each and every letter and make a list. Can AI really do it?”
Santa said that precisely this had been his own reaction. At the salesman’s last visit, he had also been told that the system would be installed free of charge on Santa’s computer, with no fees for 5 years.
Mrs Santa, who in her free time, and she had quite a bit of it for nearly nine months of the year, had read about AI on her social media feeds, felt there had to be a catch somewhere. One could not trust these pseudo-immigrants, she mused. The last thing she wanted was for the elves to gang up a day before their annual voyage and start an agitation about why they should be made redundant.
Asking Santa what the AI salesman wanted in return, Santa replied that he wanted their entire data from the last 10 years to make the predictions.
Bernard, who had been eschewing the conversation and rubbing his gruff beard, almost jumped out of his chair.
“This is our proprietary data!” he almost screamed. “We spend months and months sprucing it up, updating email IDs and ages. It is so voluminous that it has to be stored in five vaults hidden in the snow in Korouoma National Park, more than a day’s trip from Rovaniemi. And he wants all this data, with so many elves’ years of labour, free on a platter?”
So sacrosanct was the data that even Santa himself – even if he had ever wanted to, which he never had – could not access it. Four of the elves had total control over it.
“Giving access to this data would be nothing short of committing hara-kiri,” Santa pronounced.
Besides, Mrs Santa, who had some knowledge of law, informed them that they would be contravening confidentiality laws. Every small child wrote personal things in their emails or letters to Santa. Selling third-party data was an offence under the General Data Protection Regulation, she mused. Selling third-party data could only be done with the explicit consent of the user.
“That settles it,” said Santa. “Kids can’t give consent until they know what it is used for – and by the time they know, they won’t mind,” he said, guffawing in his inimitable HO, HO style, with finality that this was the end of the discussion.