The algorithm and the AI

In Marc Fennell’s The State of Man, we see how within hours and days of signing up for an account social media’s algorithms start exposing young people to content that are designed to elicit strong reactions.

I once signed up for an account for instagram and i could see that it had started recommending me content that will elicit strong reaction from me - and i chose to not interact with them and the feed changed. But young people, vulnerable people of all ages (me at a different points of time in life in the past and future) don’t have the time to choose, one click, and we get hooked and the algorithm doubles down, feeds us more of those content and if something in us does not intervene, we go down rabbit holes that we don’t know how to get out of.

The secret becomes personal - our lack becomes personal, something wrong with us.

And of course, there is nothing in particular about “man” that this problem is particular to.

Social media companies and AI companies hiring very smart people who know how humans work, how vulnerable we can be and how to manipulate us and they do, because sometimes they just love the technical challenge. I mean, we live in a world that has used science to build atomic bombs and now the modern warfare where we don’t even need to intervene to kill anyone. Such precision we have achieved.

Being a person in technology for 20 years at least in some form, i laugh at the usage of “the algorithm” or “AI” - and yet perhaps there is some justification in giving our algorithm and AI a “THE” definite article when it is essentially a collection of decisions made by a handful of people to maximize profit.

To what end? May be we think we are all gonna live forever or we don’t know an alternative way to live.

In the lecture titled Pedagogy in the times of AI, among many excellent points, the speaker says, “We cannot solve for human greed” - i think that perfectly sums up a lot of things we are seeing in the world today and perhaps always has been (but i have only lived for the last 4 decades or so).