Our world-destroying-AI paperclip maximizer is here. It's called a "news feed".
The thing that gets the most clicks is outrage, as the AI has discovered. We're setting people against each-other in a more and more efficient fashion.
The result has been clear since the Arab Spring. Good things don't come from helping people hate each-other in the most efficient way possible.
Banning AI-driven-click-maximizing news feeds would be a healthy start. Right now, they're doing serious damage to our world.
I've used YouTube for many hours per day for several years. I've almost never seen a single thing appear on my home page that was polarizing or even clickbaity. The very rare times I do (always after I watch something that's kind of adjacent), I just click "Not interested" and I never see it or anything like it again. It's done a pretty good job of predicting what I would and wouldn't be interested in.
Same with Twitter. I just unfollow anyone I find tweeting polarizing or charged things. My Twitter feed looks pretty close to the HN front page.
Many people crave these things, whether they want to or even realize it. I think it's going to be this way for a very long time.
I'll watch that film, though.
And IME, it doesn’t even have to be videos watched by most of the people, but a subset of “power users” who binge certain kind of videos are over represented on the recommendation engine.
For me it takes a single round of a few "Not interested" clicks. Definitely not weeks, or even days.
For a self-contained example, spam in large Facebook groups always rises to the top, because many people comment asking it to be deleted, causing the algorithm to show it to more people, some of which comment, until a moderator finally kills the post.
These kinds of side effects do not happen in a voting based system or a straight chronological feed.
No, it's the content that other people engage with. Disregarding the whole "engagement is a good metric of how much you want to see something" bullshit, if you served me food based on what other people like to eat, it would be a weird mix of gluten free vegan stuff, and also coke, pizza and doritos.
I don't want any of that shit. I'm not "many people". I don't need to be fed the same irrelevant garbage as them. But the only way to achieve that is to unfollow everyone and not get many useful updates. Which is what I'm doing, but it's just barely useful, and the popular crap still seeps in at every opportunity.
I do want to see what other videos are watched by large numbers of people who've watched things I've already watched. That's how I discover new and interesting things. I've found tons of great content that way, and pretty much no clickbaity or LCD / popular crap seeps in (maybe once every few months, but the "Not interested" immediately takes care of it). I don't know how common my experience is.
"This talk is about metrics and measurement: about how metrics affect the structure of organizations and societies, how they change the economy, how we’re doing them wrong, and how we could do them right."
https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizin...
(In Lonnie Athens' theory of violentisation, there's a step where the to-become-radically-violent says to themselves, "I'll become the biggest badass and this will never happen to me again." Milošević has a famous TV speech where, after a spot of "spontaneous violence", he tells ethnic serbs he isn't going to let them be beaten anymore.)
These minor grievances are later amplified by demagogues. The reaction to this perceived victimisation is so out of proportion that the initial grievance looks minuscule in retrospect.
The main difference these days is that we don't need a visible demagogue. The various "engagement algorithms" play the role of an echo chamber which sends opinions into a positive feedback loop until it enters the regime of social collapse.
You could also argue that the original rise of Fascism was enabled by mass propaganda becoming possible where it wasn't really previously, but that's so overdetermined it's hard to attribute to particular causes.
Then there's the original SARS of bad memetic propaganda, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Piece of leafleting from the early 1900s that's contributed to the deaths of millions.
"Just tell people that racism is bad"
Somehow this seems to make the problem worse not better, because if you're one of the outsiders you just get added to their mental list of conspirators. And if you've commented under your real name you're at risk of reprisals.
Effective debunking is hard.
Oh, and algorithmic social media makes this worse - your act of commenting on a post tends to raise its profile and cause it to be shown to more of your followers.
> "Just tell people that racism is bad"
What do you think "inciting ethnic hatred" means? Telling people that ethnic hatred is good? So that the only possible reply is that actually ethnic hatred is bad? No it involves conspiracy theories about an ethnic group, accusations against them, in short, empirical statements that can be refuted.
There is no statement of fact so definitive that it can overcome a vast barrage of inflammatory conspiracy theory. If that's done in front of a crowd looking for a simple solution to their problems, they'll pay no attention to refutation of "short, empirical statements".
Still an improvement compared to "I heard X", which is the default with radio and books.
Obviously that doesn't always work, but social media makes it effectively impossible. Not only do you have official sources of propaganda, you live in a swamp of anecdotes that are impossible to refute or contextualize. The radio says "Group X is bad", and you yourself may never have had any trouble with X, but a flood of "X did [bad-thing] to me" stories on social media can make you think that you've got personal exposure to it.
Ultimately, I believe the problem rests with the individuals who are willing to be manipulated. The human organism has a massive security hole that has been very well exploited, and I've got no idea how to patch it. No amount of coherent, cogent argument will change the mind of somebody bent on having a target to hate, and people have gotten very good at insinuating those targets.
I don't see how you can believe these things at the same time. If these efforts to induce ignorance are indeed so well-funded and concerted, how can bottlenecks be an obstacle? Indeed why couldn't these well-funded, concerted efforts use those bottlenecks to cut off people disagreeing with them?
Of course if the money can shut you down entirely, you can't succeed. But it's hard to completely control radio and books. It can be done, but only by making your totalitarianism clear. It's more effective if people think they came to their conclusions on their own, and have been exposed to "all sides".
Today, they can bolster their organized propaganda with a sufficiently effective astroturf campaign (magnified by social media). The two provide confirmation for each other, and appear to be independent. They may even actually be independent; they don't need to formally coordinate if they roughly agree on the ends.
So people believe they're getting "all sides" of the story, and there's no need to shut down disagreement. Instead, people hear the message from two sources that affirm each other, and disregard any disagreement willingly.
also, the remedies chapter of: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg...
still looking for more in this vein.
from HN, the discussions on https://theintercept.com/2016/09/07/google-program-to-deradi... suggest attempts to de-hate might not be uniformly well-received.
Genocides and other war crimes have been a staple of humanity since Ancient Greece. Authoritarianism, of which fascism is a subset, only depends on one thing, and that is masses willing to be led.
Saying “x has always existed” is different from the scale at which x is present. That is, in fact, one way that we measure progress. Inarguably, we will never be able to stamp out our baser instincts and behavior, but we should strive to reduce their presence and impact.
If you just broaden your definition of AI a little to include the collective decision-making processes of a market-based corporate-controlled press and political system, this has been going on for decades, if not centuries. It's only recently that computers got added to the mix and inevitably bubbled to the top of the heap. Or, I should say, helped bubble some people to the top of the heap.
Maybe we should rename "personalization" to something with a -ve connotation - perhaps "bubblification"? "narcissization"? "comfortzoned"?
I personally was fine curating my feed and only friending people I wanted to follow, but that's just not how it came to work socially and culturally.
Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.
I thought they just made a modest amount of money.
However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")
I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created.
Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good.
Wikipedia and Craigslist are great examples. Craigslist is for-profit, and Wikipedia was originally a project of Bomis, a "web portal" (those words meant things 20 years ago) that tried various things to be profitable and had a good amount of success with softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying, "You know the press has this idea that I am a porn king. I really wasn't a king of anything, frankly, you know? Because at the time, when we looked at it, we were just like, 'Okay, well, this is what our customers will want, let's follow this.'" And even he, the guy peddling pictures of naked women on the internet because it's what his customers supposedly wanted, ended up spinning off Wikipedia as a non-profit and winding down Bomis.
When you decide to make a company that values profits above all else, it's a choice. You cannot attribute the moral impact of that decision to the invisible hand of the market - the invisible hand cannot reach out and grab things that weren't given to it.
Of course it wouldn't have sophisticated features like photo tagging and such, and probably wouldn't be Hip And Cool for Gen Z, but it could be a functional bare-bones Facebook replacement. You'd have probably have to disable virality features, and maybe linking to external news sites just to prevent your racist uncle from posting Breitbart links, I don't know.
Would that really be so hard? Or do the servers, hosting, security and moderation costs just scale exponentially after some threshold of say 10 million users or what have you? Supposedly Instagram was running with a very small team when Facebook acquired them
People want to be mad. They like it.
I have two Twitter profiles. One follows only makers, tinkerers, artists and educators. I mark "do not want to see more posts like these" if anyone posts something political.
I have another one that follows people with strong political views and the latest outrage.
Guess which one makes me feel better when I view it?
Guess which one I find myself viewing more often?
Same feeling.
Maybe you only need to have some tiny fraction on board to make it worth the effort?
Link for the curious: https://friendi.ca/
Those same people are often the ones sending misinformation and creating the problems. How do you allow people to post updates and not allow them to spread misinformation that damages society?
To prevent this from happening, it has to be actively suppressed, or at least there needs to be something slowing it down so it dies off. A hands-off attitude isn’t going to do it.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno...