> Advertising and marketing kills humanity
No it doesn't. Please stope the hyperbole. Its literally just advertisements and people have the agency to choose to buy products.
No it doesn't. Please stope the hyperbole. Its literally just advertisements and people have the agency to choose to buy products.
I would argue for "greater", and from that it rather naturally follows that advertisement and marketing indeed kills humanity.
It doesn't take a high intelligence to perceive the problem.
Humans must dramatically modify their environment to thrive.
What they want: human modification of the environment to entirely stop.
Human regression is actually what they're after.
It might as well be a magic spell. You show the user the thing, and they buy/subscribe/click-through with some probability according to massive ML model that knows everything there is to know about them.
Yes - people are capable of making decisions in their own self interest. But there exists a gap where not _all_ of peoples' decision making process is the aforementioned. And that gap can be exploited, systematically.
The existence of that gap is the actual problem. At scale, you can own a nontrivial quantity of human agency because that agency is up for grabs. Google / similar make their money by charging rent on that 'freely exploitable agency'. Not by providing value to people. The very idea is ridiculous. Value? How are you going to define a loss function over value?
ML models on click-through or whatever else don't figure out how to provide value. They find the gap. The gap is made of things like: 'sharp, contrasting borders _here_ increase P by 0.0003', 'flashing text X when recently viewed links contain Y increase P by 0.031', etc and so on.
You have cause and effect reversed. The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past. Why did they buy it? Because it provides them value. The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying.
And ML models are not only based on what you've already bought. On instragram, for instance, I have ads for bird toys/vets/etc because I follow bird owners.
It's not a moral argument, but a practical one: agency is being extracted on massive scale, and being used for what?
Human beings might as well abstract away into point sources of agency for all it matters to the argument being made. If you can extract 0.1% of the agency of anyone who looks at a thing, and you show it to 3 billion people, _you have a lot of agency_. If you then sell it to the highest bidder, you find yourself quickly removing "don't be evil" from the set of any principles you may once have had.
My overarching point is that value-as-decision-mediator is meaningless in this calculus. It's the part of the equation that doesn't matter, the part you can't manipulate, the part that _is not a source of manipulable agency_. It's not relevant. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or that it doesn't affect peoples' decisions: I'm saying it _doesn't matter_. It can be 99.99% of how you make your decisions, and it _still doesn't matter_. As long as that 0.01% gap exists.
> The only reason the ML model can predict whether someone will buy a product is because people have bought it in the past.
Yes. This is how you gather evidence that something works. It is not the reason it works. The ML model _knows about the spell_ because people have let it affect them in the past. But the spell works because it's magic. It doesn't need anything other than: Y follows X.
> The ML prediction is descriptive, not prescriptive. I can similarly create an ML model to predict the weather, that does not mean my model causes the weather which is basically what you're saying.
Not all models describe actions which are possible for you to take. Weather models are basically not like that. Advertising models _are_.
You aren't in a position where you can meaningfully manipulate the weather, if only you knew how exactly to manipulate it to maximize your profit. It's a vacuous argument in general. Models are just knowledge. Obviously some knowledge is useful, some isn't, some is dangerous, some isn't, some can be used by specific people, some can be used by any, etc.
It's not the model that is causing things to happen. It's a machine that uses the knowledge in the model, where the model describes actions possible for the machine to take. It is automated greed.
The fundamental concern is not that knowledge is bad, or that ML models are bad. It is that someone is in the position of having a tap on vast, diffuse sources of agency, and have automated the gathering of knowledge in using it to maximize profit, causing untold damage to everything, with the responsibility laundered through intermediary actors.
Given this trickery I wouldn't say that people have absolute complete agency, they are being exploited, even more the ones that are more affected by trick A or B. I do agree it should be more nuanced than "it's killing humanity" but at the same time I believe you should meet more in the middle that there are manipulative tactics used by the whole PR industry that are exploitative, and do affect people's agency.
What someone thinks of marketing & advertising will almost always tell you what they think of the intelligence of the typical person. Once you realize that, you realize it's merely a bias that someone is arguing from, that they think most everybody else is a moron and should be deprived of their individual liberty (for their own safety).
A slaughterhouse for example is very efficient at processing animals from living beings into mass produced meat, however you want to feel about the ethics of that.
and you're still missing the point. I'm not saying that marketing has no effect on people (on the contrary, that's the problem, and it affects me too). my point is about the absurdity of basing our social organization on this. marketing only has perverse motivations, then you see the effects on people. tobacco is the classic example. this is an inefficiency of the system.
The reality is that psychologically manipulating people into buying things by forcing yourself as a middleman into every business transaction and industry on the planet is not just morally despicable, but opportunistic, exploitative, and many other negative descriptors I can't quite put into words.
But this isn't even the truly insidious and harmful part. That is reserved for the fact that the same systems used to get people to consume, are also used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that someone, somewhere, could potentially benefit from. So anyone with a negligible amount of resources and effort has the ability to influence individuals, groups of people, societies, and entire countries, to buy into their agenda by pushing their propaganda. After all, modern advertising uses the same propaganda tactics pioneered by the likes of E. Bernays a century ago.
It should be clear to any sane adult that this psychological manipulation is directly responsible for the corruption of democratic processes and sociopolitical instability we've seen around the world for the past decade+.
And then, if all this wasn't enough, these advertising leeches are doing this by violating digital rights, abusing our privacy, corrupting every entertainment experience, and utilizing every nasty trick they can legally get away with to steal our data, and get rich from it via dark data broker markets in perpetuity.
So, please, spare me the bullshit excuse that this is "just" advertising, and that it's a public good that helps poor small businesses reach customers. Catalogs and contextual advertising have existed for decades, but that wasn't enough for these greedy bastards. Humanity is objectively far worse off because of this, and the adtech industry has played a huge role in making it happen. Everyone who has worked on this tech should be ashamed of themselves, even though I'm sure they don't think twice about it, and enjoy the sight of their bank account statements.
There is no alternative solution to greed. Better solutions will become viable when there is less greed. Current political and economic systems allow the greediest people to profit the most.
All problems in history were solved by individuals who immediately had the correct answer without any discussion?!!
How many problems were solved by shutting down discussions do you think? Are we thinking stifling conversations causes more problem solving?!
and to be fair the industry doesn't need to be banned, just heavily regulated, fully transparent, and there should be exponential consequences for their lies (such as, claiming cigarettes are healthy while knowing they're addictive and cause cancer; anyone involved in decisions like that should be in Angola growing tobacco for 13 cents an hour.)
- they are using android
- google maps
- youtube
Not to mention Waymo and LLM's literally came out of Google. Google will go down as one of the most important institutions in the last 100 years.
To me the biggest impact of Google in the history of mankind was making Internet search actually good. Android wasn't invented there, YouTube wasn't invented there, they had the capital to scale those but I don't think it's their greatest achievement compared to Search in the early 2000s.
Everyone who works at chatgpt has blood on their hands
It was not designed that way, so they had to specifically do extra things to make it not that way.
This is like saying that python is designed to be slow and linking to a post about speeding up the python interpreter as evidence
The similarity between advertising and cancer are striking, see the post Advertising is a cancer on society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142
This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633
If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already.
Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.
Thats not efficient.
Searching does not require advertising or word of mouth. Word of mouth is not inefficient either in a world with internet, the person telling you about a product likely saw it and purchased it online already.
It is working as intended - if you want attention, you gotta pay for it. How else would it work? Charity?