And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way?
We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't the case. The youtube paperclip maximizer is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
We can say "well, it's just feeding people what they want!" But you can say the same thing about airdropping crates of opium onto the streets.
It is only terrifying if you assume people are mindless spiritless bots.
In which case (if you truly believe that), we are all fucked anyway. Then who cares? Is youtube really your biggest problem?
> is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
So has media been doing for a long time, also all writers and poets, etc. Mind's engagement is not the only meaning of life, and most people act out this deep knowledge. I don't see a problem.
Yes, it was called "yellow journalism" before it was called "clickbait". I agree, that's not new.
What's new and disturbing is 1) the degree of algorithmic personalization, and 2) that personalization goes to the highest bidder. Put together, we've built a marketplace for population-scale behavioral nudges, and the people who play that game have war-chests, not human-sized wallets.
The Facebook/Myanmar genocide is the Godwin's Law reference of the social media debate, but you don't need to look any further than the politicization of what should be neutral medical facts being fueled by recommendation-hole conspiracy theories to see the danger of all this.
I don't believe people are mindless spiritless bots, but I do believe our industry thrives on engineering ways to hack people's attention circuits. And what's terrifying is we've put a paperclip maximizing machine at the helm of all this.
And isn't that terrifying, in the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer kinda way?
We can make the well-its-your-individual-responsibility bootstraps argument, but that kinda works only if you believe in the supremacy of an individual's autonomy and that the mind can't be hacked or hijacked. Everything from addictive products to the marketing industry shows that isn't the case. The youtube paperclip maximizer is maximizing for your mind's engagement.
We can say "well, it's just feeding people what they want!" But you can say the same thing about airdropping crates of opium onto the streets.