"THE SOCIAL DILEMMA" REVIEW AND COMMENT
“The Social Dilemma” on Netflix: a documentary-drama explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. NY Times review here.
This movie is #4 in the U.S. today on Netflix. The principal interviewees are past and present highly-placed, influential designers and implementers of these technologies and business models who have awakened to the malevolent consequences of their creation and are sounding the alarm.
Strongly recommend you watch this program. It is chilling. Major points:
EVERYTHING you do online is monitored, recorded, analyzed, categorized, and archived in minute detail.
Tech companies (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, etc) use this information to form a psychological profile of you which they then use to predict your next move on the Internet and your readiness to purchase goods and services. The profile helps increase the effectiveness of advertising they sell and, therefore, increase the price they can charge for advertising to maximize profits. This much is pretty well understood by us all. What is not understood is the following:
The AI algorithms tech companies use are calculated to produce an ADDICTION to their platforms, the object of which is to increase ENGAGEMENT. For example, you tag someone in a photo, the algorithm sends a notification to the individual tagged (taggee?) that they’ve been tagged. The taggee then checks into the site and comments. The tagger then is notified that the taggee commented, so they then check back to view the comment, others chime in, and so forth. The tech companies and their advertisers capitalize on imperatives of human behavior, such as the desire to be liked – hence the utility of the “Like” 👍 link. The detail and granularity of the way our personal information is collected, analyzed, sold and used to heighten engagement is beyond our imagination.
The AI algorithms are tweaked to heighten engagement by funneling SENSATIONALIST posts and websites to you, producing emotional responses and altering your perception of reality. It matters not to the tech companies if the sensationalism is false, it’s the sensationalism and the engagement it produces that matters for the bottom line. Hence Mark Zuckerberg’s statement resisting the proposition that Facebook should become an “arbiter of truth.”
The algorithms go beyond simply passively identifying and categorizing your personality traits. They actively engage you with the objective of MODIFYING YOUR PERSONALITY so that you can be manipulated more effectively by the tech companies and their advertisers, not only of goods and services, but also of political advertising and engagement.
YOU ARE THE PRODUCT (a willing buyer or voter) the tech companies are selling. (“If you are not earning money from your online activity, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.”)
The consequence of this addictive manipulation include dramatic increases in suicide rates, particularly among teens and pre-teens brought about by depression and despair from their online activity (being rejected or mocked by peers, for example), and promote increased dissatisfaction/polarization/division/hostility/outrage/lack of trust in each other/loneliness/ alienation/acting out/incivility/violence/more election hacking/more populism/more distraction/ inability to focus on the real issues within the body politic incapable of healing itself, all with potentially disastrous social consequences, the most probable near-term consequence being civil war and in the longer term, the degradation of democracy, failure to solve climate change, the ruin of the global economy, threatening our very survival.
Facebook, as a tool of persuasion, may be the greatest thing ever created. Imagine what it could do in the hands of a dictator. For example, Myanmar and the mass killings the Rohinga.
There is a global assault on democracy perpetrated through social media. Divide the population, create chaos in the streets, promote the rise of dictators who promise to end the chaos by authoritarian means. (DlS: We’ve seen this script before.)
“We are allowing technologists to frame this as a problem they are equipped to solve.” “That’s a lie.” It’s not in their financial interest to solve it. My comment: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used when we created them.” Albert Einstein. Can the technologists using AI creating the problems change their/AI’s thinking to solve them? Unlikely. Why? We can no longer agree on what’s true. AI cannot sort truth from lies, so the process cannot be checked. ‘We’re toast.’ “It’s not that technology is the existential threat, it is that technology brings out the worst in society, and the worst in society being the existential threat.”
Tech companies have taken over the public square, are responsible for the effects they produce, and yet are not held accountable.
The interviewees suggest financial incentives to encourage positive and discourage negative behavior, also regulation, outlawing certain technologies with destructive consequences (as we outlaw trafficking in human organs and slaves, for example).
My comment: Like virtually everything else technology has produced, fire on demand, paper currency, gunpowder, electricity, viral biology, airplanes, atomic power, etc., social media technology is a wonderful servant and a terrible master, bringing to mind Buckminster Fuller’s observation: “Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . .” We must alter our present course. Will we? The techies say “We must.” I remain agnostic, recalling the late Senator Everett Dirksen’s comment: “Washington cannot solve a problem until it becomes one.” In this post-truth era, can we recognize that we have a problem? At a time of rancorous polarization, can we muster the public will to solve it?
Thoughts?