Part Eight of Natural Intelligence - How Artificial Intelligence could spiral downward into real stupidity

Part 8 of 14: Herd Mentality - How much do we make decisions ourselves or are decisions served to us on a plate presented as our own?

Albertism: “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

That’s a cool start, I have learnt a new word from a quote – “equanimity” so now I will have to think of a context to use that in some other way – the value of continuous learning and application. There is absolutely no reason or agenda to doing this, I am just doing it because I can. In the same way, this seemingly meandering tome (another cool word) that I have been taking you through is just a little beyond the halfway point, so as with every good drama series it seems time for a bit of a summary.

In this sequence of events that I am portraying, we have put the sum of our knowledge in an accessible form onto a thing called the Internet, we then found better ways to access it through search engines, then made it mobile so it was in our hands all the time, then layered onto that the ability to buy things, then added (un)social media. At this point we pause a little to make a point. We now have people addicted to accessing to all of this, but in the background have connected a very powerful lobby into the mix – we have unleashed advertising on an unsuspecting pubic in a subliminal manner.?

Adverts have always manipulated sentiment. The older ones of us will remember the Martini adverts that were entirely focused around the “beautiful people” and worked on your aspiration to be part of this clique, even though you were probably never going to be. It played on your aspirations and associated a purchase to this utopia. What is different in this iteration of advertising is that the consumers are feeding those aspirations into the advertising machine. Therefore, instead of advertising becoming a thing that is pushed into the ether, will stick to a proportion, and be ignored by the rest, things can be very focused and individualised to appeal to everyone almost individually, but not make it seem that way. We have increased access to people’s lives, thoughts and aspirations at an unprecedented level and then provided an access platform that allows targeted items to arrive in people’s hands instantaneously.

However, we have not quite stopped at that point. Platforms that are coordinating all this activity have very sophisticated algorithms that assess vast amounts of information and not only form conclusions but also define strategies that take advantage of human traits including aspiration (that we have already mentioned) but also aspects of addiction and that need to be included and liked. People want an impossible combination of being part of the herd but also being individual or “special” and the systems pander to and exploit this fact with ruthless effect. Curated access to focussed information is big business. Have you considered that Facebook (or Meta) is a vast company with huge multi-billion revenues, but its core business does not make any content it just distributes things created by someone else and then uses that information to analyse behaviour and patterns that it sells to focus advertising – that is its business model. To some extent the same is true of Google, Twitter (or X – I wish they would all stop changing their names, if we all did that they would be fed up with us because that would ruin their analytical data), YouTube, Instagram et al. Think carefully about that. Billions upon billions of revenues are generated not to produce anything at all, but instead to open the public up to advertising.

Albertism: “Information is not knowledge.”

Let’s just consider a few examples of this. In terms of our aspirational values, LVMH (I had to look them up as well), L’Oréal, Hermes and Dior are all in the top 8 of companies in Europe by market capitalisation as at time of writing. These are all aspirational companies that make goods that we often do not need but we do want. In terms of understanding the power of accumulated information and inference, Walmart were sued for breach of confidence in the US when they sent a pack of discount vouchers targeted at a newly pregnant 15 year old which revealed this to her parents. How did they know? Not because of an obvious product purchase but because of a combination of a larger bag and a change in washing products – nothing directly related to pregnancy, but instead a selection of items that showed a high probability of this being the case. And then, we come to influencers….

We have discussed how the need to be liked can be addictive, and the fact that aspirations are fed by people who lead lives we want to live and use products that we think we want. They can create a virtual herd that we follow and react to and once you are caught in that vortex it is very difficult to escape. The tools and sophistication that is applied to manipulating us right down at the psychological level is vast and relentless and devoid of passion and empathy – it is purely business. That, in itself is not a problem, as long as we understand what is happening and apply skepticism to the process. The combines phycology of the process makes us believe we are simply in a benign peer group of friends all expressing their own views, when in fact we are being fed things that reinforce something that we are thinking or that someone else wants us to think. That all sounds very bad and Orwellian (go look him up, visionary he was, but he was not great at picking dates is all I will say), but what does remain in all this is choice. Outside of the addiction elements of what is going on here, we can say no – or at the very least say “really?” if we can escape the herd mentality that gives us an “Emperor’s new clothes” moment.

To understand that reference you need to read the 1837 Hans Christian Anderson fable of that title. Following through the enquiring mind reference thoug, I knew the Hans Cristian Anderson bit as I read it (on paper) when I was a child and remember Danny Kaye playing him on the screen. But Wikipedia went on to tell me Andersen's tale is based on a 1335 story from the?Libro de los ejemplos?(or?El Conde Lucanor),?a medieval Spanish collection of fifty-one cautionary tales with various sources such as?Aesop?and other classical writers and Persian folktales, by?Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena?(1282–1348). Apparently, Andersen did not know the Spanish original but read the tale in a German translation titled?"So ist der Lauf der Welt"?("That's the way of the world"). The point is, it is actually interesting to know the route and source of something that is going to influence you, and it is an illusion that social media gives you the real picture of that – it gives you want it wants you to see – or more precisely, what it thinks you want to see.

Albertism: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

As a slightly prophetic final point, I was listening recently to the tragic tale of parents who lost their children to self-harm that was promoted by what their children found on the Internet. They pointed out (and I hadn’t considered this before) that once you express even the slightest interest in something (and self-harm or suicidal thoughts may be part of this) then the algorithms will set into motion to feed that interest which takes you further and further down the rabbit hole. That is an Alice in Wonderland reference for those of you who don’t know. On top of this (and again I had not thought this one through either), the volume of unregulated data on the Internet means that you can always find information that will back up any theory that you have or any prejudice you may (or indeed may not) be inclined to. Put these two things together and with the additive nature and the virtual herds and there is a very dangerous set of circumstances, that are increasingly combined in ways that we never envisaged.

Back to the point though. All this technology and capability can be very good. Being directed towards things you are interested in can help feed the hungry mind and help make finding things much easier. But this should remain as a tool over which you have some control, rather than abdicating responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings to organisations or people who may have ulterior motives. Following the herd has some advantages, unless it is a herd of Lemmings.

Coming Next - Part 9 of 14: Politics & Power - The committed minority always have a disproportionate influence – the emergence of fake news and deep fakes