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

Part 5 of 14: Addictive Continuous Validation

Now we are getting to sound a bit weird – what does this actually mean? Well think about the way that we have been setting ourselves up. We are now ultra-connected and have become addicted to that connection and being online all the time and immediately responsive. We react immediately to the “ping” of our phone regardless of what we are doing at the time, and we feed that frenzy but putting pictures of every action online to inform our social circles in search of likes and instant recognition. Do you remember the last time you ate a meal without taking a picture of it first? There is a poem called “Look up” by Gary Turk that is definitely worth a read:

“I have 422 friends, yet I am lonely.

I speak to all of them every day, yet none of them really know me.

The problem I have sits in the spaces in between.

Looking into their eyes, or at a name on a screen

I took a step back and opened my eyes

I looked around and realised.

That this media we call social is anything but

When we open our computers and its our doors we shut

All this technology we have, its just an illusion

Community, companionship, a sense of inclusion

But when you step away from this device of delusion

You awaken to see a world of confusion

A world where we’re slaves to the technology we mastered

Where information get sold by some rich greedy bastard

A world of self-interest, self image and self promotion

Where we all share our best bits but, leave out the emotion….”

All sounds very profound but is actually reality. Behind all of the great things that we have ever commercially developed, lies a potential dark side that we have to defend against. This is generally done through regulation and legislation to protect the vulnerable - those who would have difficulty in understanding the risks that they were taking in being involved in a particular activity because of its complexity – think around Gambling or the Financial Services or Healthcare Sectors as areas where there are interventions to force organisations to make their propositions, and the associated risks, visible

The “Internet” has generally escaped this. Partially because one of the precepts of the internet was “free speech” and universal access, and that has a valid rationale. However, for many this means that regulation is associated with what they see as censorship. In addition, there is a general feeling that the internet community will police itself, that the volume of the "crowd" will be self-regulating and moderating. That may have been true at the beginning, but as soon as you get concentrations of influence in anything, then you introduce commercial bias. As soon as the social media and search platforms became a bit component of the Internet (essentially Web 2.0), then the opportunity to use scale and influence for manipulation was vastly increased. It has taken us the best part of 20 years for that to become generally observed.

All the aspects of the internet are fantastic things that we should embrace and push forward, but to do that we have to be aware and consenting, not manipulated into positions by holding the carrot of technology in from of us and when we embrace this we get unwittingly caught by the barb of commercialism.?

Social media in particular is designed to be addictive, it is designed to tap into emotions that make you feel good when you are recognised, albeit by faceless and sometimes not even real people. We now have a generation of people that are not just addicted to these likes, they gauge their entire self-worth by them. They have role models of their world (“influencers”) placed in front of them to create aspirations that are unrealistic in a very cynical commercialised game that is very one sided.

We have then let people enter this sophisticated, one-sided game without telling the rules, left alone explaining how they work. We have allowed a set of dependencies or addictions to develop with no controlling mechanisms, because the problems were sitting behind a thin veil of positive advantages. It must be good for people to communicate and share – right?

Albertism: “All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.”

The problem going forward, is that this we are continually building large structures on this foundation of sand. If we develop AI on top of this platform of delusional and manipulated self worth without due consideration, the potential is for greater manipulation, bias and dependency on technology to tell you what you should do, think and feel. The additional element is that, whilst social media may “invent” people, there are also some real ones sitting on the other side of the virtual fence.

With AI there may be none and its will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference. The problem is that the difficulty in telling the difference will not because the agents you are interacting with are more like people, with all their flaws built in, but because they will have leant how to manipulate the real people better to understand how to allay fears and doubts to make you believe them. Years of accumulated knowledge has opened up our hopes and fears and the reactions to other people.

We need a sea change in education which establishes the benchmarks of the way that systems interact with people, and the downsides to social manipulation at scale. Starting with the trolls and moving to the more benign but affecting actions, we need to teach how understand those interactions to control both your interaction and their ongoing effect for better and more “human” interfaces. We need to get a number of people away from their addiction before reengaging them in a more controlled manner

Albertism: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

Coming Next - Part 6 of 14: Manipulative Commercialism