A.I. Amplification
image credit: The Atlantic
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) will disrupt existing labor markets and is already disrupting our social coherence. Big Tech recommendation machines amp up ideological divisions in our public discourse, spread fake news, and will continue to enable bad actors to pollute our public discourse through the A.I. powered attention economy. Attention greedy A.I. threatens our mental health and the strong social fabric necessary to address big social upheavals.
Undeniably, the biggest trend in political campaigning in the last few years has been micro-targeted social media advertising. Largely due to the influence the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) has had on my thinking, my campaign will not follow this trend. I pledge that my campaign will not buy any social media ads.
Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is best known for his warning that one in three American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies and his solution to avoid an employment crisis—the Freedom Dividend, a universal basic income for all American adults, no strings attached (Yang2020.com). While a productive debate about universal basic income (UBI) or its cousin universal basic services (UBS) needs to be had and needs to lead to real policy, worrying about when technology will take human jobs misses the point that technology is hacking at human weaknesses today.
In a recent New York Times Opinion, Tristan Harris, executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, wrote, “the digital infrastructures of Facebook and Google have overwhelmed the natural capacities of our brains.” Since automating recommendations (A.I. amplification) is cheaper than paying human editors to decide what’s worth our time, A.I. newsfeeds “drive us down rabbit holes toward extremism and conspiracy theories” and “will affect future elections and even our ability to tell fact from fiction, increasing the divisions within society.” This fracturing of social cohesion compromises our ability to take collective action to address the world’s most pressing challenges and “has turned us into a civilization maladapted for its own survival.” A.I. amplifiers that give us more of what we click on are intrinsically divisive and are the backbone of an advertising business model built on exploiting our humanity. Big tech companies have built an attention economy; in return, we get the “free” downgrading of humanity. I highly recommend reading the entire article (nytimes.com).
In June 2019, Harris testified to the United States Senate, saying: “I want to argue today that persuasive technology is a massively underestimated and powerful force shaping the world and that it has taken control of the pen of human history and will drive us to catastrophe if we don’t take it back.” A.I. is being weaponized, intentionally and otherwise, to cut through the fabric of society. It comes in forms as overt as political propaganda, peddling hate, redpill radicalization, and inauthentic campaigns; but also as consequence of deep fakes, augmented homophily, echo chambers, and ‘hashtag activism’ or ‘clicktivism’ — scroll through these examples:
The threat of inhumane tech is unsettling, but we can rise to the challenge, to rebuild the technology into alignment with an honest understanding of our humanity. Despite doing many things wrong, big tech companies are making some important and correct decisions:
But this issue is too systemic, too complex, and too critical to leave to self-regulation. Harris calls for policymakers to create a special tax on tech giants of the attention economy that would make business models based on extracting and exhausting our attention spans prohibitively expensive, redirecting funding to journalism, public education and the creation of new social infrastructure. I support this call, and will be introducing a bill to do just that.
This is a profound spiritual moment. We need to understand our natural strengths — our capacity for self-awareness and critical thinking, for reasoned debate and reflection — as well as our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and the parts of ourselves that we’ve lost control over.
Tristan Harris
The only way to make peace with technology is to make peace with ourselves.
I will also introduce a bill to require A.I. amplification platforms (such as YouTube and Facebook) to make transparent the number of times content has been recommended through their algorithms as a first step to holding them accountable for promoting harmful content (see Your Undivided Attention, episode 4).
Down the Rabbit Hole by Design
When we press play on a YouTube video, we set in motion an algorithm that taps all available data to find the next video that keeps us glued to the screen.
Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has also called for the creation of a Department of the Attention Economy to implement regulations that address the negative effects of smartphones and social media. “We need 21st century solutions for 21st century challenges. Breaking up Facebook or Apple sounds good, but it wouldn’t address this issue. If anything, having four Facebooks competing for our attention might make the problem worse,” he wrote on CNN Business Perspectives. I also support this idea.
Attention greedy platforms are built to maximize time on screen. One of the biggest lies sold by these platforms is that they connect us — that our clicks, likes, and shares do anything more than deepen the addiction of ourselves and others to the platform. These products are built to be addictive.
The truth is that headlines are more likely to be liked and retweeted than articles read. Of all the links included in the tweets embedded on this page, how many have you click through to read? We need to build community to extract ourselves from this dystopian world; as Audre Lorde wrote, “Without community there is no liberation.” Before you think about sharing this link online, think about who you’re going to talk to about it, face to face.
As “hashtag activism” has obscured longstanding traditions of assembly and protest, there’s concern that a failure to transition from the keyboard to in-person organization will effectively stall or kill the momentum of political movements.
Social media is no longer a mere public extension of our private socialization; it has become a replacement for it. What happens to our humanity when we relegate our real lives to props for the performance of our virtual ones?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/opinion/quit-social-media.html
In the fierce urgency of now, we must unite to do this work. Attention greedy A.I. is eroding the social fabric needed to address the big social upheavals the climate crises are bringing, or to even agree that climate change is real. As time passes, the power imbalance between A.I. and our humanity will grow while rising carbon dioxide levels erode our cognitive ability to fight back (see this research; a typical participant’s cognitive scores dropped 21 percent with a 400 ppm increase in CO2). We must act now! This is humanity’s race!
In solidarity,
Russ