annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
The Singularity Is Here
Artificially intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies.
By Ayad Akhtar
I don't have much expectation that any of the very few passers-by here will read the excerpt, let alone the entire article.
There's definitely the awareness that I'm posting an article about confirmation bias that confirms my bias, and it's worth it for the hope that the article may actually poke a hole in the biases of another reader. That they might walk away with a better understanding of the dark side of technology; how it reduces our humanity to data points that can be assigned a monetary value for profit. And what that's already done to us individually and as a society.
Artificially intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies.
By Ayad Akhtar
. . . .The platforms that churn through content with the greatest velocity shape the emotional responses of consumers almost in real time. Watch a video on YouTube, or like a post on Facebook or Twitter, and you will be offered another, and another, and another. Behind the suggested offerings is a logic of emotional response. The technology is seeking your trigger, whatever draws you deeper and keeps you clicking. Nothing quite does it like outrage. Moral outrage. Those we know are right to hate; those we love because we are united together against those we know are right to hate. This is the logic behind the viral campaigns leading to the slaughter of Rohingya in Myanmar. And the logic of the increasingly truculent divide between right and left in America today. Driven by engagement and the profit that it generates, each side drifts further and further from the other, the space between us growing only more charged, only richer with opportunity for monetization. The cultural clash in America today has more electrical engineering behind it than we realize. . . .
Embedded in this scheme of endless distraction is a deeper logic. The system has come to understand the fundamental value of always reaffirming our points of view back to us, delivering to us a world in our image, confirmation bias as the default setting. This is the real meaning of contemporary virtuality. In the virtual space, the technology combats and corrects our frustrations with reality itself—which defies expectation and understanding, by definition.
In its basest form—and make no mistake, the baser the form, the stickier the engagement—what we’re describing here is a profound technological support for primary narcissism. We don’t need to know our Ovid in order to understand the perils of all this self-gazing, and yet, we may nevertheless fail to appreciate just how pervasive the social attitudes engendered by this orientation have become. . . .
All of this points to a new social ontology, an evolving set of behaviors guided by the shift in incentives that the technology has created. It’s the advertising model of thought; the entertainment model of consciousness. Self-promotion, self-commodification, self-marketing—all are now taken for forms of legitimate commentary and critique; ceaseless affirmation of our biases emboldens the strident certainty of our moral positions. This is the complexion of public exchange in the newly shaped public sphere, where ideas are little more than bait for the hours a day of human attention at stake, yet another demonstration of just how much the technology is reshaping our relations with one another. In fact, we are little more than grist for a monetizing mill that mixes, like cattle feed ground from cattle bones, our own deepest intimacies with the system’s digital slop, feeding it back to us wholesale. In the process, we are being remade by what we consume. . . .
While the way to wisdom leads through knowledge, there is no path to wisdom from information.
All of this points to a new social ontology, an evolving set of behaviors guided by the shift in incentives that the technology has created. It’s the advertising model of thought; the entertainment model of consciousness. Self-promotion, self-commodification, self-marketing—all are now taken for forms of legitimate commentary and critique; ceaseless affirmation of our biases emboldens the strident certainty of our moral positions. This is the complexion of public exchange in the newly shaped public sphere, where ideas are little more than bait for the hours a day of human attention at stake, yet another demonstration of just how much the technology is reshaping our relations with one another. In fact, we are little more than grist for a monetizing mill that mixes, like cattle feed ground from cattle bones, our own deepest intimacies with the system’s digital slop, feeding it back to us wholesale. In the process, we are being remade by what we consume.
I don't have much expectation that any of the very few passers-by here will read the excerpt, let alone the entire article.
There's definitely the awareness that I'm posting an article about confirmation bias that confirms my bias, and it's worth it for the hope that the article may actually poke a hole in the biases of another reader. That they might walk away with a better understanding of the dark side of technology; how it reduces our humanity to data points that can be assigned a monetary value for profit. And what that's already done to us individually and as a society.