Author is Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about
> Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
Ugh, this fellow misses the forest for the trees. Though he's partially right: social media is partially an extension of past trends. See, e.g., "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Postman.
But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.
Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)
Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.
So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.
Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.
America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.
Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.
This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.
I see a lot of intelligent people underestimating the impact of things like propaganda and advertising.
The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically.
Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era.
I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results.
If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China.
Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you
America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that.
Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it.
Phase One: 1770s
The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required.
Phase Two: 1820s–1830s
Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch.
Phase Three: Mid-20th Century
Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom.
Phase Four: 2000s
Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes.
Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
> Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option.
The genie might be where it's always been, just a few new smokes and mirrors added for laughs and giggles.
> Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize.
"We" being like who? And "aristocracy" is who?
You lost me at Phase 3 because scientists, engineers, policy wonks don't fit any definition of aristocracy. Phase 4 didn't offer new candidates for coronation, so what gives? Are you fomenting a revolution against said scientists, engineers and policy wonks? That's curious to put it mildly.
How come the explanations offered for declining trust in media never seem to include the media demonstrably, provably getting things wrong in a way that logically ought to weaken trust?
This is now a genre of article that repeats everywhere. Its form is:
"X percent of Americans agree with the statement 'vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent', which shows America has completely lost the ability to agree on basic facts, everyone is living in a different reality, and this explains why they will not agree with the following specific correct views: [...]."
The reader is positioned such that if he does not agree with the specific "rational" views enumerated, he feels himself included in a group believing specific other, "irrational" things stated as the basic problem. The article becomes an instance of the problem it attempts to locate.
11 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread> Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.
Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)
Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.
So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.
Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.
America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.
Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.
This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.
The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically.
Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era.
I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results.
If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China.
Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you
Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it.
Phase One: 1770s
The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required.
Phase Two: 1820s–1830s
Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch.
Phase Three: Mid-20th Century
Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom.
Phase Four: 2000s
Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes.
Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
> Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option.
The genie might be where it's always been, just a few new smokes and mirrors added for laughs and giggles.
> Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize.
"We" being like who? And "aristocracy" is who?
You lost me at Phase 3 because scientists, engineers, policy wonks don't fit any definition of aristocracy. Phase 4 didn't offer new candidates for coronation, so what gives? Are you fomenting a revolution against said scientists, engineers and policy wonks? That's curious to put it mildly.
-Superfastmatt
"X percent of Americans agree with the statement 'vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent', which shows America has completely lost the ability to agree on basic facts, everyone is living in a different reality, and this explains why they will not agree with the following specific correct views: [...]."
The reader is positioned such that if he does not agree with the specific "rational" views enumerated, he feels himself included in a group believing specific other, "irrational" things stated as the basic problem. The article becomes an instance of the problem it attempts to locate.