A(I) harsh mistress

I know of only one thing worse than being the serve of some emotionless, uncaring and inhumane intelligence, forcing us to do things we really don’t want to do.
That’s the thought of some emotionless, uncaring and inhumane intelligence making us want things, controlling our minds, without us even noticing.
Unfortunately, the milk has already been spilled and we have been sold out to a cruel mistress.

“An AI? Ruling my life? What are you talking about?! You must be crazy”. Some version of this is most probably running through your head right know.

I am of course not talking about shiny robotic terminators stalking the streets and forcing people to do their bidding at the point of gun. And I am not talking about an artificial consciousness, computing away in an underground lair, seizing control over nuclear weapons to force us to do as we are told.
I am talking about something far more mundane, far simpler, but not less damaging and dangerous.

I am talking about the algorithms of news agencies and social media.

You might think the information you are seeing is determined by your preferences. And you would be right. But there is a catch. Your preferences are influenced by what you are shown and by what you are believing. And of course by what people on “your team” believe. Your preferences are malleable.

If you are a Democrat, it’s kind of likely that you believe Donald Trump called Nazis “fine people”, despite numerous debunks of this story, and that Trump is a Russian asset, despite a lengthy investigation that came up with literally nothing. If you are a Republican, you are more likely to think that global warming is a hoax and that Hilary Clinton committed treason by “selling” Uranium One. Isn’t it strange that people on “the same side” politically, also tend to believe in the same misinformation and myths? Why is that?

We tend to believe what we see and hear from sources we trust. We are quick at dismissing information as “fake”, if it does not conform to our preconceived notions. It’s a well known effect in psychology and called confirmation bias. We are wired to be team players. But this means there are people that are on your team and that there are people that aren’t.

We like to feel righteous, we like to hate our “enemies”, we don’t like to see any of “us” criticized, anybody praising “the other side” must be a traitor. We are addicted to these feelings. Almost any tweet by a “moron” on the other other side gives you that little rush, each “gotcha!” you write gives you immediate gratification. It’s a part of our operating system. So much on our human nature.

What do these algorithms do? To maximize eye-balls, clicks and revenue, the headlines and pictures are optimized in A/B tests. A simple, yet mighty technique. They measure “engagement”. How often do you share a story? Is the language in the comments indicative of anger? Or support? What “kind of people” are angry? Is it “your team”?

Once the algorithm “knows” what will make your team froth at the mouth, these stories are spread to you or your circle. And that’s it.
The algorithm has determined what you will see and thereby what you will think of as important. And it did so for all the people that you are relying upon for determining what’s fake and what is not. You might still think that you are choosing your opinions and preferences. Unfortunately, no. They are assigned to us.

This system thrives from polarization. The more outrageous a claim or tweet produces, the more viral it becomes. The result: on almost every controversial question, this makes it far more likely that all participants know and identify the most extreme demands and opinions as representative of “the other side”. Nuance is lost, the middle ground is vacated, compromise becomes impossible and anybody seeking a centrist position is seen as a dangerously deluded dotard on both sides. They are trapped in the no man’s land between the entrenched opinions shooting all they got at each other.
This is true for debates about “Who is the GOAT?” as it is for “What should we do on climate change?” or “Who should be the President”?

We are addicted to the drama of it. You are an addict. As am I. And the algorithms are our dealers. They are pushing mercilessly. They don’t care that society falls apart. To the contrary. They need division to maximize their value function. They are too stupid to “know” what they are doing, they don’t and can’t know anything.
That doesn’t make them less powerful, though.

Can we break through this and grapple back our power from the hands of the algorithms?

Hardly.

We would need to disengage emotionally from debates and positions, we’d need to realize that a lot of things we believe ourselves, might be wrong and we’d need to cease being humiliated by our own mistakes to a degree that makes us invent new realities – a process known as “cognitive dissonance”. That would need a whole lot of hard, uncomfortable and conscious work on ourselves. A lot of habit forming. People don’t tend to do things that are hard and not rewarding, especially, if the alternative is an endless series of little doses of those sweet, sweet hormones

To get to something like regulations on algorithms, for example regularly auditing algorithms that determine what contend minors are seeing or to put it differently, just to audit with what information and misinformation our children are targeted, would need support from both sides. There’d need to be trust that neither side is using this process to “spread propaganda” or “censoring speech”. The algorithms would make sure that you’d know at least that one person on the other side who said something about “grabbing that opportunity”, not because it is clever enough to protect itself, but because that will bring “engagement”.

Their financial profitability will make sure that people, actual human beings, will deploy more algorithms. They will provide serve(r)s and administrators to care for them. They will fight tooth and nail to keep them running, because these algorithms pay the bills. Acquiring resource to multiply, like a strange silicon-based parasite on human civilization.

It’s the darnedest of situations: we are ruled by mindless stupidity. The algorithms’ and unfortunately our own, baked into the very foundation of our neural processes.

AI already controls our minds. It has enslaved us with our own feelings. And it’s greatest trick was to make us believe our preferences are genuinely ours.