In the fiction of Philip K. Dick there are things called homeopapes. These are basically automata that assemble your daily newspaper for you based on the things you're interested in. Not a few have said that this was Dick's prediction of the algorithmic new media environment we live in. Well, sort of.
When I look up a particular video on YouTube, the platform shows thumbnails of videos that are "recommended" for me. Time after time these include a rant by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on "why millions of Americans would follow a neofascist." Yeah, you can guess. Now there's nothing that would interest me less, but the fact that I repeatedly fail to click and watch it makes no difference to the recommendations.
You see this all over the web. The algorithms are there to help the Owners cater to various groups, but they have only very blunt and crude ideas about these groups, and no real interest in individuals.
Of course PKD put his characters through weird and traumatic events, after which they weren't as taken with things like homeopapes. As it turns out, it's easier than previously imagined to get to that point. Staying there is another matter.
2 comments:
A newspaper that filters only the news that interests you sounds like something that would have to know you very well. Perhaps a close friend might make some correct guesses about what would catch your attention but even so there'd likely be a number of mistakes. Nobody knows anyone else quite that well.
The question that arises is to wonder if the plan might be to channel us into some sort of logarithmic matrix where our interests are controlled by the choices we have in a limited context? Predictive AI has its uses in large systems but can appear malevolent the more it's used to generate hypotheses about who we are as individuals.
You're right that whether we're looking at YouTube or Amazon data collection systems are always trying to keep you on their website or encourage you to purchase items other than what you're looking for. Given choices is good but it's obvious from your experience with the Robert Reich videos shows how they're attempting to manipulate your attention. They do keep trying - the owners, I mean.
I think Philip K. Dick came close enough in describing our current dilemmas. I think people are smart enough to see through the algorithms and not be ruled by them - well, some people.. hopefully their numbers will grow.
As is often the case it's difficult to say how the thing would actually work. What Dick did seem to realize was that if the news was a consumer product it would be tailored to the consumer like any other product. This has come to pass, if perhaps in a different way than the one he imagined.
You're likely quite right that AI will be used as a tool to manipulate the customers with which it comes into contact. The ideal of the state/corporate project is to have a population who think they have infinite choices when their actual choices are pretty much nil.
It's sneaky, isn't it? Nobody - or at least almost nobody - likes going to a store and immediately drawing the attention of a salesman who will start hitting you with a high pressure pitch. So many of us choose to do our browsing on the internet. But of course the salesmen are still there, they're just mostly bots instead of people and they have no mercy.
Dick's fictional world was his own, God love him, but he did notice some worrying trends and expanded on them. Like you say, we can only hope that more people learn to see through the algorithms and such.
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