The article only talks about commercial manipulation technology, but what about political or religious ones?
Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
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Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#12Interesting question. Interesting too that we've become so self-confident in our machines and our studies that we think to ask it. Seeking to regulate something like the use of psychology, which we understand so little of, seems like an 18th century pirate asking his captain whether they should regulate the ocean. Like no, we only know a minuscule amount of information about it, about the bare surface of it at that -…
Yeah, no. Ignorance is a reason to employ caution, not throw it to the winds.
What do you imagine is going to be the horrifying fallout of telling businesses and politicians they're not allowed to build and act on detailed profiles of people?
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#13The article only talks about commercial manipulation technology, but what about political or religious ones?
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#14I sometimes ask myself, in 20 years will we begin to see class action lawsuits directed at technology platforms that use notification triggered dopamine releases for growing engagement?
No, because that case is too vague. Sending a notification isn’t a crime, especially when you request them by not turning off notifications.
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the article does a good job of showing that current technology has the power to be a lot more persuasive than it ever has been. You could nit-pick on the effectiveness of individual methods but the broader point is clearly evident: technology, and our increasing use of it, has more potential to implement, test and refine new persuasive techniques at a scale never seen before in human history. The evidence for…
My point is that I think this kind of thinking is disempowering and counterproductive. By framing technology companies as all powerful, even if that's possibly inaccurate and overblown, tech supremacy becomes inevitable in the eyes of people who see it as lacking any alternatives. ("If they can predict me this well, they must know better, right?") I think this is why Silicon Valley loves to invite their critics who a…
Talking about the limits of how we use technology in society is hardly disempowering - quite the opposite. I would have thought that talking less about the potential supremacy of technology would be the real counterproductive measure in trying to curb that potential reality.
Whether or not the influence of technology is overblown, the fact still stands that we need to draw boundaries around how technology can be used for persuasion. The question should be "where is the line?" not "should we even bother drawing one?".
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#16I sometimes ask myself, in 20 years will we begin to see class action lawsuits directed at technology platforms that use notification triggered dopamine releases for growing engagement?
No, because that case is too vague. Sending a notification isn’t a crime, especially when you request them by not turning off notifications.
I mean, is giving someone nicotine a crime, especially when they request it by going to the store and buying more cigarettes?
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#17I keep coming back to my default idea here - that PII needs to be seen as legally owned by me and only licensed to others for use. The default legal framework should include medical / epidemiology research as freely licensed and commercial use as ... well let's just say i think my license conditions will be expensive. If an advertising channel then shows ads that breach license they are liable. A fairly simple licens…
If you're a US citizen with a Facebook account, your value for Facebook is about $ 200 per year. That's the average, including children, seniors, etc. If you're a tech worker in your 30s, it's probably 3x as much.
If you want to use Facebook without targeted advertising, you need to either convince them that they don't need all that money, or pay it yourself. And that's just Facebook.
In other words: the internet economy without targeted ads will be a very different place. Facebook will survive. imgurl / snopes / fivethirtyeight? Unlikely...
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#18>The New York Times once experimented by predicting the moods of readers based on article content to better target ads, enabling marketers to find audiences when they were sad or fearful Can we maybe go one step back in the discussion and not only discuss what we should do about it, but simply ask does it even work? There's Zuboff's book about surveillance capitalism that echoes much of what the blog post talks about…
It's a hypothetical. Waiting until the technology exists is probably a bad idea, since at that point there'd be someone with the means and motive to convince you that the technology is entirely benign.
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#19Interesting question. Interesting too that we've become so self-confident in our machines and our studies that we think to ask it. Seeking to regulate something like the use of psychology, which we understand so little of, seems like an 18th century pirate asking his captain whether they should regulate the ocean. Like no, we only know a minuscule amount of information about it, about the bare surface of it at that -…
I don't understand what this argument is. I think the FDA was approving medicines long before the precise molecular mechanisms were known. Even with unknowns you can still study outcomes and legislate around them. Instead you seem to propose "oh we don't know enough, so we should just let it run wild". I do agree that sensible legislation around this is hard to impossible to do. I'd rather see some more research into…
You're right that we don't need to understand something completely before we regulate it.
My point was to emphasize how little we know about psychology and how little good a law that addresses our current technology will do in the long run, since the psychology-focused technology we have 50 or 100 years from now will likely be vastly more dangerous.
The image I have is of a caveman who, upon seeing one of his tribesmen kill another with a rock, proposes to regulate the use of rocks. Good idea maybe, but give it time and rocks will be the least of his troubles.
However it's unfair of me to dismiss our real life solutions to real life problems by pointing to a problem that might come to exist in an imaginary long-term future. We can only make the best with what we have.
Maybe I need to update my mental model of the law from an eternal-and-perfect view to an incremental-and-imperfect view, especially when it comes to the intersection of law and technology.
Re: Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the article does a good job of showing that current technology has the power to be a lot more persuasive than it ever has been. You could nit-pick on the effectiveness of individual methods but the broader point is clearly evident: technology, and our increasing use of it, has more potential to implement, test and refine new persuasive techniques at a scale never seen before in human history. The evidence for…
My point is that I think this kind of thinking is disempowering and counterproductive. By framing technology companies as all powerful, even if that's possibly inaccurate and overblown, tech supremacy becomes inevitable in the eyes of people who see it as lacking any alternatives. ("If they can predict me this well, they must know better, right?") I think this is why Silicon Valley loves to invite their critics who a…
Why can't both be true though
For example, regression models aren't exactly ai magic, but unchecked, they compute discriminatory insurance premiums in a way we find morally unacceptable.
The naked emperor still needs keeping in check.